Townhall Review | Commentaries

In a welcome holding, a California Superior Court struck down as unconstitutional a state law mandating a certain number of women on every public company’s board in the state.

The law was as unnecessary as it is misguided. Last year, fully 96 percent of Fortune 500 boards included two or more female directors, without the heavy-handed intrusion of California’s legislature.

But most importantly, the law was simply wrong. After all, if companies are required by law to hire female directors, they’re also being forbidden from hiring male ones. And that’s gender discrimination.

In America, we should strive toward the ideal of a meritocracy – where people are selected for positions based on their abilities and efforts, not on immutable characteristics. 

A quota system only creates a permanent warfare between armies of interest groups. That’s no way to run a lemonade stand, much less a country – and it’s antithetical to America’s founding principles.

Kudos to California’s Superior Court for getting this one right.

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Special counsel John Durham’s prosecution of former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann has uncovered how her 2016 presidential campaign shopped around an unfounded allegation as fact—and turned it into the worst dirty trick since Watergate.

Witnesses testified that Sussmann shopped the false allegation of a link between the Trump Organization and Russia-controlled Alfa Bank to the CIA and the FBI. In both cases, Sussmann falsely claimed not to be working for a political candidate. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Hillary herself approved the decision to leak the allegation to media.

The Washington Post and the New York Times won Pulitzers for their breathless reporting on the Russian-collusion fallacy. Neither paper has gone out of their way to report on its unraveling. This dirty trick has torn our country apart and set off a wave of political hysteria not seen since the Red Scare. 

Accountability should come to those at the highest levels of both politics and the media.

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This weekend brought news that the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco had informed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that she was not to present herself for holy communion at Mass.
 
Some reacted with overheated rhetoric that Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone was violating the separation of church and state. That is false. 
 
The archbishop was engaging in his Constitutionally-protected right to the free exercise of religion—and that includes teaching the truth about moral issues such as the right to life of the unborn. It also entails church governance.
 
After repeated attempts to speak with Speaker Pelosi about the grave evil of her public support for legalized abortion on demand up until the moment of birth, the archbishop felt duty-bound in conscience to let Pelosi know that she needs to repent of her abortion support before receiving communion.
 
That’s not a violation of the First Amendment, that’s the proper exercise of it.

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This is Hugh Hewitt for Townhall.com.

As we quickly approach the mid-term election, the nation is—naturally—looking past it to 2024 presidential contest.

It will mark my ninth as a Republican commentator—and 50 years since I first voted in 1974. The party has changed a lot over that half-century.

Two huge changes have rocked the party:

Externally, the national security challenge posed by a hardline Chinese Communist Party. Every Republican who wants to win will have recognize the fact that China is the new U.S.S.R. We need to respond accordingly.

The second change, of course, is the rise of Donald Trump. The former president’s populism has brought untold numbers into the party and vastly reorganized its thinking about trade and some aspects of foreign policy.

Trump is likely to run, but that’s not a given. He may choose to try his hand as kingmaker. Keep your eyes on Governor DeSantis, former Secretary of State Pompeo, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton … and I could go on. 

It could be quite the field.

Voters should have their eyes on one thing: Winning.

We don’t want another four-year rumble with the hard left.

I’m Hugh Hewitt.

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Last week the Democratic-led Senate forced a vote on a radical abortion bill—but the big story is what didn't happen. 

We’re talking about the Women's Health Protection Act of 2022. The Democratic leadership claimed that this bill would codify Roe v. Wade, it actually would have gone even further. The legislation as proposed would have basically allowed for abortion all the way up until the moment of birth for any reason, or for that matter, for no reason at all.

But the Senate vote to forward the bill was 49 to 51—falling far short of the 60 votes needed to advance. But what is notable—and what news media didn’t really note—is that proponents did not even gain a bare majority.

What does that vote tell us? All but one Democrat voted for the bill and not a single Republican voted for it. What does that tell you? It simply highlights that on the issue of abortion, we are now looking at a clear, predictable, unmistakable partisan divide. 

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“This was pure evil.” Those were the words of Erie County Sheriff John Garcia, speaking of that tragic shooting in a Buffalo supermarket last weekend—a shooting that left ten people, people made in God’s image, dead.

The Sheriff’s comment points to the deep, deep evil that was in that man’s heart. He went to Buffalo on a singular mission: To try to kill as many black people as possible. We know this because he told us so in what can only be described as a horrific manifesto.

Evil is not just an apparition; evil is an objective reality.

Ten human beings are now unspeakably missed by their loved ones in an attack that was targeted at people simply for the color of their skin.

Of course, this horrific act of evil will reignite the nation’s debate over guns and the second amendment.

But the real problem and the biggest problem facing humanity is not what this young man carried in his hands—though that is horrifying beyond words. The biggest problem, as we know, is what he carried in his heart. That is infinitely more horrifying.

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We need to protect our Supreme Court justices, no matter the outcome on abortion.

Fanatics come in all shapes and sizes, all ages and eras. They are usually driven by ideology or an insatiable thirst for power.

The leak of the draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs’ decision has done incredible damage. But more could result: Will the leak also lead to violence, intended or not, now that abortion rights activists are protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices?

There is already a federal law that prohibits demonstrations to influence a judicial proceeding. Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to enforce it. He needs to narrow the possibility of the sort of shocking act that has tortured our politics since the Civil War, in which we’ve seen only so recently in Buffalo and Orange County, California. We know what fanatics are capable of. It is up to the attorney general, working with the chief justice, to anticipate and protect, not sit back and apologize come some dreadful day.

Attorney General Garland: Act quickly and decisively.

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Two weeks after a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in a key abortion case, polls show that Americans remained focused on other issues – and on Joe Biden’s failure to address them. A new NBC News poll shows Biden’s job approval rating slipping to its lowest level yet, and also that a majority of voters disapprove of Biden on a personal basis. 

What about Roe? Little has changed despite the media hysteria over Justice Samuel Alito’s draft. Only thirty-seven percent of voters agree with the bill pushed Biden and Chuck Schumer that would prevent any restrictions on abortion to the moment of birth. Only ten percent of respondents in the survey, taken just days after the leak, see abortion as their top priority in the midterms. Forty percent chose inflation and the economy, and Biden only gets a 23 percent approval rating on the cost of living. 

Abortion won’t save Democrats, not even with media assistance. And neither will President Biden.

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“Emboldened by wins, GOP goes all in on the culture wars.” Now, that’s a headline. It’s from Annie Linksy of the Washington Post. Her piece begins this way: “Republicans believe they found an edge in the culture wars. On the campaign trail,” she writes, “they’re railing against critical race theory and gender identity discussions in schools.”

Well … they’re not railing. 

Simply put: Parents do not want the schools dumbed down, politicized, or used for inappropriate discussions about intimacy in human sexuality. 

They do not want that. Zero of it, full stop, period.

Recent school board elections in Texas wiped out the existing school boards that were standing up incumbents. I’ve been predicting this.

Parents have had it.

And yes: This issue of education is a winning issue for the GOP.

My own governor Glenn Youngkin won—in large part—because he identified himself as on the side of parents.

Being on the side of parents is a good place to be, whether you are an elected official or an appointed one.

Listen up, superintendents and school boards—the parents are coming!

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 “It is time to heed the Constitution,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his purloined Dobbs draft, “and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justices only have to look outside their doors to find evidence of Alito’s conclusion that Roe warped the constitutional form of self-governance, and his wisdom in warning of the consequences of rule by judicial fiat.

President Biden, his Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — among others — have either encouraged or refused to discourage angry demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. These protests actually violate federal law, as Congress recognized at one time that political lobbying has no place in judicial proceedings, especially when used to intimidate jurists. 
Biden and Schumer want to force the judiciary into the role of a super-legislature. Justice Alito wants to return it to its proper constitutional role. The mobs sent by Democrats to intimidate the justices prove the critical need for Alito to prevail.

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