Townhall Review | Commentaries

Thirty years have passed since Justice Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the US Supreme Court. His tenure there has been consequential, indeed.

He’s the Court’s foremost proponent of natural law—an understanding that our individual rights are transcendent and come from God. This understanding undergirds his approach to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, powerfully informing the Justice’s unyielding commitment to limited government and equal justice before the law.

Over the last five years, Justice Thomas has authored more opinions than any of his colleagues on the Supreme Court. His influence only continues to grow. 

And he’s beloved by the scores of people who know him. Justice Thomas has time for everyone. He knows the names of the children of the marshals who guard the courthouse. He’s mentored generations of clerks, treating them like family, and his distinctive, hearty laugh rings out within his judicial chambers.

May God bless this great, good and brilliant man, and may he serve on the Court many years longer.

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With Democrats in Congress feuding over their massive social-engineering reconciliation bill, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi need a distraction from their failure. Hence, we will have a meaningless vote on the House’s election-federalizing bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, which has even less chance of passing. 

The bill finally achieved unanimity among Senate Democrats—or so Schumer claims—after bowing to Joe Manchin and eliminating the most radical elements of the For The People Act. What remains still amounts to the biggest federal intrusion on state’s jurisdiction over elections. Mitch McConnell accurately labeled it a “partisan power grab.” 

Not a single Republican senator will vote for it, let alone the ten Schumer needs to break a filibuster. It is, as one aide put it to NBC, nothing more than public-relations filler while Democrats try to rescue their massive spending bill. 

Voters gave Joe Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi a big opportunity to govern. It’s clear that they prefer political stunts—playing to the hard left—over responsible governance. 

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Pat Gelsinger is the CEO of Intel and perhaps the most visible tech executive in America who is also a Christian. In a recent interview with Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, he made a simple but powerful point about the push for diversity in corporate America and especially in Silicon Valley: diversity should also include people of faith. Gelsinger argues that if companies are truly inviting us to “bring our whole selves to work,” that ought to include Christians like him. If not, then it’s really diversity at all?

It reminded me a conversation I had with a manager of a major company. She boasted—“L, G, B, T, Q…we have all the letters.” 

I asked “What about C?”. 

“What’s C?” 

I told her “Christian…c is Christian”. 

Of course: They had no convictional position on religious liberty.

To have the CEO of America’s largest chip-maker arguing for a diversity that includes “c” is something that other CEOs should emulate. 

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Giddy with his recall reelection win, Gavin Newsome is living large. Last week, he signed laws making it illegal to use gas-powered “off-road engines” including leaf blowers, lawn mowers and golf carts; prohibiting gender-specific sections in toy stores; and mandating the teaching of ethnic studies in schools.

While Governor Newsom celebrates, the rest of his state is suffering. The off-road engine mandate will make life infinitely more difficult for thousands of small businesses. California has the highest rate of homelessness in the country – with more than a quarter of America’s homeless living there. And his state has the second highest unemployment in our nation, and saw a whopping 31 percent jump in homicides last year.

This is heartbreaking. I once lived near Los Angeles. California is a beautiful place, filled with wonderful people.

They deserve better than a governor who distracts with nonsense legislation and fails to address his state’s real problems. 

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Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has released a memo announcing it would crack down on parents at school board meetings, because some board members feel “threatened” by parents objecting to everything from critical race theory to mask mandates.

But there are serious problems with this approach. First, the Justice Department is only empowered to investigate federal crimes. Even if some behavior is as bad as the National Association of School Boards has claimed, that’s a local or maybe a state matter.

Second, in America, before we’re punished for a crime, we’re entitled to understand exactly what is illegal. Here, the Justice Department’s memo is unacceptably imprecise. Is simply yelling at a school board member now prohibited, or are actual threats or violence required? Vagueness doesn’t fly.

Cherokee activist Wilma Mankiller once noted, “Whoever controls the education of our children controls the future.” The left understands that well. Let’s hope America’s parents, do, too—and don’t back down an inch.

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To hear the media tell the story of Joe Biden’s polling collapse, the president has really just been beset by bad luck, vaccine skeptics, and an obstinate opposition party in Congress. In reality, voters have been forced to confront the fact that Biden is incompetent—with Exhibit A being his disgraceful abandonment of Americans in Afghanistan.

This week, both Politico and the Washington Post attempted to distract from the obvious. Neither outlet even mentioned Afghanistan as a reason for the polling collapse. Yet the polling data shows a sharp collapse beginning in late August, at the same time as the withdrawal when no other major developments arose in the pandemic, the filibuster, or any of the other topics the media claims to be driving Biden’s low approval numbers.

Biden’s utter incompetence has created a confidence crisis with Americans. 

But legacy media is culpable in the confidence crisis as well.

They are, after all, complicit in Biden’s disgrace. 

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In the latest employment report, we learned that the economy only added 194,000 jobs last month, the lowest number in a year.

But why? 

After all, there are plenty of jobs available—and many of the incentives not to work, such as extended benefits associated with Covid relief—ended in September. Economists expected far more people to go to work once they were kicked off the dole. 

They turned out to be wrong, because economics isn’t just about incentives, it’s also about culture, and we have undergone a cultural revolution, one in which idleness is no longer stigmatized. 

For most of the history of this country, the able-bodied who were unwilling to take available jobs were not respected. Of course, some people couldn’t find work, and no one faulted them for that. But to be young and able and simply not work was unheard of. 

Now, that has changed—and there’s not a simple government fix.

But: We can start by working … and teaching our young people the dignity of work.

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Inflation recently hit a 30-year high. It’s not just the Consumer Price Index—which is the most-often used measurement of inflation; price hikes are evident in a wide variety of measurements. I’ve been arguing that our current policy environment was likely to create high inflation, based on various technical factors, especially money supply/demand. But for all the technical discussion about inflation, we miss a major point if we ignore one simple moral truth: Inflation is theft. 
 
Medieval Catholic theologians argued that debasing currency was the equivalent of Ahab taking Naboth’s vineyard. Reformation theologians argued it violated the 8th commandment. It is condemned by the Torah as an abomination and denounced by the Old Testament Prophets because it robs the poor. Inflation isn’t fundamentally a math problem. It’s a moral problem obscured by hyper-Keysnian mathematical models and politicians punishing savers to buy votes. 

It is debasement in both senses of the word. 

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It’s true. Parents are a child’s first teacher. But not anymore, it seems, if woke America has anything to say about it.
 
In Virginia’s gubernatorial debate, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe said it out loud: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.”
 
Understandably, many parents don’t agree. During covid, they saw what their kids are learning, and they didn’t like it.
 
So they’re showing up at school board meetings to advocate for their children. Some topics are controversial, like critical race theory, mask mandates, and the pornographic materials available in some school libraries.  
 
Some meetings have grown heated, and of course threats and violence are always wrong. But it’s ludicrous that the National School Boards Association has called this parent pushback “domestic terrorism,” and demanded the Biden Administration use tools like the Patriot Act to suppress political dissent. And it’s frightening that the Biden Administration would even consider it.
 
That’s not what we do in America.

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You may have missed it, but last week was Banned Books Week in the United States—and you didn’t miss anything. It’s a program undertaken some 40 years ago by the American Library Association. But there are really are no banned books in the United States—at least not in the sense that the American Library Association wants to tell you. 
 
When you look at the list of the books they claim have been banned, it turns out not a single one of them has actually been banned. Sure: Some have been complained about, but none has been banned.
 
But: There are books that are now effectively banned, but they’re not the books that the ALA is willing to speak up about. One example of a book that really is marginalized right now is “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” by Ryan Anderson”—a solid, well researched book that you cannot get on Amazon today.
 
It starts with books but it’s really about ideas, and it’s the ideas that are in danger of being banned. But, that’s not the focus of those who are behind Banned Books Week—and therein is a parable.

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