Trump Keeps Winning on Judicial Nominations

Trump said that he wanted to influence generations... here is how!

Trump Keeps Winning on Judicial Nominations

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised that, under his presidency, America would win so much we might get tired of it. He added, however, that you can never get tired of winning.

So far, Trump’s presidency has not put that caveat to the test. But President Trump is winning big on judicial nominations. He’s nominating outstanding men and women, and most of them seem destined to be confirmed.

This week, Trump made four nominations to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The four are Don Willett, James Ho, Kyle Duncan, and Kurt Engelhardt.

Willett is a judge on the Texas Supreme Court. He made the list of judges considered by Trump for the Supreme Court slot eventually filled by Neil Gorsuch. Ho succeeded Ted Cruz as Solicitor General of Texas. Ilya Shapiro praises Willet and Ho here.

Kyle Duncan was Louisiana’s Solicitor General and, since leaving that post, has been called back to represent the state as special counsel. He has extensive experience as an appellate advocate. Duncan was the lead lawyer arguing for Hobby Lobby stores in the 2014 Supreme Court case that successfully challenged Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Carrie Severino endorses the Duncan nomination here.

I want to focus on Kurt Engelhardt, currently a district court judge — in fact, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. He’s the judge who wrote a scathing 129-page order denouncing the misconduct of lawyers at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the local New Orleans U.S. Attorney’s Office in a prosecution of New Orleans police officers. As Christian Adams says, Judge Engelhardt’s order “offers a look behind the curtain of some of the worst ideological misconduct that occurred at the Obama DOJ.”

I wrote about that case, the judge’s order, and its affirmation by the Fifth Circuit here. You can read Judge Engelhardt’s blistering 129-page “Order and Reasons” here.

The misconduct of DOJ attorneys included: (1) using a fake name to post commentary on the website of the Times-Picayune that castigated the defendants and their lawyers and repeatedly chastised the New Orleans Police Department as a fish “rotten from the head down;” (2) lying to the court about the scope of DOJ’s online activity and its culprits; (3) intimidating defense witnesses from testifying; and (4) using plea bargains and charging practices that produced inexplicably gross sentencing disparities.

Judge Engelhardt did not exaggerate when he described the Obama Justice Department’s conduct as “bizarre,” “appalling,” and “grotesque.” The Fifth Circuit did not err in finding that the Justice Department lawyers stoked a “mob mentality” against police officers, and in affirming Judge Engelhardt’s decision to order a new trial.

Judge Engelhardt deserves great credit for blowing the whistle so loudly and decisively on the misconduct of the Obama Justice Department. If his decision in the New Orleans police case is a good indicator of his overall jurisprudence, then his nomination is another win for President Trump and for justice.

The Progressive Octopus

The Progressive Octopus

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Politics lost, culture won. 

It is the best and worst of times for progressives and liberals.

Politically, their obsessions with identity politics and various racial and gender -isms and -ologies have emasculated the Democratic party: loss of governorships, state legislatures, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. 

Democrats, for the time being at least, are now reduced to largely a coastal, big-city party. It can certainly pile up lots of blue electoral votes. And, thanks to California, Democrats can capture the popular vote, without necessarily winning presidential elections. 

The old liberal idea that the new demography is progressive destiny did not work out as planned. when the Blue Wall crumbled; Hillary Clinton lost a sure-thing election. Large Latino populations in red Texas and blue California are not likely to turn either one into a swing state. Inner-city voters so far have not transferred prior record levels of turn-out and bloc voting to candidates of the Hillary Clinton sort. Identity politics did not ensure that the white liberals who created it were always exempt from the natural boomerang of their own ideology.   

24/7 Sermonizing 

Yet culturally, the progressive octopus continues to recalibrate popular life according to the new orthodoxies shared by a minority of the population. 

Indeed, the octopus has formidable and far-reaching tentacles that reach into every crevice of modern American life. Our progressive mollusk is big, and he swims with us everywhere. 

Most Americans are quite willing to concede spheres of partisanship — but not lawlessness. Some colleges, such as Evergreen State or UC Berkeley, while public and tax-supported, are, by definition, leftist in the manner that a private Hillsdale College or Saint Thomas Aquinas are traditionalist and conservative. But whereas the latter are calm and tolerant of dissent; the former, with public monies, are hysterical and often Stalinist when confronted by opposing views. That disconnect is unsustainable.

 Most citizens are fine with the fact that Fox News is the conservative cable-channel bookend to the progressive MSNBC. Americans realize that a different sort of crowd goes to a NASCAR race than watches the Tour de France. 

But what is bothering half the country is not such ideological birds-of-a-feather tribalism per se. The rub instead is the progressive attempt to undermine all shared public institutions by turning them into left-wing megaphones and in the process condoning the use of violence, obscenity, and racialism. 

So it is not quite accurate to complain of the “politicization of everything,” given that the phenomenon is largely a progressive project in which nothing is much sacred from left-wing political hectoring — our vocabulary, the very cars we drive, even the TV shows we watch.   

No Escape 

Why are the major private research universities such as Yale, Harvard, Duke, and Stanford, not just liberal but fully in service to a left-wing social agenda? Do they not all pile up huge billion-dollar endowments that are not taxed, thus robbing taxpayers of considerable annual revenue, while they turn out more biased yet less educated students? 

Network news was always liberal. Yet in the last decade, ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with PBS and NPR, as well as their cable counterparts such as CNN, have become veritable progressive operatives. Mention of transgenderism, gay marriage, abortion, global warming, and identity politics will be massaged to promote a progressive position that was once held only by minority — until the position morphs into an intolerant mainstream orthodoxy that does not allow dissent.

 Sometimes the scripted metamorphosis takes just a few years. Obama’s loud support of traditional marriage in 2008 changed to support for gay marriage in 2012. And when he left office, he conformed to the idea that only homophobes agreed with the position he’d held a few years earlier. Bill Clinton’s stance not too long ago on legal-only immigration would reduce him to a nativist racist by today’s progressive standards. 

Whether it is a 2006 or 2016 Oscar ceremony, it matters little. Some actor, some screenwriter, some director is eager to lecture the audience (to applause) and a national television audience (to mute disdain) that George W. Bush or Donald Trump (the conservative names come and go; the progressive hysterical outrage stays the same), is a fascist, or a Nazi, or a buffoon, or a criminal.   

Thanks, but No Thanks 

The result is that increasingly millions of Americans do not watch the Oscars as they once did in the days of the liberal but mostly sensible Hollywood of Doris Day, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Debbie Reynolds, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne. The Emmy Awards are even more polarizing in their lockstep messaging that resembles the dreariness of a May Day parade on a cold Soviet Moscow morning. 

Half of America no longer goes to the movies, for reasons that transcend the advent of cable TV and computer viewing. They are bored with the latest predictable remake of a far better earlier movie — now updated with tattooed, white villains speaking in a Russian, South African, or southern accent, diabolically seeking to harm a young, picture-perfect progressive social-justice warrior as she uncovers the racist, sexist, and homophobic machinations of an evil corporation or government agency, run by a white male cabal, that aims to pollute the water, dirty the air, or rob noble progressive victims. 

Much of America finds Hollywood a boring Pravda enterprise. It is hypocritical too in the Soviet style of a privileged apparat — given that movies are the products of huge corporations and multimillionaire actors who live apartheid existences. 

Sports used to be sacred. Not now. 

ESPN op-eds dressed up as sports analyses are not subtle. The working-class audience is often assumed to be bigoted in some way; the wealthy and elite sportscasters, athletes, and media celebrities imagine that they themselves are virtuous and exempt from their own criticism. 

Colin Kaepernick was the straw that broke the viewing audience’s proverbial back. He is lionized as Martin Luther King Jr. rather than portrayed as a confused young man of so-so talent, pampered by a multimillion-dollar salary. He and his newfound followers will not stand for the anthem of the country that ensured that the National Football League would be the most ethnically diverse athletic corporation in the world, with the most highly compensated players, and dependent on fans who would scrimp to pay outrageously high sums for tickets and cable packages just to see a simple football game — only to be insulted as the supposedly guilty party. 

The result is Orwellian on two counts. 

One, the NFL is an admirably meritocratic enterprise, absolutely immune from the progressive dictums of “proportional representation” (diversity in the workplace and university must reflect the race, gender, and ethnic ratios of the general population) and “disparate impact” (there is no need to show that the NFL is racialist in order to force it to diversify). Otherwise, the NFL, as in the case of universities or other publicly subsidized entities, would demand that player rosters “look like us.” That is, they’d make the necessary adjustments to ensure affirmative action for underrepresented Latino, Asian, and white players — in the manner that UC Berkeley currently takes steps apparently to keep it from becoming an Asian-majority university based on merit and skills.

Two, the subtext of not saluting the flag seems predicated on the notion of a racist white America, which in overwhelming numbers watches, enjoys, and pays for a mostly black NFL. Do the players, then, not wish their viewer base to keep watching, given its supposedly illiberal temperament and contemptible respect for the National Anthem? 

The Soviet Strangulation of Thought 

Major weather disasters are now almost immediately contextualized in progressive terms (often on the air by news readers) — and not just by politicians. (Do we remember Barack Obama’s saying “10,000” died in a Kansas tornado because George W. Bush had shorted the National Guard?) 

A drought is proof of climate change. But so is a deep freeze. Storms or the doldrums, it doesn’t matter: Greedy corporations and clueless, in-hock consumers are the carbon culprits. A tsunami or a receding sea, fog, or sun — climate change did it. When everything is proof of climate change, then nothing is.

Before 2017 there may have been a decade-long dearth of hurricanes into the Caribbean. There may have been a number of scientists who stated on the record that two large late summer storms in 2017 were not proof of global warming. Surely there is room for reasoned debate? 

Again, no. All the pop-culture talking heads, from somber pundits to late-night television hosts, explained Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in a drearily similar way: Americans’ wasteful consumption of carbon energies had heated the planet and brought down upon them a Biblical retribution of bad weather. 

Some even went so far to point out that the work of divine retribution had deliberately targeted Florida and Texas. The reason was not the obvious one that coastal states have long shorelines on the tropical Gulf of Mexico. Instead, they were hit by Nemesis because they were red states with populations more likely to doubt theories of catastrophic man-made global warming. Even the telethon for victims of the hurricanes turned into yet another media event in which celebrities trashed Donald Trump and his supporters. When Facebook is caught censoring, when Google fires its employees for talking freely, the sanctimonious high hand predictably comes down on the values of Middle America. 

Nothing is spared from rank politicization. Late-night TV? Superman comic books? Marquee chefs? 

The weary messaging is everywhere and always predictable: Superman now protects illegal aliens, so we are no longer to imagine him as an oversized cartoon hero but instead as a newly muscled Jorge Ramos.  

 No Mas 

As the progressive octopus squeezes the country, its dominance comes at a price. Lately fewer and fewer want to waste precious time watching the pampered adolescents of the NFL. Fewer wish to blow an afternoon viewing preachy mediocrities from Hollywood. 

Madonna is a tiring bore who needs to go away and age gracefully. Ditto ESPN.

 Who wishes to pay for the latest overpriced Apple gadget, because an aging zillionaire dressed in black prances back and forth on stage before stockholders as if he were Mick Jagger with a mic?

Most yawn that Mark Zuckerberg and Pope Francis have given one too many sanctimonious rants that project their own hypocrisies. And one too many sober and judicious ex-diplomats (of the sort whose mellifluous prior appeasement led to a thermonuclear North Korea) bores us with warnings about Trump’s “incendiary rhetoric.” 

Apparently in 2016, the deplorables and irredeemables struck back. Donald J. Trump symbolically served as a radiologically hot CAT scan that revealed long-festering inner metastases. Next, as deadly chemotherapy, he unpleasantly saturated the patient until the cancers within slowly began to fester and shrink — even as the convalescent resented the harsh therapy as much as he did the symptoms of the disease. 

If the diagnosis and treatment are clear, the prognosis is not: Will America the patient buckle under the treatment and its side effects before the malady is mastered?

 — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books.  

Hmmmm, not rocket science... comes down to choices.

THE CAUSES OF INCOME INEQUALITY, REVEALED

John Hinderaker, Powerline

In 1995, Scott and I wrote a paper titled The Truth About Income Inequality, which was published by Center of the American Experiment, the organization I now lead. It got quite a bit of national attention, and I subsequently debated Congressman Martin Sabo, who then represented Minneapolis, on the subject at a Center-sponsored event that was televised by C-SPAN. 

That paper looked at the issue of income inequality from a variety of perspectives. The data obviously would need to be updated, but conceptually the paper holds up very well. Starting with the fact that income inequality is good, not bad. In fact–if you think about it–a society without income inequality would scarcely be worth living in.

At Townhall, Terry Jeffrey looks at income inequality through the lens of Census Bureau data and identifies the “culprit”: “Married Couples With Children and Jobs Cause Income Inequality.”

Liberals talk about “income inequality” as if it is caused by insufficient government action — including insufficient taxation of those they call the “rich.”
***
But what really causes income disparity in the United States? Who makes more than whom?

The Census Bureau’s annual report on American incomes…presents data that answers these questions.

It turns out that income has a lot more to do with culture and behavior than anything else.

Of the seven types of households listed in Table HINC-01, the wealthiest were married-couple families, which had a median income of $87,057.

It was a steep drop from there to second place: Family households with a male householder — but no spouse present — had a median income of $58,051.

That was $29,006 — or 33.3 percent — less than married couple households.

The next wealthiest households were nonfamily households with male householders, which had a median income of $41,749.

Then followed families with female householders but no spouse present ($41,027); male householders living alone ($35,265); nonfamily households with female householders ($30,572); and female householders living alone ($26,877).

So marriage is the first great driver of income inequality. But what happens if you have children?

Married couples with no children had a median income of $81,529 in 2016. Married couples with one child between 6 and 17 years of age had median incomes of $95,965. Married couples that had two or more children between 6 and 17 had median incomes of $102,657.

In America, moms and dads with at least two young kids have a median income ($102,657) approximately three times that of men who live alone ($35,265).

Funny how that works. Of course, having children in the home correlates positively with prime earning years, which I assume is reflected in these numbers. More on that later.

Education is another culprit. Shockingly, those who obtain training and education generally earn more money than those who don’t. (I look forward to the day when social scientists, at great trouble and expense, will demonstrate something important that my grandmother didn’t already know.)

The other thing that correlates highly with earnings (as opposed to income, which includes welfare and other government payments) is work. I know, how many surprises can you take in a single day?

Of the 126,224,000 households in the United States in 2016, according to Table HINC-01, 29,750,000 — or 23.6 percent — had “no earners” at all. These households had a median income of $22,272.

They were surpassed by households with one earner ($48,550), two earners ($94,679), three earners ($115,357), and four earners or more ($143,000).

American households where two people worked ($94,679) had more than four times the median income of households where no one worked ($22,272).

I should hope so! If you think it is “unfair” that people who work have higher incomes than people who don’t, we can say with confidence that you are a liberal.

As Jeffrey points out, age also plays a major role. Shakespeare said that one man in his time plays many parts, and that is certainly true economically. Pretty much everyone starts out with a relatively low income, earns more as he gains experience, training and useful relationships, and then earns less as he transitions into retirement. If there were no income inequality, we would all be stuck at our 18-year-old wage forever.

Jeffrey concludes:

There is not a class war in America. There is a cultural war. It is between those who pursue the traditional life of the American dream and those who want to reduce more Americans to a broken life of government dependency.

Someone should explain this to the ignorant leftists who are attacking Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander.

North Korea, eye opening...

Looks like Donald's pressure is working....

North Korea, eye opening...

Contributed by Col Mike Walker (USMC) retired

DANDONG, China (Reuters) – The United Nations may have failed to slow North Korea’s weapons programs, but the country’s economy is already showing signs it is feeling the squeeze from the ongoing clampdown on trade, including a curb on fuel sales by China.

The latest sanctions agreed on Monday by the UN Security Council ban the export of textiles from North Korea, one of its few substantial foreign currency earners. They also capped imports of oil and refined products, without imposing the full ban the United States had sought.

Chinese traders along the border with North Korea and some regular visitors to the isolated country said scarcer and costlier fuel, as well as earlier UN sanctions banning the export of commodities such as seafood and coal, are now taking a toll.

“Our factory in North Korea is about to go bankrupt,” said an ethnically-Korean Chinese businessman in Dandong who sells cars refurbished at a factory in North Korea. He declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the situation.

“If they can’t pay us, we’re not going to give them goods for free,” he said, referring to his North Korean customers.

A trader at another auto-related businesses in Dandong said cross-border trade had been hurt over the past few years, which he attributed to sanctions and less access to petrol. Several Chinese traders told Reuters the sanctions had stymied North Korean businesses’ ability to raise hard currency to trade.

“Last month sales were really bad, I only sold a couple of vehicles,” said the Chinese trader who sells new trucks, vans and minibuses to North Korea. “In August last year, I sold tens of vehicles and I thought that was bad.”

On top of the sanctions, some traders said Chinese officials have stepped up efforts to curb smuggling across the border, a key source of fuel in the northern parts of North Korea.

AND:

Large State banks halt services for North Korean clients, tellers say

The big four Chinese State-owned banks have stopped providing financial services to new North Korean clients, according to branch staff, amid US concerns that the Chinese government has not been tough enough over North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests.

Tensions between the US and North Korea have increased after the sixth nuclear test conducted by Pyongyang on September 3 prompted the United Nations Security Council to impose further sanctions on Tuesday.

Chinese banks have come under scrutiny for their role as a conduit for funds flowing to and from North Korea.

China Construction Bank (CCB) has “completely prohibited business with North Korea,” said a bank teller at a branch in Northeast China’s Liaoning Province. The ban started on August 28, the teller said.

A person answering the customer hotline at the world’s largest lender, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), said the bank had stopped opening accounts for North Koreans and Iranians since July 16. The person did not explain why or answer further questions.

The measures taken by the largest Chinese banks began as early as the end of last year, when the city branch of Bank of China (BOC) in Dandong, Liaoning Province, which borders North Korea, stopped allowing North Koreans to open individual or business accounts, said a BOC bank teller who declined to be identified.

Existing North Korean account holders could not deposit or remove money from their accounts, the BOC teller said.

At Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), a teller at a branch in Dandong said North Koreans could not open accounts. The teller did not provide further details.

Official representatives for BOC, ICBC, CCB and ABC could not be reached for comment.

Banks in Dandong have been under the microscope as tensions have risen, given the city’s proximity to North Korea.

In June, the US accused the Bank of Dandong, a small lender, of laundering money for North Korea.

Attempts to slowly choke off the flow of funds to and from North Korea come after the US imposed sanctions on a Chinese industrial machinery wholesaler that it said was acting on behalf of a Pyongyang bank already covered by UN sanctions for supporting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Rule of Law

On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Rule of Law
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
A response to Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart

Two former top Obama-appointed prosecutors co-author a diatribe against Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions for returning the Justice Department to purportedly outdated, too “tough on crime” charging practices. Yawn. After eight years of Justice Department stewardship by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and after Obama’s record 1,715 commutations that systematically undermined federal sentencing laws, we know the skewed storyline. 

The surprise is to find such an argument in the pages of National Review Online. But there it was on Tuesday: “On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Failed Policies of the Past,” by Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart, formerly the United States attorneys for, respectively, the Northern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Ohio. Ms. Vance is now lecturing on criminal-justice reform at the University of Alabama School of Law and doing legal commentary at MSNBC. Mr. Stewart has moved on to the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, fresh from what it describes as his “leadership role at DOJ in addressing inequities in the criminal justice system,” focusing on “alternatives to incarceration,” and “reducing racial disparities in the federal system.” 

The authors lament that Sessions has reinstituted guidelines requiring prosecutors “to charge the most serious offenses and ask for the lengthiest prison sentences.” This, the authors insist, is a “one-size-fits-all policy” that “doesn’t work.” It marks a return to the supposedly “ineffective and damaging criminal-justice policies that were imposed in 2003,” upsetting the “bipartisan consensus” for “criminal-justice reform” that has supposedly seized “today’s America.” 

This is so wrongheaded, it’s tough to decide where to begin.

In reality, what Sessions has done is return the Justice Department to the traditional guidance articulated nearly four decades ago by President Carter’s highly regarded attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti (and memorialized in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual). It instructs prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense under the circumstances. Doesn’t work? This directive, in effect with little variation until the Obama years, is one of several factors that contributed to historic decreases in crime. When bad guys are prosecuted and incarcerated, they are not preying on our communities. 

The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress. 

A concrete example makes the point. Congress has prescribed a minimum ten-year sentence for the offense of distributing at least five kilograms of cocaine (see section 841(b)(1)(A)(ii) of the federal narcotics laws). Let’s say a prosecutor is presented with solid evidence that a defendant sold seven kilograms of cocaine. The crime is readily provable. Nevertheless, the prosecutor follows the Obama deviation from traditional Justice Department policy, charging a much less serious offense: a distribution that does not specify an amount of cocaine — as if we were talking about a one-vial street sale. The purpose of this sleight of hand is to evade the controlling statute’s ten-year sentence, inviting the judge to impose little or no jail time. 

That is not prosecutorial discretion. It is the prosecutor substituting his own judgment for Congress’s regarding the gravity of the offense. In effect, the prosecutor is decreeing law, not enforcing what is on the books — notwithstanding the wont of prosecutors to admonish that courts must honor Congress’s laws as written. 

Absent this Justice Department directive that prosecutors must charge the most serious, readily provable offense, the executive branch becomes a law unto itself. Bending congressional statutes to the executive’s policy preferences was the Obama approach to governance, so we should not be surprised that a pair of his appointed prosecutors see it as a model for criminal enforcement, too. But it is not enforcement of the law. It is executive imperialism. It is DACA all over again: “Congress refuses to codify my policy preferences; but I have raw executive power so I shall impose them by will . . . and call it ‘prosecutorial discretion.’” (In truth, it is a distortion of prosecutorial discretion.) 

It should not be necessary to point out to accomplished lawyers that, in our system, “bipartisan consensus” is not a comparative handful of Democrats and Republicans clucking their tongues in unison. Yes, between leftist hostility to incarceration and libertarian skepticism about prosecutorial power, there is common ground among some factions of lawmakers when it comes to opposing our allegedly draconian penal code. But these factions are not much of a consensus. The only consensus that matters is one that drums up support sufficient to enact legislation into law. “Criminal-justice reform” is of a piece with “comprehensive immigration reform” and the Obama agenda: If it actually enjoyed broad popularity, resort to executive fiat would be unnecessary — Congress would codify it. 

The criminal-justice “reformers” want mandatory-minimum-sentencing provisions eliminated and other sentencing provisions mitigated. Yet, despite the sympathetic airing they get from the “progressive” mainstream media, they are unable to get their “reforms” passed by Congress. How come? Because strong majorities of lawmakers understand themselves to be accountable to commonsense citizens — people who aren’t “evolved” enough to grasp how reducing the number of criminals in prisons will somehow decrease the amount of crime. Most of us benighted types proceed under the quaint assumption that, even in “today’s America,” the streets are safer when the criminals are not on them. 

In light of the caterwauling about mandatory-minimum sentencing by people either unfamiliar with or in a state of amnesia about what the federal system was like before it was instituted, it is worth repeating: Such provisions mean that the public, rather than the judge, decides the minimum appropriate term for serious crimes. As a class, judges are elite products of American universities and tend to be more left-leaning than the general public. That is particularly the case with respect to President Obama’s 335 judicial appointees, many of them — like Obama himself, as well as Vance and Stewart — philosophically resistant to incarceration as a response to crime. We can certainly repeal mandatory minimums, but if we do, it will vest those judges with unfettered discretion to mete out punishment. Rest assured, such sentences will not resemble the ones most of us would impose. Note also what the “reformers” do not tell you about mandatory minimums: (a) Congress has enacted a “safety valve” that allows a judge to waive them in cases involving first offenders whose crimes do not involve guns; and (b) they can also be waived if a defendant cooperates with government investigations. By and large, mandatory minimums are applied to hardcore criminals — as one would expect, since they are mainly triggered by very large amounts of illegal narcotics and the use of firearms during violent crimes. 

It is always worth considering whether sentencing terms are too severe — or, for that matter, insufficiently severe. Criminal statutes can be modified by legislation, which reflects the judgment of the people’s representatives. The fact that they have not been, notwithstanding the purported “consensus” for “reform,” suggests that the public is not convinced of the need for such modification — or, perhaps, that our representatives grasp the need for a check on the judges. 

Unable to change the law, the “reformers” are reduced to arguing that justice happens only when prosecutors ignore the law. If you’re Jeff Sessions and you say, “No, you know, I think we’ll have them follow the law,” you’re a Neanderthal. 

Vance and Stewart persist in the mythology of federal penitentiaries overflowing with “nonviolent drug offenders.” They must use this deceptive term because what they’d like to be able to claim — namely, that the prisons teem with sad sacks rotting away on misdemeanor drug-possession crimes — is patently false. Federal prosecutorial resources are targeted at narcotics felonies, often involving significant distribution organizations and importation networks. 

These schemes are inherently violent. Cocaine, heroin, and the like are illegal commodities that generate major cash transactions. Traffickers can’t go to the police when they need to protect a shipment, or sue in court when they get cheated. They therefore protect themselves by cultivating a reputation for violence — which requires liberal resort to violence. Even if an individual drug dealer happens to be unarmed when apprehended, it was the omnipresent specter of violence that enabled his enterprise to thrive. That is why, for decades, evidence of guns, ammunition, and other weaponry has been admissible to prove the existence of narcotics conspiracies — guns, federal jurisprudence teaches, are “tools of the drug trade.” 

Vance and Stewart advance the now familiar prattle that what they describe as “excessive reliance on arrests and extended incarceration” — translation: enforcing the criminal laws against narcotics trafficking and violent crime — has “disparately impacted racial minorities and the poor” and is responsible for “the broken relationship between police departments and the communities they are sworn to serve and protect.” 

This is unmitigated nonsense. As Heather Mac Donald has repeatedly demonstrated, based on hard evidence, the disparate impact that the enforcement of law has on racial minorities is a function of offense behavior. The brute fact is that black people, taken as a group, commit more crimes than other racial and ethnic groups. Of course, in the day-to-day work of police and prosecutors, racialized bean-counting is irrelevant. We don’t treat people as groups — it’s the Left’s agitators who want us to view people not as individuals but as members of oppressed classes. In our system, however, guilt is personal. That is real justice, not “social justice.” 

Regardless of the root causes, it is a remorseless fact that if you are going to enforce the laws, you necessarily will most often encounter the people who most often violate them. And you most often encounter them because they are violating the law, not because of some “institutionalized” bias. We know crimes are being committed not because of statisticians but because of victims. If you want to obsess over groups, maybe our sympathetic attention should shift to the prey rather than the predators — the racial minorities and poor people who by an outsize margin are victims of crime. That’s the disparate impact worth fretting over. And it is exacerbated when the laws are not enforced. 

Moreover, the relationship between police departments and the communities they serve is not broken. That is a progressive narrative that seeks to blame the higher incidence of crime in minority communities on “institutional racism” in the justice system. Really? In “today’s America,” police departments are more integrated than at any time in history — often run by members of the minority communities that they serve. The court system is run by judges and lawyers educated in American law schools, proud (and often activist) members of the most politically progressive profession in our society — with the possible exception of university professors. The thought that these people would tolerate pervasive racism in their institution is laughable — or at least it should be. The reality of the system is that it bends over backward to avoid even the appearance of racism. 

Of course there are bad cops, just as there are bad people in every occupation. But there are fewer of them in policing. Law enforcement tends to draw unusually valorous recruits who want to serve their communities, and who accept that their actions will be scrutinized with a zeal unknown to other professions. In a country of over 320 million people, it is unavoidable that there will be some violent encounters between police and civilians. We should marvel, though, at how relatively rare they are. The problem we have is not that the justice system is racist; it is that the slander that it is racist will cause police to shrink from enforcing the laws, a dereliction that would most harm minority communities. 

Vance and Stewart have a point when they object to Attorney General Sessions’s unfortunate fondness for what they call “adoptive forfeiture policies.” As we at National Review have contended (as has Justice Clarence Thomas, Kevin Williamson reminds us), civil asset forfeitures are property seizures without due process of law. A federal spoils system incentivizes police to grab with both hands. Regardless of their effectiveness against drug lords, such forfeitures should be halted — the police should be required to proceed by criminal forfeiture and prosecution, with the due-process safeguards that entails. But that is because civil forfeitures offend the Constitution, not because they feed a left-wing narrative about fractured police–community relations. 

Attorney General Sessions is enforcing the law, and doing so within a noble Justice Department tradition of giving force to Congress’s expression of the public will. He is not altering the law by executive fiat, the preference of President Obama, Attorneys General Holder and Lynch, Professor Vance, Mr. Stewart, and the bipartisan minority they portray as a “consensus.” 

There is a great deal I don’t like about the legal system either. Statist government has enacted far too many laws, such that the federal government has criminalized too much of what used to be the province of state regulation — or unregulated private behavior. The drug laws do have severe penalties and may work injustice in some cases — although fewer than Vance and Stewart suggest: Though the hands of federal judges are tied by mandatory minimums, they are not bound to follow advisory sentencing guidelines or prosecutorial recommendations. I would certainly be open to mitigating penalties in exchange for thinning out the federal penal code and transferring areas of enforcement responsibility back to the states. The point, however, is that this has to be done by legislation, not by executive autocrats under a stealthy distortion of prosecutorial discretion. 

If Professor Vance and Mr. Stewart are right that we are in a new era, if the public has truly been won over to the notion that incarcerating criminals is counterproductive, the next step is very simple: Pass laws that amend the penal code. In the meantime, the Justice Department’s job is to enforce the laws we have. As Attorney General Sessions recognizes, that means charging the most serious, readily provable offense.

 — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Trump Administration Cancels Oppressive Obama Employment Regulations

Trump Administration Cancels Oppressive Obama Employment Regulations

John Hinderaker, Powerline

This is one of many similar stories we have seen over the past seven months, which cause one to question the judgment of those who claim to be conservatives, but who favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. The Free Beacon reports: “Trump Rolls Back Onerous Diversity Regs.”

The Trump administration blocked Obama-era rules that would have saddled employers with hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs and increased paperwork loads by millions of hours each year.

The Office of Management and Budget instructed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to shelve a rule change that would have required employers to submit 20 times as much data to the agency as previously required. The Obama administration called for the new standards, which would have affected 61,000 American companies with more than 100 workers and federal contractors with more than 50 workers, to demonstrate his commitment to closing the much-disputed “gender wage gap.”

That would be the same “gender wage gap” that existed in Barack Obama’s own White House.

Obama’s EEOC called for businesses to provide 3,660 different data points about each employee and their pay structure, up from the 188 points.

***

The agency estimated the new regulations would cost employers $53.5 million and take about 1.9 million hours to complete. Those numbers paled in comparison to the findings of a survey conducted by the Chamber of Commerce, which estimated the regulations would cost $400 million and increase work hours by 8 million—if additional overhead is taken into account the rules could cost up to $1.3 billion.

This was one of many regulations that the lame duck Obama administration put in place, or set in motion, while it was on its way out the door. President Obama didn’t want to take responsibility for such absurdly burdensome regulations while still in office, but left them as poison pills for his successor. The Trump administration has wisely killed a number of such wasteful and pointless regulations.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, called on the Trump administration to block the rules in an April letter. He welcomed the OMB decision in a statement, saying the EEOC should use its resources to address a “backlog of more than 73,000 unresolved complaints of discrimination,” rather than engage in new rulemaking.

“This agency is supposed to be protecting American workers from discrimination. Instead the EEOC came up with an absurd mandate forcing employers to submit new pay data on 63 million private sector employees,” Alexander said in a statement.

Kudos to Donald Trump and his administration. If Congressional Republicans would quit sniping at President Trump and instead try to match his performance in office, we could get somewhere.