Townhall Review | Commentaries

The Supreme Court has started the year with some cases to watch. Justices heard arguments about whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—OSHA—may impose Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on large employers.

OSHA is charged with setting health and safety standards for industries including hospitals and construction. The Supreme Court must decide if an agency that usually makes technical determinations—for example, that the permissible exposure limit for ammonia is 50 parts per million over an eight-hour day—is ALSO empowered to enforce a sweeping vaccine mandate.

But it’s also time to look at the outsized power agencies like OSHA have amassed. They appear nowhere in the Constitution, yet they’re effectively a fourth branch of government that contain all the powers of the other three. And too often, they abuse these powers.

Yet—as we’ve seen with Dr. Fauci—those who control agencies are shielded from accountability. In a representative democracy like ours, that’s a problem—one we should start addressing now.

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As we begin this new year, we need to track closely with the headlines that impact religious liberty. Both Canada and Great Britain are pursuing legislative bans on what is called conversion therapy. 

And here we see the unavoidable collision between the LGBTQ ideology and biblical Christianity. 

The entire ideology of sexual revolution has been matched now with identity politics in such a way that sexual orientation has become a giant instrument of political leverage.

The biggest issue as it relates to religious liberty is the effect these particular bills could have—the chilling effect of restricting the preaching and liberty of the pulpit in Christian churches. It could even extend to criminalizing or outlawing certain kinds of conversations between parents and their own children.

It’s concerning. It’s horrifying. But we have seen this coming. 

In Canada—as of January 7—it is the law.

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Our nation awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration can force private employers to require vaccinations as the price of continued employment. Not every “good idea” should be a government mandate. More importantly, nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government a general police power, and Congress never gave OSHA the authority to impose vaccine mandates.
Many of the factual assertions made by left-leaning justices during the oral argument were stunningly ignorant. 

Justice Breyer asserted there were quote “750 million new covid cases yesterday.” That would mean all Americans contracted covid twice in the last day. Justice Sotomayor claimed 100,000 children were in serious condition. The actual consensus figure is 3,342 and in some of those cases infection is incidental.

One wonders what other factual errors these justices carry into the other cases they hear.

Let’s hope those justices have a better grasp of the law than they do of the facts.

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 Buckle up for 2022; the year in politics is going to be rough.
 
This midterm election year seems predestined to banish the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The country senses infirmity in President Biden—and many worry that our adversaries in China, Russia and Iran sense that opening too. 
 
The shadow campaign for the GOP nomination in 2024 opens now—with the clear front-runner being former president Donald Trump.
 
The ranks of the top tier among possible GOP presidential nominees, in alphabetical order—starts with two Senators: Arkansas’ Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz of Texas.
 
Then we have the populist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
 
If the world grows even darker in the days to come, Cotton and Pompeo—two former soldiers—start with some advantages. 
 
It’s possible one or more will run whether or not the former president does. 
 
My bet, with three years to go, is that Trump runs—and runs hard.
 
Buckle up.

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We hear plenty from the media and liberals about “following the science” when it comes to the pandemic. Why then did New York City choose race and “social inequity” over actual case rates and transmission risk in their distribution of COVID tests? Bill de Blasio’s administration explicitly excluded the neighborhood with the highest transmission rate from their network of testing sites, while putting thirteen in a more “diverse” neighborhood with lower risk for community transmission. 
 
That’s not following the science. 
 
It’s politicized rationing for virtue signaling, and the kind of racial divisiveness that wounds more deeply than it heals. But this was only made possible by the scandalous failure of Joe Biden’s administration to push massive test development and production. The White House repeatedly failed numerous promises to deliver tests, even while pushing mandates that include testing. 
 
Biden and his team created both the shortage and demand that allows tinpot politicians to ration needed good for their own political benefit. This demonstrates the danger of central planning and the long-term risk to economic, political and health liberty.

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Perhaps the tide has finally started to turn. Those in elite circles are beginning to acknowledge the damaging impact of America’s Covid policy on our children.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, there was a story headlined “Covid has created a crisis for American children.” The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a piece titled “How school counselors are helping children cope during covid.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” commentator Jan Crawford noted kids would be, quote “paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives,” unquote.

Note how these views were not treated as out of the mainstream.

Has the omicron variant finally penetrated even the secluded blue enclaves where elite journalists and their families dwell? Or do they realize Americans are done with Covid?

This reckoning is long overdue. Our children have paid dearly for adult fears. It’s time to give them a normal life back.

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Wang Huning is the most dangerous man you have probably never heard of, which is why I counseled readers of my Washington Post column to pray for him. Wang is, along with China’s President Xi Jinping, a member of the seven-member committee from which all power and directives flow in the People’s Republic of China. He’s also regarded as the author of the crucial policy pronouncements not just of Xi but of Xi’s two immediate predecessors.  Imagine a Henry Kissinger who served as architect of national security policy in the United States for more than two decades and then looked to be in the same position for the next decade or more. That’s Wang.

And that’s why Americans and Westerners generally need to become acquainted with Wang and his world view, which—in quick summary—is that the West is diseased and crumbling, and that China needs better and new core values. Facile agreement with Wang does not help the West regain its footing. A focus on what made the West great —common purpose-built around “mere Christianity”— would serve us well and might serve China, indeed.

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In 1973 the United States took a terrible turn, obliged to do so by a radical decision of a majority of nine unelected justices as the late Justice Scalia would come to call the long Standing majority on the Supreme Court that dictated Roe v Wade and the disfigured 50 years of case law on abortion that has followed. 

2022 is the year in which the Court can declare its error, abandon its shadow made-up Constitution on so-called reproductive rights and return to the real Constitution—the one that is silent on abortion and under which state legislatures have the authority to pass laws, or not, on the question of when life begins and who can choose to end it.

Neither conservatives nor liberals will be fully happy in a restored and correct Constitutional order, one that sees Roe v Wade and Casey reversed,  but the country and its commitment to the rule of law will be much the better for it if 2022 reverses the profound error of 1973.

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The year of Our Lord, 2022, begins with plenty of unknowns and an unknowable number of what Donald Rumsfeld famously called “unknown unknowns.” Will inflation continue to rise? Will the pandemic finally retreat from the headlines? Who will push harder, Joe Biden or Joe Manchin? How will the Supreme Court rule in the big abortion case from Mississippi? Will the birthrate recover? Who will win the big sports titles? Will anyone show up for the Beijing Olympics?

In the Unites States, the midterm elections will dominate all other political considerations. Until then, every politician on the ballot will be looking for votes every waking minute. Expect more robocalls. 

Here is one absolutely certain prediction for the year ahead: There will be weather. 

In any event, the coming year presents an opportunity for families to love together, for children to mark yet another inch or two (or more) of growth, for churches to share the gospel, and for the press to push new headlines. Don’t miss it. 

Happy New Year to you and yours. 

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Well, 2021 is going into the history books. It began with a contested election, then an inauguration, and then months of political turmoil. President Biden ran as a moderate but took a swerve to the left. 

President Trump was impeached—again—and left office in the aftermath of an infamous insurrection at the Capital. 

Identity politics was on full display as Biden celebrated such milestones as the nation’s “first transgender assistant secretary of health.” But voters pushed back in Virginia, where parents rejected critical race theory and, after being told to go home, actually went to the polls and elected a Republican governor. 

Hurricanes and tornadoes did their damage, and the COVID pandemic introduced frustrated Americans to the Greek alphabet. Delta… Omicron… There were tragedies, like the condo falling in Florida. 

Perhaps as a coping mechanism, Americans evidently spent a lot of time watching animal videos. 

The supply chain was disrupted and the brothers Cuomo were ejected. 

The birth rate fell and inflation rose.

It was quite a year, and now it’s over. On to 2022. 

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