Townhall Review | Commentaries

One of the basic duties of government—at any level—is providing security for its citizens and their property. How disgraceful that some city governments are failing miserably in this fundamental task.

Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle asked its readers if city residents should just tolerate burglaries as part of city life, and instead focus on making their homes more burglary proof. In a similar vein, Los Angeles authorities are telling robbery victims they should “cooperate and comply” with thieves, and simply report crimes later. Good luck getting George Soros-installed LA District Attorney George Gascon to prosecute them.

This passive acceptance of crime is un-American and wrong. We don’t let law-abiding citizens to be victimized by thieves: our streets don’t belong to the criminals. Instead, we hire police to apprehend the wrongdoers, and then we prosecute them, and then we put them in jail. That’s the way it works in a country bound by the rule of law.

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When the Supreme Court turns to the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization this fall, I believe that six justices will vote to overrule the combined doctrines of 1973’s Roe v. Wade, and then twenty years later, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

The entire cobbled-together façade of jerry-rigged, ad hoc and incoherent abortion case law would be swept away if that happens, and the half-century of strained readings and outright judicial inventions overruled.

Abortion will remain legal in many states—even late-term, “partial-birth” abortions in some—but in other states, almost never allowed after a heartbeat is detected in the unborn baby.

The issue will return to the political realm to be decided, and after an initial burst of emotional reactions, the Court and the rule of law will be better for it. And the near-uniform chorus of elite media claiming a republic-ending departure from the Doctrine of Stare Decisis? Well, it will be largely ignored—the media discredited as they are on this issue by their relentless, decades-long effort to disappear half the country’s deeply felt beliefs on the subject.

We’ll all be watching closely.

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Many of you who have heard my voice in these commentaries know that—for nearly 30 years—I’ve had the honor of serving as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

On November 5, SBTS filed suit in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals against the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.

The mandate—as handed down by the administration—would effectively turn religious institutions into coercive arms of the administrative state. This seminary must not be forced to stand in for the government in investigating the private health decisions of our faculty and employees, in a matter involving legitimate religious concerns.

That is wrong. It’s unconstitutional. It’s an infringement of religious liberty, and in defense of religious liberty, we must take our stand.

Let make one important point on this: if religious liberty is on the line for any institution anywhere, it’s on the line for all religious institutions and all American citizens everywhere.

Watch closely—and please pray with us.

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Last week’s data showed that the inflation rate over the past year has been 4.4 percent. It’s the highest inflation rate we’ve seen in three decades.

The previous “excuse” for high inflation was the pandemic—that the Covid recession had set such a low baseline, essentially making the recovery look like inflation. But that baseline effect is gone.

The new excuse for high inflation is that we have a “great resignation” and accompanying supply chain disruptions. I fail to see that as much of an excuse. Government policy pays people whether they work or not; vaccine mandates disrupt supply chains by discouraging skeptical workers and suppressing child care provision, and government policy has flooded the world with excess money creation far beyond the needs of the economy.

The time for excuses is over. Our ruling class is down to one skill set only, shifting the blame. It’s time for putting the brakes on government spending and on easy money.

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In workplaces across the country, there’s controversy about the COVID vaccine mandate. Apparently, that controversy extends to the National Institutes of Health—the workplace of Anthony Fauci, himself.

An award-winning physician there, Dr. Matthew Memoli, supports Covid vaccinations for high-risk populations, but not blanket vaccination of those at low risk. He believes mandatory mass vaccinations are problematic, because they prevent more-robust immunity, population wide, from being developed from people overcoming infections.

To her credit, the head of the NIH’s Clinical Center bioethics department—who’s also Dr. Fauci’s wife—has authorized a debate on the topic. It will be held December 1—and it will be open to the public.

This is how public policy for a free people should be formulated—in the light of day, where everyone can see it. Too bad the Biden administration jumped the gun and imposed the mandate before any genuine debate about whether the mandate made good sense—for the public health and the health of our constitutional order.

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The late Andrew Breitbart often exhorted his fellow conservatives to remember that politics exists downstream of culture. A New York Times analysis of Democrats’ disastrous election results last week confirms that point—and offers a warning to Republicans as well.

The Times warned Democrats that they have lost the rural white vote to Republicans, to the extent that their bond to the GOP might rival that of the Democrats’ traditional hold on the black vote. “Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base,” they warn, “can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life.” In Virginia and New Jersey, the Times concedes, the radical-progressive agenda turned out to be off-putting in suburbs too—even in previously reliable Democratic bastions like Fairfax and Loudoun.

Democrats have learned to sneer at rural and suburban cultures rather than engage and appreciate them. Democrats haven’t learned their lesson. The cultural disconnect will create a political tsunami of a red wave in the midterms if it continues.

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Sometimes, there are policies so destructive that at first you don’t believe they’re true. Joe Biden is currently defending one—his plan to award $450,000 to migrants separated from their families after entering the U.S. illegally.

Children of deceased U.S. soldiers are separated from their parents … permanently. They don’t receive this kind of money. And migrants who enter the U.S. legally certainly don’t get this kind of payout. The really big jackpot, it seems, is being reserved for the lawbreakers.

There are some obvious truths here. First, behavior that’s subsidized gets repeated. Joe Biden is effectively inviting many more illegal immigrants to breach America’s open borders. Second, he’s betting over time the payoffs will benefit his party in political terms.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans watch in shock and dismay as our president—the chief law enforcement officer—brazenly rewards lawbreaking, a clear violation of his oath to defend our nation’s laws.

It’s a sorry sight, indeed.

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The great exodus has begun—from the nation’s largest public school districts.  A record number of families are voting with their feet in the nation’s bluest cities.

In New York’s public school system—America’s largest—enrollment has dropped by 50,000 students since 2019. That’s a whopping 4.5 percent. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, there’s a record loss of 6 percent of enrollment, 27,000 students. And in number three—Chicago—enrollment is down 3 percent, with 25,000 students leaving.

Covid has spawned an education revolution. Urban parents at home with children barred from school by teachers’ unions got a first-hand look at what their children were learning. They were not impressed.

Whatever a parent’s politics, race or socioeconomic background, they all want their children to have the opportunities that only come with a quality education.

At last, the tide of education reform is beginning to roll like a mighty wave. For those who need it most, it’s long overdue.

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Ever since abandoning Americans in his haste to retreat from Afghanistan, Joe Biden’s support has entered a free fall. At first, media outlets treated the polling plunge as a momentary blip. After two months, and on the eve of crucial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, both ABC and NBC have finally reached the obvious conclusion—that voters have lost confidence in Biden.

“What people voted for was stability and calm,” added fellow Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “And what they got was instability and chaos.”
  
And not just among Republicans. A new Marist poll shows more Democrats prefer a new nominee in 2024, and that only a third would want Biden back as president. 

The president’s cowardly actions in Afghanistan started the collapse, but other factors feed into it: inflation, the economic stall in the third quarter, and Democrats’ feud between moderates and progressives. It all creates the sense that Biden is in over his head. That perception has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Biden’s woes on Capitol Hill and in Virginia prove. 

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There’s no hypocrite like a green hypocrite—and that hypocrisy has been on display at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

The elites, the great and the good, are touting their eco-credentials, worrying about everyone’s carbon footprint but their own.  More than 100 world leaders have shown up—and they didn’t fly commercial. This after a pandemic when everyone learned how to use zoom.

President Biden was seen pre-summit tooling around Rome in an 85-car motorcade . . . a display of conspicuous, gas-guzzling consumption if there ever was one. Meanwhile, Climate Czar John Kerry flies almost exclusively by private jet.

But it’s not really about climate. It’s about a class divide: between the elites, who live as they please, and the rest of us—who are told to drive less, turn off our air conditioners, and put down that burger. I’ll take them seriously when they tell China, the world’s biggest polluter, to cut emissions … and when they start acting like they believe their own warnings.

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