If House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi seems desperate in her partisan maneuvering these days, it’s because the House that she now leads looks like a lock for the GOP in 2022.

The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in the midterms following their inauguration. President Obama’s Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010. In 2018, President Trump’s Republicans lost 40. 

Redistricting will take place over the course of the next 18 months—throwing a wrench into the gears of prediction models, but one that favors Republicans.

But the GOP has the advantage here: The Brennan Center reports that Republicans will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats.

Yes, gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity.

The bottom line is this: the Democrats’ meager nine-seat House majority is likely to evaporate in the midterms. 

Look for California’s Kevin McCarthy to be House speaker in 2023.

It can’t come soon enough.

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The new release of “Justice League” is getting rave reviews. Originally filmmaker Zach Snyder was the director of the film until a personal tragedy pulled him off the project. Joss Whedon was tapped to finish the film. The result was one of the worst superhero movies ever. Whedon’s cynical atheism was not up to the task of finishing out the sincerely religious vision of Snyder. 

Fans demanded Snyder’s version of the film be released—and the results are being praised. Issues of grace, divinity, idolatry and, yes, justice, are dealt with in respectful ways. The worldview of a filmmaker matters—and Snyder’s more conservative and religious influences have allowed the material to speak with far more power. 

Snyder’s first blockbuster, “300” was an unapologetic defense of Western civilization, though a bloody and brutal one. Justice League is likewise dark, and not appropriate for everyone, but at least in this case, there’s some light in the darkness.

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Graduation is a ceremony dating back to the 12th century. It is equal parts ritual, a unified celebration and a rite of passage. And now the Columbia University has gone entirely woke, this spring students there can participate in six different graduations divided by race, by income and by sexuality.

The phenomenon is sadly revealing of our era’s outsized obsession with identity politics. How, precisely, does it serve the message of tolerance and inclusion for the LGBTQ community to have a separate ceremony? Worse, imagine the criteria for inclusion in any of the racial graduations. It harkens back to the darkest eras of American history, when having even “one drop” of non-white blood could relegate a person to second-class status.

Graduation ceremonies focused on what divides us—rather than on what unites us—tears at the social fabric we all should be trying to create in these tense and fractured times.

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Manhattan and Washington, D.C. are two of the bluest cities in the nation.  And both make no bones about it: In order to qualify for the coronavirus vaccine in either place, you must show at least two forms of identification, proving age and residency.

This makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense is that neither city requires any ID at all for someone to vote. This is true even though a recent Rasmussen poll found that every key demographic supports photo ID to vote, including African Americans.

The left insists requiring ID would depress voter turnout. But a 2019 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research completely debunks that claim, showing that ID laws didn’t suppress registration or turnout over a ten-year period.

It’s both rational and right to defend what we value. Just as we protect access to the coronavirus vaccine, we should likewise safeguard the precious right so many have died to secure for us: our vote.

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Antony Blinken-our new Secretary of State-went to Alaska early this month
for his first major meeting with his Chinese counterparts.

After Blinken's opening comments he was welcomed by what the Wall Street
Journal described as a 20-minute "tongue lashing."

The incident highlights the major geopolitical struggle of our life and of
our children's lives and, yes, our grandchildren's lives: An increasingly
assertive indeed combative China.

The Chinese Communist Party is pushing and testing the Biden administration, and the Trump administration gets credit for waking our foreign policy  
establishment up to the threat from China. It's a tale told superbly in the new
book "Chaos Under Heaven" by Josh Rogin of the Washington post. Rogin gives
us a comprehensive reveal of China 2021-an unreformed Marxist-Leninist
superpower far more ominous in design and means than the USSR ever was or
could become.

It's not a Democrat issue, it’s not a Republican issue. It's an American issue.

... and we'd better wake up.

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In one of the classic lines from the movie “Casablanca,” Captain Louis Renault tells Rick Blaine—played by Humphrey Bogart—that’s he was “shocked, shocked!” that gambling was going on in the casino.

His line came to mind as Joe Biden and his team express their own shock that their gamble on the border created incentives for a mad rush into the U.S.

Biden campaigned on promises of liberalizing asylum policies and processing within the U.S. rather than Mexico. Is there any doubt that those messages reversed the disincentives of the Trump years?—or that the slow response telegraphed a lack of will to enforce border security?

Biden’s gamble has backfired.

The only way to put an end to the border crisis is to change the incentives and thus convince people to remain in their home countries. Biden’s “solutions”—including releasing asylum claimants without even a court date—have only made matters worse.

What we get is a collapse of border integrity.

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Elite culture warriors have demanded that Pepe Le Pew—the Looney Tunes cartoon skunk—be cancelled. New York Times columnist Charles Blow argues that the character’s misbegotten pursuit of female counterparts somehow—in his words—“normalizes rape culture,” even though he consistently becomes the butt of the joke.

Critics justify eliminating Pepe from cartoons arguing boys may imitate his undesirable behavior if they witness it. How strange, then, that the same elites praised the recent Grammy performances by Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion. Children are watching those, too.

If there is a danger in emulating the message of a cartoon skunk, why can’t they see a greater danger in the raunchy message and performance from real live performers who are targeting our teens today?

The cancel culture crew can’t have it both ways. Are they really concerned about children learning unwholesome lessons from popular culture?

A glance at the Grammy’s says, “no.”

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The new jobs report is in, and it indicates that the labor market is starting to truly recover. Nearly 400,000 jobs were added in February, almost twice what was expected. The unemployment rate is now half what it was at the peak of the pandemic. Despite these gains, Democrats are pushing for policies that could seriously undermine this recovery.

The new stimulus package was supposed to include a $15 an hour minimum wage. Though saner voices blocked it from the final bill, a national wage hike was one of Biden's core campaign promises. It will be back—and that alone that would be a massive hit to the jobs market.

Alongside the expanded and extended unemployment benefits, it could be disastrous. Democrats are pushing for a regime in which workers will be priced out of the market, while subsidizing unemployment. They want to make jobs harder to get and then pay people to not work.

It is both morally and fiscally irresponsible.

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The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts will now legalize polyamorous relationships.

Yes, polyamory is the project du jour—and Cambridge—home to Harvard and MIT—is also home to this latest experiment.

The argument put forward is: That the definition of the family is changing, the law has to keep up—or else people will be vulnerable because their own relationships will not be recognized.

So, a marital family unit in Cambridge will include any number of participants who simply “consider themselves to be a family.”

What’s at stake here is the redefinition of the family from anything based on the familial construct which has been true throughout millennia—that is by blood descent, a man, a woman, coming together in marriage and the children who are produced by that marriage, and the larger extended family of blood kinship and adoption.

That—the natural family unit—is what advocates want to de-normalize.

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Just four years after 9/11, Senator Dick Durbin took to the floor of the US Senate and compared U.S. soldiers to Nazis and Communists and the Pol Pot regime.

The military’s response? Dignified silence.

What a difference 16 years makes. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson recently critiqued new military policies—including flight suits for pregnant women.

This prompted outraged tweets from uniformed soldiers including the Sergeant Major of the Army, the Commander of Fort Hood and an official U.S. Marines account.

Our military should focus on keeping America safe—not bickering with a commentator. We have a proud history of a military that retains widespread respect by refusing to play politics. We should keep that standard. 

Our servicemen and servicewoman ought to keep one thing in their sights: America’s enemies. Their job is to defend us and our rights—including the right to speak freely—even when some soldiers may disagree.

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