The late senator was the kind of man the Founders had in mind.

A long time ago, and for no particular religious reason, I decided the psalmist was right: “Put not your trust in princes.” The point the unknown author was making is that it’s God, not some son of man, in whom one should trust. But regardless, it has seemed to me eminently true that princes are not trustworthy. I especially like the term “princes” because it’s more encompassing than “kings” would be. It seems to evoke the totality of the class of politicians, from the time of the psalms unto this democratic age.

I have made one exception in the years since, and that was for John McCain. I never worked for the man, except as an informal and unpaid adviser on national security to his 2008 presidential campaign. Perhaps that contributed to my ability to trust him: I thereby avoided finding myself the object of one of his famous outbursts of temper. But maybe not, because not one of the dozens of people I know who worked for him, and who presumably were at one time or another on the receiving end of one of his tirades, had anything but love and loyalty for him. Continue reading →

Why the success of the Federalist Society is unlikely to be replicated.

With President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat Justice Anthony Kennedy is vacating, the influence of the Federalist Society—the membership organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers, legal scholars, and law students—remains at the absolute peak it attained during the administration of George W. Bush with the nomination of Samuel Alito to the nation’s highest court.

Founded in 1982 by Lee Liberman Otis, Steven Calabresi, David McIntosh, and E. Spencer Abraham, the Federalist Society launched as a counterbalance to the leftward tilt among law school faculty nationwide. Part of the idea was to ensure that the progressive hegemony on campus met serious resistance at least at the level of intellectual debate, if not the numerical balance among faculties. But within 20 years of its establishment, the Federalist Society had also emerged as the premier vetting institution for Republican appointments to the federal judiciary, especially at the appellate level. Continue reading →

Trump may well prefer for Mueller to play out the string.

For much of the past year, speculation has swirled that President Trump will fire Robert Mueller, the independent counsel investigating supposed links between Russia and the Trump campaign. Interestingly, the likelihood that Trump fires Mueller is an area of rare bipartisan agreement in Washington—though of course, the speculated reasons why he might do so vary greatly.

Democrats think Trump may or will fire Mueller as a last-ditch attempt to derail an investigation closing in on him. Republican supporters of the president think Trump might or should fire Mueller because his probe has become exactly the “witch hunt” the president often tweets that it is.

Republican never-Trumpers and neutrals by and large take the view that the investigation must run its course even (or perhaps especially) if there was “no collusion” with Russia, as Trump insists on a regular basis. Disrupting the investigation would worsen the president’s position. But such is their generally low opinion of Trump that many of them, too, regard it as likely that the president will fire Mueller despite his own best interests in letting the investigation play out. Continue reading →

For those willing to take it seriously, the question of Trump-ian national security and foreign policy has always been the extent to which the disruptive if not incendiary rhetoric of Donald Trump, the man, would be matched by a Trump administration effort to remake U.S. policy in accordance with his Twitter account. Was “America First” a fundamental reconception of the U.S. role in the world with new policies to match? Or could we expect more policy continuity than actual disruption?

Of course, many remain entirely unwilling to get to this question. Trumpian rhetoric is too unsettling for them to countenance in any way. To deride the utility of U.S. alliance commitments, the value of global trade, the obligation of the United States to adhere to international humanitarian law and human rights treaties such as the Convention against Torture—and to do so, moreover, under the same slogan as the pro-German isolationism of the 1930s—is more than enough to indicate a fundamental, disastrous change of course. By this light, Trump has been walking away from two generations of policy that served the United States very well. Continue reading →

To those feverishly speculating, whether in glee or in terror, that the election results in Virginia and New Jersey portend loss of GOP control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections a year from now, I ask this question: What difference does that prospect make not as of January 2019 but between now and then? The analogy is imprecise, but if someone told you authoritatively you were going to be pushing up daisies 14 months from now, how would you handle the news? I think an answer many people would give would be: make the most of the time you have left.

For an example of how to go about doing that, one need look back no further than the first year of the Obama administration.

In 2009, the top priority for President Obama and the Democratic party in Washington was to pass a health care reform bill. They were trying to do so on the strength of their possession of the White House and strong majorities in the House and Senate. The 111th Congress opened with 60 Democratic senators, enough to defeat a filibuster and pass legislation without GOP votes—and indeed, on this topic, the GOP was providing none. Continue reading →

These are perilous times for understatement and modest expectations. In the age of Trump, even the smallest of things are transmogrified into epoch-defining events. These are the days of mountains out of molehills, “a new low” almost daily, and more proof (as if more were needed) that your political opponents are every bit as debased as—no, even more debased than—you rightly concluded long ago.

In keeping with the times, many now detect a strong whiff of impeachment in the fetid Washington air. And it is here that I would like to apply a little critical political realism to the question, to set aside personal views and analyze it as coolly and dispassionately as possible. I’m sure there’s still an audience for that sort of thing. But just in case there isn’t, let me begin by saying that the idea Donald Trump is going to be removed from office is about the most farfetched fantasy in the rich history of Washington partisan delusion.

To return to measured understatement, the likelihood of such an outcome is not zero. But if you examine the hypothetical chain of events that would produce Trump’s removal, you will find not a president barely maintaining his balance atop a house of cards sure to collapse at any moment, but rather a confluence of constitutional procedures and political calculations that will work to keep him in the office to which he was elected certainly for the next two years, and very likely for the rest of his term. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

To those who believed, sequentially, that Donald Trump would drop out soon after entering the GOP primary field; that this or that outrageous provocation of his would fatally turn off primary voters; that while he might be winning primaries, he had a ceiling of support among Republicans in the 40-percent range through which he could never pass; that he would never win a majority of delegates to the convention; that if he did, the party establishment would do its utmost to deny him the nomination; that under pressure from GOP defectors, he might drop out of the race; and that he could never win the general election—to all of you, I say: It’s time to start thinking about how Trump intends to win reelection. He will certainly be thinking about it, and it is likely to illuminate some of the decisions he makes. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

One noteworthy feature of the ideological divide in Washington is how immune the country’s foreign policy practitioners have been from the disfiguring aspects of hyper-partisanship. Take any random left-wing specialist in constitutional law and a counterpart from the Federalist Society, and odds are they will believe they have little to say to or learn from each other. Something similar holds on questions of inequality and the tax code, and on social issues, if any of those are left to argue about.

On foreign policy matters, this hasn’t generally been true. It’s not that the intensity of the party identification of those working in this arena is lacking. But Democrats and Republicans alike have to work in a world in which U.S. foreign policy is subject to external constraints in a way domestic policy is not. The constraints on domestic policy are mostly up for grabs; this intensifies partisan feelings. The constraints on foreign policy are not only beyond the reach of any American ability to dictate terms—even for the “sole superpower”—they are also dangerous and need to be understood. Both sides have to do business with the same world. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

At a White House ceremony on November 12, President Obama will award the Medal of Honor to retired Army captain Florent Groberg. When the president fastens the medal’s light-blue ribbon behind Groberg’s neck, Obama will be doing more than honoring a single American hero. He will be reaffirming what has become a national commitment to honor a distinctive kind of heroism. Groberg, like other recent recipients of the nation’s highest military honor, risked his life to save the lives of others.

Groberg, who was born in France in 1983 and is a naturalized American citizen, grew up in Bethesda and is a graduate of the University of Maryland. He joined the Army, he has said, because he felt he owed something to his adopted country. On his second tour in Afghanistan in 2012, Groberg was in charge of a detail that provided security for the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division.

Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Nothing can redeem the harrowing massacre that unfolded last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But something does enter on the positive side of the ledger: A genuine American hero revealed himself that day.

Chris Mintz’s biography seems to fit the profile of a student enrolled in community college. He’d finished high school, done a stint in the army, worked at Walmart among a series of unremarkable jobs. He fought mixed martial arts and was going to school because he wanted to become a personal trainer. He’s the father of a young son with autism, and though he is no longer together with the boy’s mother, he remains thoroughly engaged in his son’s life.

It all sounds perfectly ordinary, and in most ways it was. Under almost all of the plausible scenarios in which a life such as this plays out, the rest of his countrymen would never have heard of him. He would have lived his life as tens of millions do, privately, with the travails and rewards of work, family and friendship. And the rest of us—and perhaps he himself—would never have known that a heroic heart was quietly beating inside him, awaiting only the occasion to reveal itself.

Continue reading →