This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

President Biden will soon nominate a black female for the Supreme Court.

In so doing, he’ll be fulfilling a pledge made to secure the endorsement of South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn.

But by announcing his nominee’s race and sex in advance, the president has made his selection about her identity, not her accomplishments. And in doing so, he’s cheapened her achievements.

The President’s approach highlights the pitfalls of affirmative action. It was intended to allow consideration of immutable characteristics—as one factor of many—to level the playing field.

But now, the left’s obsession with identity politics leaves even those with the best intentions to wonder: Is Biden’s nominee being chosen for the Supreme Court because she’s the best person for the job, or simply because she’s a black woman?

The president’s nominee deserves better. And so does America.

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Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jan Kleeb lamented this week that “we’re doing all these good things as Democrats, and yet voters don’t seem to be on our side.” Like the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress, Ms. Kleeb gets this entirely backward.

Inflation, shortages, the pandemic, and crime touch most Americans’ lives every day, either directly or indirectly. Spiking crime rates limit our freedom of movement. Inflation erodes our buying power, while pandemic policies and the supply chain crisis keep grocery shelves empty.

Yet Democrats remain focused on their climate-change policy in Congress while President Biden demands even more inflationary spending to buy votes.

Jen Psaki scoffed at crime concerns, calling them a figment of Fox News “alternate universe.” In the real world, homicides, and carjackings have exploded over the past two years and retail thefts have shockingly skyrocketed.

Democrats’ problem isn’t that voters aren’t on their side. It’s that Democrats aren’t on voters’ side—and voters have figured that out.

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I was recently preparing to interview former national security adviser General H.R. McMaster, retired from the United States Army and re-visited his 1996 book on the Vietnam War: “Dereliction of Duty.”

It’s difficult not to apply the lessons of the United States’ ultimately terribly destructive commitment in Vietnam to what we have experienced in the very different crises presented by Covid-19.

The similarities are surprising and striking.

President Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara demonstrated a dramatic willingness to lie that was astonishing. Criticisms of Anthony S. Fauci today are likewise rooted in misrepresentations the doctor has made.

This “Fauci as McNamara” comparison has now settled in my mind. A new NBC poll asked respondents if they trust the CDC. 44 percent said yes; 43 percent said no. That’s a crisis of trust, in not just the CDC and other public health authorities, but especially in Tony Fauci. It’s a new so-called “credibility gap”—and it is itself a public health crisis.

We’re in the middle of a domestic equivalent of the Vietnam catastrophe brought about by the latest iteration of those purported to be our “best and our brightest.”

Let’s stop. Look around. Something’s happening here and we have to stop it.

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As we continue our national discussion over voter reform, let’s remember some basic math. The candidate who gets more votes than the other candidates is supposed to win.

This means that victory is not just a matter of getting votes. It’s a matter of candidate A not surpassing candidate B as a result of illegal votes or ineligible voters. Simply put: Every illegal vote cancels out someone else’s legal one.

In other words, the election reform efforts we’ve seen in recent days that, for example, require some form of voter identification, are not voter suppression.

Actually: It’s actually voter fraud which is the real vote suppression. That’s because counting someone’s fake ballot has exactly the same mathematical effect on the outcome as throwing your legal ballot out.

Representative government—if it’s going to work over the long haul—requires both that every legal vote gets counted and that no illegal one does.

Anything else is really suppression of the consent of the governed.

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This is Jerry Bowyer for Townhall.com.

Is the world starting to look like a ’70s rerun? We certainly have high inflation, especially in food and energy, plus the growth outlook is not good, which adds up to stagflation. And now on top of all that, it looks like an ally might be falling under Russian domination. It’s not Afghanistan this time—though we lost that too—now it's Ukraine. 

But remember what came out of the ’70s stagflation, appeasement and malaise: we got Morning in America. Reagan’s combination of supply-side economics, sound money, and firmness in the face of the foreign threats. Everything that failed in the ’70s is failing now. And: everything that succeeded in the ’80s will succeed now—if we turn to it again. 

We should continue to engage in our current era of history with the hopeful optimism of a Ronald Reagan. The American story has chapter after chapter when the future looked ominous and bleak—but renewal was in the wings.

Yes: We can have Morning in America again.

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Inflation is destabilizing the world, especially with huge spikes in energy prices. These spikes make it difficult for our NATO allies to hold their nerve against an aggressive Russia because they depend on Russian energy. 

High energy prices prop up Russian power. Oil was over 100 dollars a barrel in the lead-up to the last Russian foreign adventure known as the Crimean crisis. Now oil is high again, Putin feels he can afford to be reckless. 

When oil prices are low, the bear sleeps. Every time we debase the dollar —which remains the world’s reserve currency—we get inflation. And: Every time we choke off energy production, we feed the Russian bear. 

If you stabilize the dollar, you don’t just fix U.S. inflation, you help fix global inflation. If you stop throttling U.S. energy production, you weaken tyrants. 

Decline isn’t fate. It’s a choice. 

It’s time to make better choices. 

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The Supreme Court has just agreed to hear a pair of cases challenging race-based affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. It could signal the death knell for the legal regime establishing “diversity” as the rationale for considering skin color in college admissions.

This sort of thinking has fueled the identity politics—on race and sex and sexual identity—that dominate today’s college campuses.

Ironically, it hasn’t produced what matters most for any university: Diversity of thought.

Any admissions system should strive to ensure equal opportunity. Those surmounting extraordinary challenges should be rewarded. But it’s wrong and racist to assume that race equates with disadvantage. The child of a poverty-stricken white meth addict from Appalachia is hardly more privileged than, say, Barack Obama’s daughters.

Chief Justice Roberts has written, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  Now we’ll see if he meant it, and if the other justices agree.

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Recently, the New York Times somewhat right-of-center columnist David Brookes wrote an important column about how America is “coming apart at the seams” and he shares some compelling data. Our driving rates have fallen in the past two years, but traffic fatalities have risen significantly. We’re becoming more reckless. Abuse towards workers in retail, healthcare and the airline industry has also spiked. Addiction and overdose rates have spiked as well. Social cohesion is being strained to what we pray is not the breaking point. 
 
Brookes admits: He can’t explain why this is happening, but I think he's asking the wrong question. Conservatism, grounded in Christianity, knows that we don't have to explain why societies disintegrate; we have to explain why they ever held together in the first place. Human nature is deeply flawed. The war of all against all is our natural state. Western civilization, especially American civilization is a miraculous but fragile exception to that human history. 
 
Our only real hope is to recapture that worldview—and repair the seams.

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

The Department of Justice says it’s very worried about domestic terrorism. So worried, in fact, that it just created a whole new unit focused on finding and prosecuting domestic terrorists.

You should be worried, too. Not because there’s any reason to believe there’s a big boom in actual domestic terrorism. But because it looks like the DOJ is playing some very ugly politics.

Last week, we learned that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited a letter from the National School Boards Association. It compared parents to—you guessed it!—domestic terrorists. These were the parents who had shown up to complain about Covid measures and critical race theories beloved by the Biden administration.

It paints a disturbing picture of an administration determined to use high office to paint—and worse, prosecute—their political opponents as domestic terrorists. It’s abusive, it’s un-American, and it must be stopped.

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This is Jerry Bowyer for Townhall.com.

We recently received the inflation numbers for December. And I’m sure most of you are feeling it: We are at 7 percent year-to-year inflation—the highest annual rate in 40 years. It may well be the most important fact in the U.S. economy right now. 2021 gave you inflation.

This was not only predictable; it was also avoidable.

When money supply grows at vastly higher rates than money demand, inflation results. If the Fed keeps adding trillions to the monetary base at the same time that the regulators suppress commerce, that amounts to more money, chasing fewer goods, an inflationary double-whammy.

Is anyone helped by this?

Yes, the ruling class in politics and finance who get the new money first, get to spend it before the resulting inflation.

It’s time to put the blame where it belongs: a binge-spending government and a central bank in the role of enabler.

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