The state of the democratic party

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ka...se-welfare-2022-11637362201?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

The Kamikaze Democrats
Pelosi and Biden march swing-district House Members to the end of their careers.
By The Editorial Board
Nov. 21, 2021 4:34 pm ET

The Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal dominated the weekend news, but the more significant story for the long run was House passage Friday of the multi-trillion-dollar tax, climate and entitlement spending bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi marched her majority off a cliff in 2010 with votes on ObamaCare, and now she has done it again.

The Speaker muscled the bill through on a 220-213 vote. No Republicans voted aye, and Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the sole Democratic dissenter. Other swing-district Democrats had made a show of demanding concessions and a bill that “paid for itself,” but in the end the bill didn’t pay for itself even by the rigged rules of the Congressional Budget Office. But they still rolled over, as they always do when Mrs. Pelosi gives the order.

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The 81-year-old Mrs. Pelosi is almost certainly retiring after this Congress, and this vote is a legacy project for her. But her younger Members will have much to explain in 2022 as they defend this gargantuan, destructive and unnecessary bill.

There’s the immigration provision that would give 6.5 million or so illegal migrants who have been in the country since 2011 a 10-year right to work in the U.S. This will probably be stripped from the bill in the Senate, but House Members will be on record for legalizing millions of migrants even as the border has become a lawless mess. The political effect will be to empower GOP restrictionists.

Then there’s the $8 billion methane “fee” that is in effect a tax on natural gas production and thus on consumer energy prices. The American Gas Association estimates this could raise the average family’s natural gas bill by 17%, so this is also a violation of President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year.

Sen. Joe Manchin might strip this from the Senate bill. But Abigail Spanberger (Va.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and the rest are now on record as supporting higher energy prices when they are already spiking in suburban American.

The immoderate moderates also voted for a tax cut for the rich in high-tax states by raising the state-and-local tax deduction to $80,000 from $10,000. The Penn Wharton Budget Model says that the top 10% of taxpayers will get 88% of the benefit from this provision. Most of those reside in coastal states run by Democrats.

The same Democrats who campaign against inequality and for soaking the rich thus voted to give affluent taxpayers who earn up to $10 million a year a huge tax cut. The provision costs the Treasury $230 billion through 2026, after which Democrats pretend it will raise revenue. Sure it will. Mr. Golden cited this provision as the reason he voted no, and Senate Democrats may alter or nix it. But House Democrats are still on the record.

Other lowlights that may end up in Republican campaign ads include the $2.5 billion handout to trial lawyers to deduct their expenses for contingency-fee lawsuits. Don’t forget the $1.7 billion subsidy for local journalists, most of whom are left of center. Republicans will call that, not without cause, a bribe for favorable coverage.

All of this and more is part of the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s, and maybe ever. House Democrats say the bill spends roughly $2 trillion over 10 years, but that’s because they use gimmicks such as phasing-out programs that they have no intention of phasing out. Independent analysts put it closer to $5 trillion over a decade if the programs are made permanent.

Democrats say their specific programs are popular—who doesn’t love free child care? But voters understand that nothing is free from the government, and polls are starting to show that voters think they will end up paying for it. They are right. There are only so many rich people to soak, and Democrats are cutting taxes for most of them.

Americans have also begun to link the flood of government spending to inflation, which is acting like another tax. With this bill, passed in the wake of their nationwide election drubbing this month, Democrats are underscoring that they are the inflation party.

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Mrs. Pelosi promised Democrats she wouldn’t make them vote on a bill before the Senate agreed to it, but as in 2010 she’s done that again. They’ll now have to defend provisions that couldn’t pass a Democratic Senate. No wonder Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke on the House floor for eight hours. He knows the Democrats were voting to make him Speaker.

Appeared in the November 22, 2021, print edition.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/kyle-r...ilty-11637597046?mod=hp_trending_now_opn_pos2

Kyle Rittenhouse and the Left’s Terrifying Assault on Due Process
They want revolutionary justice. The legal system’s verdict will be supplanted by the people’s judgment.
By Gerard Baker
Nov. 22, 2021 1:01 pm ET

The unhinged reaction from the left to Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal last week is easily dismissed as a glimpse into the rancid minds and rabid hearts of the ideological brigands of modern progressivism.

But it may offer clarity about the real threat posed by the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers to the values and institutions that have made America the most successful democratic republic in history.

With varying degrees of apoplexy, from President Biden on down, the party’s leaders and its allies emphasized their dismay with or rage at the decision by 12 of Mr. Rittenhouse’s peers, after due deliberation, unanimously to find him not guilty of first-degree murder and lesser charges in the killings of two men and wounding of a third during the August 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wis.

Mr. Biden, proving himself once again the consummate moral weakling, first declared his respect for the jury’s verdict, then pronounced himself—no doubt after consultation with his handlers—“angry and concerned.”

While the follow-up statement paid lip service to the idea that a jury’s decision should be respected, the more striking message was that remarkable emotional response to its unanimous decision.

The president’s politically motivated disregard for the rights of accused defendants is well documented by now. He had already included the young man among a video montage of “white supremacists” during his memorably “healing” campaign for the presidency. He also told the nation he was “praying for the right verdict” as the jury deliberated in April before convicting Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. Running commentary on the guilt of criminal defendants is despicable when offered by barroom braggarts, but when it comes from the most powerful man on the planet it amounts to reckless endangerment of the rights of his fellow citizens.

But that’s the point.

In the minds of the ranting radicals of the Squad or MSNBC, dimly repeated by the president, these so-called rights—presumption of innocence, due process, trial by jury, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, etc., are not the bedrock legal protections against overweening authority the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence has deemed them to be. In the minds of the regnant left when they find the defendant unsympathetic, they are inconveniences, fetishized excrescences of judicial process that obstruct and subvert the larger and more important objective of social justice. In this increasingly popular account on the left, they are the armor with which the capitalist white supremacists protect their hegemony. As such they can be dismissed.

And so people like House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic congressman, his own intellectual vacuity helpfully filled in by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, can demand that Mr. Rittenhouse face further prosecution under spurious civil-rights precepts designed to undo the principle of double jeopardy.

So too do the president and his party demonstrate disdain for other niceties of the law: extending the Covid eviction moratorium Mr. Biden knew was unconstitutional, imposing a blanket vaccine mandate on employers in the face of widespread advice that it wouldn’t pass legal muster.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the intention behind the denunciation by some of the left of the Rittenhouse verdict reflected an even darker instinct. Though the president himself called for restraint, some of the loud condemnations sounded like incitement of more of the kind of behavior that characterized the Kenosha riots in the first place. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri tweeted: “The judge. The jury. The defendant. It’s white supremacy in action”—just as California’s Maxine Waters had promised unrest if the Chauvin verdict went the wrong way.

This is what the pernicious doctrines of the modern progressive identity left look like in practice. The “critical theory” they subscribe to says real justice cannot be delivered by a court, presided over by a judge whose outcome is determined by a dispassionate jury, since the entire structure is itself the product of racism, oppression and discrimination.

What they want is revolutionary justice. The legal system’s verdict will be supplanted by the people’s judgment so that someone like Mr. Rittenhouse will pay for his crime of defending himself and the property of others against the people’s paramilitary.

These same people professed outrage when a Republican-supporting mob attempted to subvert a constitutional process. Genuine democrats condemn both sorts of lawlessness.

Juries sometimes reach the wrong verdict. But no one who watched critical phases of the Kenosha trial can honestly assert that the evidence proved the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Far from representing some malign flaw in the legal process, it showed the system working at its best.

If the left’s reaction to this case doesn’t scare you, I am afraid you don’t understand what it represents, or how rapidly and how far the poison of this subversive and illiberal dogma has already spread through a political movement and ideology we once called liberal.

Appeared in the November 23, 2021, print edition.
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