Category Archives: Federalist

A daredevil guy with a leather jacket tears around the world, in search of ancient Egyptian treasure captured by the Nazis. He also ends up hiking through the South American jungle and making a death-defying escape from the bad guys in their own aerial transport. Gosh, where have I heard that before?

But wait this protagonist is forced to team up with his biggest rival, creating a playful jostle of competitive one-uppery that continually hints at reluctant friendship. Theres also an underestimated brunette who seems to keep outwitting them both, and the trios antics play out against the glamorous backdrop of the city of Rome.

Nope, I think Ive heard that one too.

Netflixs Red Notice which, at nearly 330 million viewing hours, is now the most-watched original movie on Netflix ever borrows heavily from both Steven Spielbergs 1981 hit Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Guy Ritchies 2015 spy flick The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But that doesnt make it a bad movie.

As of Wednesday, the film had scored a mere 35 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer despite receiving a 92 percent positive score from audiences on the same platform. Maybe thats because the film focuses more on entertaining audiences than checking all the identity politics boxes demanded by the same Hollywood critics who thought Fauci was a good Disney movie.

Or maybe its because there are two kinds of movie-watchers in the world: those who want a profound, thought-provoking masterpiece, and those who want a good time. The best movies usually do both, of course, but either done right can make a worthwhile piece of cinema. And while critics, in claiming to seek the former, can end up elevating bad movies just because they are avant-garde, the popularity of Red Notice indicates that the average moviegoer still enjoys a good old action flick.

Spoilers ahead.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson is introduced to the audience as FBI agent John Hartley, on the hunt for the worlds best art thief Nolan Booth, played by Ryan Reynolds. As both men one-up each other, theyre forced to work together to beat the Bishop the worlds mysteriousother best art thief played by Gal Gadot.

While Red Notice may not be the cult classic that Harrison Ford made famous in Indiana Jones, it obviously pulls heavily from its 40-year-old predecessor. Reynolds character even whistles the iconic Raiders soundtrack as he and Hartley discover a stockpile of Nazi treasure, another clear nod to the whip-cracking archeologist.

But Red Notice might bear even more similarities to 2015s The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a movie rendition of the 1960s TV show of the same name. If you enjoyed Red Notice, youll almost undoubtedly like the 2015 flick, which features Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as an American operative and a Russian spy forced to team up at the height of the Cold War to keep a wealthy villain from obtaining nuclear weapons. Johnson, Reynolds, and Gadots dynamic mirrors the chemistry between Cavill, Hammer, and the stylish colleague they find in Alicia Vikander, even if the Red Notice trio lacks some of the others depth and warmth.

It turns out, at least on the silver screen, spies and world-class criminals have a lot of similarities including lots of glamour and plenty of ego. Both movies are gorgeous and fun to watch, with elegant costumes, elaborate backdrops, and set romantically in Rome (although Red Notice could lay off the CGI). They both lean into the lavish, debonair attitude of a Bond movie without taking themselves as seriously.

That said, Red Notice is at its weakest in the one-liners it continually tries and fails to make funny. Most of them come from Reynolds, whose quips come off more groan-worthy than clever. But overall, just like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the movies lack of self-seriousness leaves room for fun entertainment, especially with the final twists each movie delivers.

Just as, at the end of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., we find out all three spies are (mostly) good guys, Red Notice ends with the twist that all three leads are bad guys. Not only is Hartley not an FBI agent, hes been teaming up with Gadots character all along and the couple together comprise the notorious Bishop.

The last several minutes of the movie involve a fast-paced flurry of the Bishop duo and Booth trying to con each other, before all three agree to team up in an obvious set-up for a sequel. Its a mostly clever and satisfying ending (with the weird exception of a random appearance by Ed Sheeran that does nothing to further the plot).

If youre looking for a revolutionary piece of art that leaves you thinking for days, Red Notice will probably come up short. But as an entertaining action film to enjoy over popcorn that, for once, doesnt come from one of Hollywoods endless and overused franchises, Red Notice does its job well.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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'Indiana Jones' Meets 'The Man From UNCLE' In 'Red Notice' - The Federalist

Official Washingtons conventional wisdom about the Senate filibuster is a fairy tale. It is utterly unmoored from the choices being made by individual senators, party caucuses, and the body as a whole. Every person who has ever told you that the mean, nasty, outdated legislative filibuster is the source of Senate gridlock and the obstacle to common-sense legislating in Congress has either swallowed, or is peddling, a lie.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post this week, Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Henry Olsen suggests requiring filibusters to be at least nominally bipartisan as a way of solving the familiar filibuster problem. What follows is not a fisking of Olsen, who is a good guy and perhaps the best electoral analyst in America today, but a corrective to the apparently universal pundit-class misunderstanding about whats really going on inside the worlds greatest deliberative body.

The mistake everyone makes is looking at Senate inaction and asking, How can we change Senate rules so it can start legislating again? The better question is, Why did the Senate stop legislating in the first place?

The answer isnt gridlock, any more than a car drove through that parade in Wisconsin. Somewhere along the way, senators behavior changed. Its not a coincidence this happened along the same timeline as the polarization of the parties over the last 30 years. Partisan filibusters were harder, and bipartisan legislating easier when the Senate had dozens of conservative-leaning Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans.

Before moving inside the chamber, lets take stock of an important but easily overlooked point: Senate Democrats as a group are much farther left than they were in, say, 1990, and Senate Republicans are more uniformly conservative.

Because pundits and people who read them tend to be consistent ideologues themselves, this kind of polarization seems normal, even enlightened. But all it really means is that both parties in the Senate have drifted away fromabandoned, eventhe middle of the country.

The public didnt lurch left or right. Senate rules didnt change. Congress is simply less representative of the American people than it used to be. Pews well-worn ideological scatter chart from the 2016 election exit polls illustrates the point below.

The sweet spot in American politics would seem to be left-but-not-too-left-of-center on economic issues and right-but-not-too-right-of-center on cultural issues. (Im conservative on both, for whatever its worth.) But today, congressmen and senators tend toward the upper-right or lower-leftthe ideological extremeswith elite journalists overrepresented in the nearly empty lower-right: woke private-school parents.

The strike zone for both parties looking to forge a majority, then, should be the upper-left. This would be your pro-lifers for universal health care, men who want only their unions to build the border wall, women who want to raise taxes to build more prisons for pornographers and drug dealers. Such peoplereal, live, working-class moderates, the sort who decide our national electionsare thin on the ground in Washington, D.C. Indeed, they seem downright unwelcome in both parties.

Nuking the filibuster to establish a majoritarian Senate, in the context of our actual country, would only empower out-of-touch, unpopular, ideological extremists to unilaterally impose their outr elite values on a public that dislikes them. Constitutionally speaking, in the morality play of congressional politics today, the filibuster is the good guy. Its not the hero we deserve, but the one we need, stopping Republicans from gutting social programs and Democrats from banning guns or red meat.

So, if the Senates rules arent the cause of Senate inertia, what is? Snarky Washingtonians will say Republicans. But thats silly. Both sides take up the others tactics whenever the Senate changes hands. Gridlock is not an external force exerted on the Senate.

Nor is gridlock a condition imposed on it by an uncooperative minority. No, inaction is always a policy choice affirmatively, consciously taken by the majority. Gridlock and obstruction are weasel words Senate majorities use to duck responsibility for their own decisions.

Contrary to beltway shorthand, passing bills through the Senate doesnt require bipartisan compromise. It just requires compromise, full stop. Theres a difference. Sixty-vote majorities could be found on almost any issue, any week of any year, through an open amendment process on the Senate floor. Heck, they could call up a blank bill for floor consideration, and let every Senator offer whatever amendment he or she wanted, and before too long, a final bill that could get 60 votes would emerge.

Both parties know this, and refuse to do it. Why? Because an open amendment processthe wild west, they call itwould force senators to take amendment votes that would, quelle horreur, lay bare their actual beliefs and policy priorities to their constituents.

Thats it. Thats the whole story of Senate gridlock. Not the filibuster, not cloture, not grandstanding, not Donald Trump or norms, or obstruction or any other nonsense youve been told.

At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation. This, and no other reason, is why both parties now legislate via secret negotiations, followed by an obnoxious, rigged floor process (filling the tree) that blocks all amendments except the ones mutually agreed to by the party leaders.

Remember, the amendments this process blocks are not the ones that wouldnt pass, but the ones that would. Most Democratic senators dont want to have to vote on popular Republican amendments to, say, curb immigration or protect gun rights. Likewise, most GOP senators dont want to have to defend a vote against a higher minimum wage or increased spending for childrens health care.

All kinds of bills and amendments could get 60 votes in the Senate today. The problem is, they would be the wrong 60 votesmajorities representing the public as such instead of their party. When the dust settled, lots of incumbents on both sides would invite dangerous primary or general election challengers next time they faced the voters.

A good example of such a bill is the Higher Wages for American Workers Act, introduced by Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark. It would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 and mandate the E-Verify instant immigration-status test for all employers.

To normal Americans, this might sound like a sensible compromise; to Washington insiders, its a five-alarm fire. It would be a brutal floor vote, triggering dozens of Club for Growth- or Squad-backed primary challenges and crippling TV ads come November.

If Senate leaders ever opened up the floor, thats the kind of legislation senators would face: popular, cross-partisan, and career-threatening. Party leadersalways at the behest of their constituents, the senators themselvessee their job as never letting an organic, unchoreographed, cross-partisan majority work its will on the floor on behalf of the American people.

Instead, majorities negotiate bills to get all of their teams votes plus just enough of the other teams to pass maximally partisan legislation. To leaders, this is a correct 60-vote majority that, with proper supervision and stage direction, may be permitted to pass bills through the United States Senate.

Ultimately, Senate majorities do not see gridlock as a frustrating, inferior alternative to passing legislation. They see it as a superior alternative to the transparency and accountability that comes with discharging their constitutional responsibilities.

Not convinced? When was the last time you saw a Senate majority of either party really put their shoulder to the wheel to break a partisan filibuster? I dont mean whining to cable news or talk radio. I mean work: staying in session all night, for days on end, forcing late night attendance, including the sick old men, the cancellation of weekend plans, missing piano recitals and family weddings? Never.

If Senate majorities really want to pass legislation, they could, anytime, through a combination of compromise, transparency, and the exertion of physical energy. This approach has not been tried and found wanting, but found inconvenient and left untried.

Finally, those on the left who think a post-filibuster Senate would help their cause are really missing the forest for the trees here. Senate Democrats are never going to nuke the filibuster to enshrine Roes protections in federal law, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein proposed on Twitter yesterdaynot because they are weak or deferential to norms, but because Roe is really, really undemocratic.

Even without a red wave election, Kleins Roe Act would quickly be watered down to a restrictive bipartisan compromise he would hate. And when the next red wave did come, the Democratic Party would be left limping for a generation.

The vast majority of federal policies today rendered untouchable by the Senates 60-vote cloture threshold was written between the 1930s and 1960s when even Republicans were proud liberals. Are three years of Roe-lite or some half-baked Green New Deal ramp-up really worth giving President Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Jim Jordan, and Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz free-rein to rewrite the Great Society and New Deal, the APA, the NLRB, NEPA, civil service, education, and immigration law in one swing?

They would decentralize and defund dozens of power centers within the progressive movement. The left has unimaginably more to lose from a majoritarian Senate than the right.

As a conservative who would welcome lots of those reforms, I nonetheless recognize that our system is built for consensus and stability. In America, its ideologues like Klein and me who are the weirdos, not the majority of the country with supposedly less consistent views. Its good that we never have too much power.

At any given moment, both parties are advancing, on different issues, popular and unpopular ideas. The way the Senate is designed to work is, the popular ideas get creatively cobbled together and passed as consensus compromises. And the unpopular ideas are discarded as slogans for the performance artists in the House.

The only reason this doesnt happen today is that senators real, if unstated, top priorities are personal convenience and partisan positioning. Passing major legislation is a distant second or third. What we see on C-Span2 every day is the majority applying minimal-to-modest effort to pass legislation, and maximal effort to protect their seats and undermine the other side.

The Senates rules do not stop it from legislating. Its the senators themselves, entitled and vain, cowering in the shadows behind the one thing in Washington with the courage to stand up for all of us, simultaneously against the mob and the elite. The filibuster isnt our hero. Its a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.

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It's Not The Filibuster's Fault We Have 'Gridlock,' It's The Senators' - The Federalist

Dr. Anthony Fauci conceded Sunday, more than two years after COVID-19 emerged, that it is time Americans learn to live with the virus.

Were not going to eradicate it, Fauci said on NBCs Meet the Press as the Omicron variant triggers a new wave of pandemic panic. But, Fauci added, we really need to be prepared for an Omicron outbreak with 32 or more variants in that very important spike protein of the virus.

Of course being prepared in Fauci-land means compulsory vaccination, endless mask-wearing and a forever lockdown.

If normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us, Fauci said on CNN in March, I cant predict that.

True preparation for a future of endless variants, however, is an urgent and immediate commitment to confronting the underlying epidemic that is obesity, a primary COVID comorbidity.

New variants will always be in the pipeline, popping up as the virus spreads, leading to new vaccine boosters engineered to better protect individuals from the evolving disease.

If we keep pulling back on life with every new variant, however, and demand universal compliance with endemic boosters, well never return to anything that even resembles normalcy, let alone reclaim the virtues of individual liberty or personal responsibility. Americans have become too comfortable with shutting down their neighbors lives for the sake of their own risk aversion.

One major way to protect oneself in the COVID era is to maintain a healthy weight, where in the event a variant does emerge that evades vaccine-given immunity, Americans will be in better shape to confront it. Right now, most Americans are not healthy.

According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more than 42 percent of Americans qualified as obese in 2017-2018, marking a 31 percent spike since 1999-2000. More than 70 percent of adults 20 years old and older were overweight.

Considering the CDC statistics are now three years old and precede the pandemic, the number of Americans struggling with weight already on an upward trajectory is almost certainly far higher.According to data from the Epic Health Research Network tracking the weight of nearly 47 million patients in the first 14 months of the lockdowns, the average American continued to gain weight.

More than 6 in 10 Americans reported undesired weight gain, according to the American Psychological Association.

Our population is hugely sick, saidDr. Tim Logemann of the Wausau Aspirus Hospital Cardiologist and Obesity Treatment Program in Wisconsin. We dont really understand health Health starts with a healthy diet, a healthy lifestyle.

Logemann told The Federalist it was conceivable Americans would react to new coronavirus variants far differently if Americans maintained a healthy weight, offsetting other comorbidities in the process. Beyond tripling ones risk of hospitalization from COVID-19, obesity has also been linked to heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer. In March, CDC data showed nearly 80 percent of those hospitalized with the coronavirus were overweight or obese.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the big concern was overwhelming the health care system, right? Logemann said. And if your population doesnt get sick and doesnt end up in the hospital, then they dont overwhelm the health care system.

Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy told the Boston Globe in November his research shows 64 percent of all hospitalizations from COVID could have been prevented, if we had a metabolically healthy population, without the rates of obesity and diabetes and hypertension that we have now.

In other words, the COVID crisis wouldnt be as much a crisis as if a public health crisis hadnt already existed. If Americans werent so at risk due to widespread obesity, perhaps businesses wouldnt have been shut down, graduations wouldnt have been canceled, and overdoses might not have reached records highs. The death toll attributed to coronavirus certainly wouldnt have eclipsed 778,000 within two years.

When something like COVID comes along, it just wipes us out, Logemann told The Federalist. Were just set up.

The western world, said South African Dr. Angelique Coetzee, who was the first to discover the Omicron variant, is already overreacting to the news of its existence even at the poor baseline of public health.The world will continue to overreact so long as it refuses to act on the underlying epidemic.

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Living With The Virus Requires Confronting Obesity - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Dr. Scott Atlas joins Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann to discuss his new book A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.

This is the ultimate example of sort of moral bankruptcy, in my view, Atlas said. I mean, we must learn the lessons from this. I outline the lessons in the book and I then talk about the big issues that were really exposed, that were facing now as a society because it goes well beyond COVID.

Atlas said at some point he became burned out by the lack of challenges to the claims made by people on the task force.

We can never let this happen again. I mean, this is one of the big lessons. I was stunned at the lack of competence, at the lack of critical thinking, at the lack of rigor, at the lack of preparation, at the lack of questioning, and this can never happen again, Atlas said.

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Scott Atlas On How Everything Media Says About COVID Is Wrong And Why Trump Didn't Fire Fauci - The Federalist

CNNs Chris Cuomo is not the only media icon who needs to answer for his attempts to shield his scandalous brother from fallout following accusations of sexual misconduct.

CNN finally caved on Tuesday and announced that the Cuomo Prime Time host would be indefinitely suspended after a series of text messages exposed the anchors attempts to help cover up former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomos sexual scandals earlier this year.

While CNN staffers such as Brian Stelter already hinted that Chris would return to the air as soon as January 2022, there are multiple other corporate media anchors, hosts, and writers who need to be held accountable for simply taking the governors weak defense at its face and amplifying it.

On the same day that Andrew Cuomo claimed he didnt sexually harass someone, MSNBCs Katy Tur ran a segment asking why someone like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is a savvy politician, [would] not have buttoned things up, not have gotten the message to be careful about what he says around his staffers, around others. Tur also cited somebody who is close to the family as her source.

And the person said, its not that he didnt think the rules didnt apply to him, its just that in the Cuomo DNA, they are extraordinarily friendly, I guess, by nature, Tur claimed.

Turs public response not only gave undue credibility to the then-governor but used the words of Cuomo brother allies to inform her coverage.

Lis Smith, a Democrat political consultant who worked as Pete Buttigiegs senior presidential campaign adviser, was one of the many people who immediately aligned herself with the governor and began working overtime to coo corrupt corporate media icons into doing what they do best: amplify narratives to cover Democrats butts.

Im texting [with] Katy tur, Smith wrote. Katy is saying my spin live. Like verbatim.

As T. Becket Adams noted in his Substack on Thursday, the anchor was repeating the governor teams official stance, but Tur didnt have to repeat any of what Smith apparently told her.

She certainly didnt have to repeat it uncritically. Also, the fact Smith was privately pleased with Turs coverage suggests Tur did indeed serve Cuomos interests as opposed to the interests of MSNBCs viewers, Adams wrote.

Smith also reached out to Edward-Isaac Dovere at The Atlantic, whom she described as being very hard on our side on this.

Total mind meld. He says he could be convinced to write something on andrew Bc he thinks this whole thing is bullsh-t, Smith wrote.

Three days after Cuomos infamous March 3 press conference, Dovere wrote an article titled Of Course Andrew Cuomo Isnt Going To Resign just a few months before the governor called it quits.

Smith also reached out to Bill Maher, who didnt appear to take the bait.

Ok I texted Bill mahers producer, she wrote. To see if i could connect w him before show- want him to tee off on this.

We need some big names weighing in on our side, Smith said.

Two days after Andrew Cuomos address at the beginning of March, Maher roasted the governor for being f-ckin stupid.

Were four years into the MeToo era, hes this dumb that you dont hit on the help, dont touch people without their permission. What could this guy be thinking? Maher asked.

Other media outlets that Smiths recently released text messages do not discuss also gladly ran with pro-Cuomo narrative until they couldnt any longer. Countless corrupt corporate newsrooms gladly took aim at Republican leaders such as Gov. Ron DeSantis while fawning over the New York governor for offering press briefings that were like a tender embrace even though thousands of nursing home residents were dying as a result of his failed COVID-19 policies.

God, now theres a leader, said MSNBCs Joe Scarborough.

Smith, while doing the dirty work to help Andrew Cuomo cover up his sins, shouldnt be the focus of peoples wrath. After all, she was technically doing her job. The media veterans who lent a listening ear to her and the Cuomo brothers spin, however and then ran with it were not doing their jobs. They didnt offer scrutiny to the bait laid right before their eyes. Instead, people such as Tur, Dovere, and others repeated the narrative because they wanted to protect Cuomo and their Democrat alliances.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Chris Cuomo Isn't The Only Media Icon Who Should Be Held Accountable - The Federalist

Liberal legislators in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California seem determined to make sure that their own high-income constituents pay for as little of their big spending plan as possible.

Recently, the House of Representatives passed thelargestexpansion of means-tested welfare spending in U.S. history, along with hundreds of billions of new corporate welfare. In addition to about$2 trillionof new taxes in the bill, fully funding the so-called Build Back Better Act would requiremultitrillion-dollartax increases in the future.

Members of congress in high-tax statesboastthat they fought to include an increase in the cap on state and local taxcommonly known as SALTdeductions, a provision that benefits high-income residents of their states. This change would effectively shift federal tax burdens away from the wealthy, especially those in high-tax states.

Since the 2017 passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, taxpayers that itemize their tax returns arelimitedto $10,000 of state and local tax deductions when determining their federal taxable income. Taxpayers can deduct state and local income taxes and property taxes (or sales tax in lieu of an income tax).

Under the House plan, the cap on SALT deductions would increase to$80,000through 2030. This is problematic for several reasons.

Problem #1: Taxpayers in the Top 1% Would Benefit From This Provision Nearly 1,000 Times More Than Taxpayers in the Bottom 80%.

Cutting taxes on the wealthy is not necessarily problematic. After all, the wealthy do pay aninordinateshare of federal taxes. However, a large tax cut benefiting the wealthy is certainly noteworthy, givenPresident Joe Bidensfalse claimthat households earning less than $400,000 a year wouldnt pay a penny more under his plan, and his vow to make the highest income Americans pay their fair share.

Yet, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, raising the SALT deduction capa benefit almost exclusively for the wealthyis the single most expensive provision in the bill. The organization estimates that increasing the SALT deduction cap would reduce revenues by$275 billionthrough 2025.

Because of the increased SALT cap, taxpayers making $500,000 to $1,000,000 would receive an overall tax cut under the bill of 1.8% in 2023 and 2.5% in 2025. Meanwhile,government scorekeepersestimate that taxpayers earning between $50,000 and $75,000 would face overall tax increases of 0.4% in 2023 and 0.3% in 2025.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania estimates the increased SALT cap would reduce the federal taxes of the bottom 80% of taxpayers by about $16 in 2022. It would, on average, provide taxpayers in the top 1% a tax cut of nearly$16,000.

Fewer than 2% of taxpayers in the bottom 80% would benefit at all from a higher SALT deduction, partly because only about6%of them itemize their deductions (due to the standard deduction having been doubled in 2017). Even among lower- and middle-income taxpayers that do itemize, they seldom pay $10,000 in state and local taxes, let alone the new $80,000 SALT limitation.

Problem #2: Proponents Rely on Deceptive Logical Arguments to Defend Raising the SALT Cap

Defending an expanded SALT deduction, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif.,stated, If you are forced to pay part of your income to the state where you live, you dont have that income left over The federal government ought to tax you on what you have left [after state taxes.]

On the surface, that argument may make sense. But it ignores the benefit that taxpayers receive from the state and local government spending that their tax dollars fund. In a well-run state, residentsshouldreceive a net benefit from each dollar taxed and spent by the state government.

Voters either directly or indirectly (through elected representatives) choose the level of taxes and spending in their states and localities. Nobody is forcing taxpayers in California to pay higher state taxes, except California voters and California elected officials. The mere fact that residents of some states consume more goods and services provided by the public sector rather than by the private sector shouldnt entitle those taxpayers to reductions in their federal taxes.

Theres a glaring logical inconsistency in arguing that the SALT deduction is necessary to level the playing field between taxpayers in big government states and small government states, while simultaneously voting for whatcouldend up being the largest expansion of government spending in history.

Problem #3: The SALT Deduction Encourages Wasteful Spending by State and Local Governments.

The SALT deduction effectively acts as a federal subsidy of state and local government spending. The deduction insulates governments from negative consequences when they spend taxpayer dollars inefficiently, thereby encouraging more waste.

Suppose a taxpayer faces a40%federal income tax rate. If his state taxes increase by $250, and he claims that $250 as a SALT deduction, he can then reduce his federal taxes by $100. Given the federal tax savings, the taxpayer may support a state government project that he values at $150 but costs him $250 in state taxes.

Let that sink in. With an unlimited federal SALT deduction subsidy, some high-income taxpayers could rationally shrug off projects with a 67% cost overrun ($100 divided by $150), because so much cost is absorbed by the federal government. The SALT deduction rewards wasteful spending and excessive taxation.

With or without the full SALT deduction subsidy, governments in many high-tax states have been poor stewards of taxpayer dollars, and residents of those states have fled to other states.

The four states whose residents benefit most from the SALT deduction (as a percentage of adjusted gross income) are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California. Every year, these high-tax states experience a large net outflow of residents moving to other states. In the year from 2015 to 2016, over140,000more tax filers moved out of these states than moved into them.

The migration out of these four states continues apace today. Between 2017 and 2019, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California lost almost170,000tax filers per year.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Californiahave top individual income tax ratesthat range from 6.99% to 13.3%, compared to a U.S. average of about 5.3%. Property taxes in these four states are alsovery high. These four high-tax states rank 43rd, 47th, 49th, and 50th in net interstate migration. By contrast, of the seven states with no income tax (including investment income), four rank in the top seven for net interstate migration.

If migration is any indication, even with federal subsidization, many taxpayers in big government states were unhappy with their states burdensome taxes. Its bad enough that taxpayers in New York and California must pay for their own governments mismanagement, but taxpayers in other states absolutely shouldnt have to share the tab.

Problem #4: Congress Shouldnt Use the Tax Code to Promote One Style of State Government Over Others.

Changing federal tax law for the sole purpose of shifting the geographic burden of taxes is a perversion of our federalist system.

In 1932, liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeiswrote, It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

While most on the right bristle at being guinea pigs in state governments social and economic experiments, most peopleleft or rightshould see the value of a federal system where citizens can choose between 50 different state democracies.

A federalist system gives citizens more control over how theyre governed. If they disapprove of how their state or locality is run, Americans can move. Some Americans prefer expansive state and local government and are willing to pay the corresponding high taxes. Others prefer more limited state governments. Citizens ability to vote with their feet provides a natural check on poor state governance.

By shifting costs of state government away from the states, the SALT deduction weakens our federalist system. It tampers with the scales in the laboratories of democracy, biasing the system in favor of big state government.

It also biases the system toward certain forms of taxation over others, specifically encouraging income taxes over sales taxes. In 2017, of the seven states with no income tax, eachrankedbetween 40th and 50th in SALT deductions (evenotherwisehigh-tax Washington state).

Taxes on income are more economicallydamagingthan sales taxes. Unlike sales taxes, income taxes discourage work, saving, and investing. Yet, the SALT deduction rewards states that choose an income tax over a sales tax.

The Senate Should Reject This Effort to Centralize Control Over Individuals and State Governments

Increasing the SALT deduction cap would add insult to injury for supporters of limited government. The rest of the Build Back Better Act would expand the role of thefederalgovernmentinvirtuallyeveryareaofAmericanlife. A higher SALT deduction would encourage one-size-fits-all big government at the state level, too.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

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4 Problems With Left's Hypocritical Plan to Give Wealthy Constituents a Bigger SALT Deduction - Heritage.org

The first landmark ruling delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court was Marbury v. Madison (1803), in which Chief Justice John Marshall asserted the power of judicial review, the authority of the federal judiciary to review the constitutionality of governmental acts, including laws passed by Congress.

Consider the fundamental impact of the power of judicial review for American Constitutionalism. In 1627, in The Five Knights Case, an important case in English legal history, the Attorney General, representing the King, asked: Shall any say, the King cannot do this? No, we may only say, He will not do this.

In contrast, in the United States, the power of judicial review ensures that we could say: the government cannot do this. Judicial review thus empowers the courts to enforce constitutional limitations against Congress and the president, which, in theory, protects the American people from governmental violation of the Bill of Rights and usurpation of power.

Marbury v. Madison is the greatest case in American constitutional history precisely because it marked the courts first exercise of the doctrine of judicial review, in this instance, a ruling on the constitutionality of a statute passed by Congress, arose in the context of intense and divisive partisan politics between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians.

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In the last hectic days of the presidency of the ardent Federalist, John Adams, who had been defeated by Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801. This law created a host of new circuit court judgeships, to which Adams nominated and the Senate approved, good loyal Federalists. These judges, appointed in the last hours of the Adams Administration, were nicknamed, the midnight judges. A second bill, passed just days later, created new judgeships in the District of Columbia, to which Adams would, again, appoint strong Federalists.

Jeffersonian newspapers were appalled by the Federalists power grab, seemingly an abuse of the public will since American voters had in the election changed the political landscape by thoroughly rejecting the Federalists at the polls in favor of the Jeffersonians. The electoral upheaval led scholars to call the election, The Revolution of 1800.

Federalist intentions were crystal clear. They aimed to pack the courts with judges who would maintain Federalist legal principles. As Henry Adams, the eminent historian and great-grandson of President John Adams, observed, the Federalists felt bound to exclude Republicans from the bench, to prevent the overthrow of those legal principles in which, as they believed, national safety dwelt.

In one of his last official acts, President Adams appointed 50 Federalists to these newly minted judicial posts, including one William Marbury, as justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. Marbury was a banker, large landowner and member of a prominent Maryland family.

Marbury, and the other Federalist nominees, were quickly confirmed by the Senate. Adams signed their commissions of office. As a statutory duty, it fell to Secretary of State John Marshall, who had just been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to deliver the commissions. For one reason or another, he failed to deliver the commissions, including Marburys. The new president, Thomas Jefferson, furious at Adams and the Federalists for what he perceived to be an act of usurpation, ordered his secretary of state, James Madison, not to deliver the commissions. Jefferson believed that withholding the commissions would prevent the Federalist judges from assuming their judgeships. This order set up the basis for Marburys suit against Madison.

Marbury filed a suit in the Supreme Court, not in a federal district court, which is where most federal suits are initiated. Marbury asked the court to issue a writ of mandamus to Secretary of State Madison, an order that would direct Madison to deliver the commissions. Marbury brought the action under section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which gave the court original jurisdiction in mandamus cases against federal officials.

Marbury v. Madison seemed only to raise the question of whether the court could issue the mandamus to the secretary of state. The court seemed to have two options. It might deny it possessed authority over the executive branch, that is, authority to order Madison, which really meant President Jefferson, to deliver the commissions. That course was unappealing because it would mean the court was abdicating its judicial power to decide cases and controversies brought before it.

A second option, that of ordering the president to deliver the commission, seemed equally unappealing, since the court lacked authority to enforce its ruling. Would Jefferson refuse to obey the courts ruling? While the principle of executive accountability to the law has since been well established, it had yet to be litigated.

In what scholars have termed a masterstroke in judicial statesmanship, Chief Justice Marshall avoided both courses, including a collision with the president. Marshall held that section 13 of the Judiciary Act was unconstitutional since the original jurisdiction conferred upon the court by the Article 3, could be exercised only in cases involving ambassadors, public ministers and cases involving states. The court, he declared, might issue a mandamus, but only in cases involving its appellate jurisdiction. Congress has no authority to enlarge the courts original jurisdiction, which was granted by the Constitution.

When the court announced that section 13 was unconstitutional, on grounds that it was in conflict with Article 3 of the Constitution, it was exercising the power of judicial review for the first time in our nations history. Marshall wrote: It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. In a case involving a conflict of laws -- in Marbury v. Madison a statute and a constitutional provision -- it is the essence of judicial duty to say what the law is. Given the supremacy of the Constitution, a statute in conflict with its terms is unconstitutional.

The source of the judiciarys authority to exercise the power of judicial review, unmentioned in the Constitution, has been a source of concern for many citizens.

David Adler is president of The Alturas Institute.This "We the People" series is provided by the North Dakota Newspaper Association and Humanities North Dakota.

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David Adler: Marbury v. Madison: The greatest of landmark decisions - Bismarck Tribune

The defining political question of our time is this: Do you know what time it is?

The line, popularized by the Claremont Institutes David Reaboi, succinctly captures the most essential of points: If you dont understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing to achieve it you are unfit to lead. You ought to exit the playing field.

Knowing what time it is leads one to prioritize different ends and to pursue them using different means.Among those on the right, although more so in the chattering class than among activists, there appears to be a divide over the stakes inadvertently elucidated in some of the recent debates over national conservatism.

In the Wall Street Journal, Chris DeMuth and Matthew Continetti jousted over it.Continetti took issue with DeMuths argument endorsing national conservatism in part by claiming essentially that the movement captured so many schools of thought as to be incoherent, and that he favored his conservatism without modification constitutionalist, market-oriented and unapologetically American.

I laid out what it is that unites national conservatives in a recent piece here at The Federalist noting that a shared understanding of the stakes is inherent to the movement.

The idea that conservatism needs no modifier becomes questionable if conservatism which has in many quarters focused on economic liberalism while ceding most everything else is not conserving or doing everything it can to restore what it ought to in the face of a ruling class onslaught.

Nor is it clear why a conservatism unmoored from or even effectively hostile to the national interest can be treated as conservative. Hence the utility in part of national conservatism, in contrast with a globalist, values-neutral liberalism that ultimately aims at a nationless, secular progressive, likely China-dominated world.

In response to Continettis formulation, one colleague commented: Im sorry but these days when I read the phrases market-oriented and limited government coming from people on the right I kind of throw up in my mouth a little.Why do these words ring hollow to those traditionally most receptive to them?

Because such concerns are anachronistic. Thomas Jeffersons statue was just removed from New Yorks City Hall. People are being deemed inherently evil based on their skin color, and the country deemed evil itself. Equal rights for all and special privileges for none has given way to a ruling class ethos of unequal rights and special privileges.

We do not share a common belief in our history, the righteousness of our cause, or the cultural basis for a free and flourishing society. These fundamental issues make economic policy and the size of government of secondary concern. It is futile to focus on them when facing an existential crisis in which the ability to even freely debate anything of consequence is under assault.

When one hears bromides today about free enterprise and limited government as if those are not only the main thing, but perhaps the only thing this is a sign that one may not know what time it is.It also implies a certain focus on the material over the cultural, again when we are in the throes of an anti-cultural revolution, and it is the culture that is preeminent.

What does market-oriented matter if youve lost the culture on which a genuinely free enterprise system which we are nowhere near relies, and the market actors themselves are among the most culpable actors in killing that underlying culture?

What good is limited government when the state is colluding with non-state actors to erode the core values and principles on which the republic was founded? Does limited government mean exercising restraint while those who loathe our system run roughshod over it? Does it mean the Constitution is a suicide pact, whereby conservatives keep their arms tied behind their back and the left waltzes to victory almost by default?

Its not that these ideals are not imperative or worth defending.Id like to abolish the administrative state, reinstitute sound money, and see a massive redistribution of federal power to the states and more importantly the people along with a host of other policies associated with traditional conservatism and libertarianism.

But an emphasis on these issues to the detriment or exclusion of the almost pre-political, existential challenges we face, indicates a focus on a world, and a time, that we might wish for, but in which we are not currently residing.

To reiterate: We are in a fight about the most fundamental things, mired in a Cold Civil War at home and a Hot War by Other Means abroad.The aggressors are our woke ruling class and Communist China, to which the former kowtows and increasingly seeks to emulate.

Big business hates our guts. Big tech wants us silenced. Schools want to indoctrinate our kids into racial Marxism.The justice system punishes dissenters from ruling class orthodoxy and rewards its friends.The national security apparatus wants to pursue rightly outraged parents like theyre al-Qaida.

At every turn, the institutions privilege non-Americans, and criminals, over law-abiding Americans.The ruling class breaks every rule, and seeks to break the Americans they hold in such contempt with those rules.

This effort accelerated with the revolt of every power center of the country against Donald Trump. But it is climaxing with every power center in the country targeting dissenters down to the last nameless, faceless resister of its every diktat.

To focus on anything else is to bury the lede.When the ruling class is obliterating the American way of life, the old emphases are simply inapt.We must know what time it is, and operate accordingly.

Ben Weingarten is a Federalist senior contributor, senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and fellow at the Claremont Institute. He was selected as a 2019 Robert Novak Journalism fellow of the Fund for American Studies, under which he is currently working on a book on U.S.-China policy. You can find his work at benweingarten.com, and follow him on Twitter @bhweingarten.

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If You Don't Know What Time It Is, Get Out Of Politics Now - The Federalist

Entrenched leftists within the U.S. State Department are supporting the effort to demote Viktor Orban from prime minister of Hungary, if a report in Financial Times is correct. The Biden administration also left Hungary off its invitation list for a forthcoming international virtual Democracy Summit on Dec. 9 and 10 to which some 100 countries were invited.

Trump and his enablers and those who invaded and attacked our Capitol, they dont like the world were living in and they have that in common with autocratic leaders from Russia to Turkey, from Hungary to Brazil, and so many other places, Hillary Clinton explained to MSNBC.

Hungarys Foreign Minister Pter Szijjrt retorted that Clintons remarks about the Democracy Summit proved that the event has a domestic political character, with invitations withheld from countries whose leaders had good ties with former President Donald Trump...We need nobody to judge the state of Hungarian democracy as if in a school exam.

A superficial reading of this would conclude its the big bad Central Euro authoritarians complaining about another American-backed regime change, but theres more to it and this is just the latest connection to a broader ideological war unfolding across the Euro-Atlantic.

Hungary has been an important point of discussion among U.S. conservatives. Orbans party, Fidesz, leads a family-friendly conservative government, where women are tax free if they have more than three kids. Orbans government has also crushed gender studies and other disciplines, defunded universities, closed Hungarian borders to illegal mass migration, stopped LGBT programs targeted towards children as propaganda, and cut down on abortion.

Alongside Poland, Hungary has formed a semi-alliance of Christian conservative central European powers, and has been an example of sorts for Western conservatives. Hungary offers what Sweden does to leftists: an functioning example of what a social-conservative government might look like in practice.

This is drawing attention from liberals and conservatives alike. Rod Dreher of the American Conservative lived in Hungary on a fellowship often writing about it, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News shot a whole documentary for a week from Budapest.

Its also invited transnational opposition. Germanys new center-left coalition of red and green parties insisted they will start a full-on culture war with Poland and Hungary while making the European Union a stronger transnational government.

Countries which do not live up to the EUs standards should not expect to receive EU moneya clear message to Poland and Hungary. This general approach applies to the United Kingdom as well, a recent analysis stated, adding that the German coalition wants to make it legal for trans people to self-identify.

Meanwhile, Belgium and Netherlands are planning to fund abortion across Poland and Hungary, which limit the practice. The Dutch parliament adopted a resolution approving the use of state funds to help Polish women obtain abortions, reports Deutsche Welle The decision follows a similar move in September by Belgium, whose government agreed to provide funding for women in Poland to obtain terminations abroad, as a growing number have done since the near-total abortion ban was introduced, according to a report.

Just to take one example, consider the implications of Germany allowing self-identification of transgenders, a process that fundamentally goes against biological reality. Given the Schengen borderless mandates within the EU, German transgender individuals could travel everywhere and use their EU special protections to undermine individual national policies about transgenderism, as well as the religious traditions of Hungary and Poland, which are stricter (and, one can say, more democratic) about such rules.

That likely sequence further indicates these countries are not liberal democracies (the key word here being liberal), opening them up for further charges of growing authoritarianism, and further clashes in EU courts, the rulings of which are increasingly considered superior to national democracies and lawmaking. In the past that has resulted in the EU clashing with Poland over fossil fuels and with Hungary over LGBT legal preferences and national courts.

The Polish conservative government, as well as Orban, bear similarities to the socially conservative section within the Republican Party, which consolidated under Donald Trump with increasing exchanges of intellectuals and conferences. The lefts reaction to that ascendence of social conservatives across the globe was therefore somewhat expected, given the new Biden administration staffed with Hillary-era culture warriors.

The culture war is transnational and the battle lines being drawn are naturally ideological as well. On one hand, theres evangelical internationalist liberalism, which is imperial in nature and is therefore clashing with localist reactions from Virginia schools to villages in Hungary.

Hungarian-American relations were at their peak during the Trump presidency, Szijjarto of Hungary also noted when the FT reporter asked why Hungary was the only EU country left out of the planned Democracy summit by Joe Biden. We have a great deal of respect for the former president, a respect that is mutual. We give the same respect to every elected U.S. president regardless of what we get in return but it is clear that those who were on friendly terms with Donald Trump were not invited.

Hungary was the only country in the EU to be snubbed even when the U.S. State Department coyly added that that was not the case. As an important part of our bilateral agenda, we continue to press our Hungarian counterparts when we have concerns about developments that erode space for independent media and civil society, curtailed LGBTQI+ rights, and undermined judicial independence, the State dept said, according to FT. Within hours of its report, someone leaked an old speech of one of Orbans closest allies that heightened political tensions in the nation.

Ultimately, however, there are two emerging questions to ponder. One, the complete hypocrisy of the Biden administration is visible. New Zealand, which is growing rapidly authoritarian with vaccine passports, second-grade citizenships, and lockdowns, is invited, but not Hungary, where people can move freely. The undertone of this decision is not lost on conservatives across Europe and possibly the United States: it is not about democracy at all, but about liberalism and sexual rights.

Are Republicans astute enough to see through this, and understand the potential long-term damage the lefts culture war is causing to Americas reputation as the ruling Democratic Party turns increasingly woke, revolutionary, and ideological? Democrats are actively building ideological solidarity and fellowship with other leftist parties across the world, but theres no such equivalent among conservatives. If it is coming down to a battle of ideas across national boundaries, perhaps cultivating that is something to think about.

The second, and far more crucial, question is: what next for Poland and Hungary and how long can they survive within an openly hostile EU? The combined GDP and manpower of the four conservative central V4-Euro powers led by Poland and Hungary can compete with Germany and France. But at translating that into power, hard and soft, theres no visible effort of unity.

France and Greece, for example, recently made a bilateral treaty that consolidated their foreign policy into one. Theres no such treaty between Poland and Hungary, or one alongside the UK, for example. Nor is there any visible effort of promoting a socially conservative order across Europe even when the situation is ripe with right-wing voters opposed to a leftist social revolution feeling increasingly voiceless, especially across Northern Europe.

Glimpses of that ideological movement building were once seen in an Orban speech asking Christian refugees from Europe to head to Hungary: Of course we can give shelter to the real refugees: Germans, Dutch, French, Italians; scared politicians and journalists; Christians who had to flee their own country; those people who want to find here the Europe that they lost at their home, he said.

If Orban wins re-election this time, against the odds, will we see the consolidation of a conservative bloc right at the heart of Europe? Because the days of hedging might soon be over. When the world turns binary, fence-sitting is usually no longer an option.

Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a national-security fellow at The Center for the National Interest; a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center; and an elected early career historian member at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.

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Leftists Are Making Global Culture War Alliances, And So Should The Right - The Federalist

Georgia attorney Stacey Abrams announced her second run for governor Wednesday, three years into her first imaginary term.

Im running for Governor because opportunity in our state shouldnt be determined by zip code, background or access to power, Abrams wrote in a tweet featuring an announcement video.

The Democrat and former Georgia House leader lost to Republican Brian Kemp by less than 2 percent in 2018, a hostile year for Republicans who lost control of the lower chamber on Capitol Hill. Now Abrams, a polarizing figure who refused to concede that her 2018 race was free and fair despite no evidence for her claims, is running in a political climate favorable to Republicans excited at a rematch.

The one thing Georgia Republicans and most independents can agree on is that Stacey Abrams would be a disaster for the Peach State, one Republican familiar with the race told The Federalist. While Republicans are working through differences on their side, Abrams announcement guarantees Republicans will be united in November.

Republicans expect an Abrams candidacy to energize voters and boost turnout in November. After clinching the Virginia governors mansion for the first time in years by running on cultural issues, the Republican Governors Association (RGA) is prepared to go after Abrams on the same field. The RGA already branded the Georgia Democrat queen of the woke mob on the heels of her announcement.

Abrams stands firmly on the side of the woke activists who cost Georgia millions in revenue all because Governor Brian Kemp made it a priority to protect lives and livelihoods, keep kids in school and in the classroom, let businesses stay open and grow their workforce, and make it easier to vote and harder to cheat, RGA spokeswoman Maddie Anderson wrote in a statement. The RGA looks forward to ensuring Abrams is once again soundly defeated.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) echoed similar sentiments.

The RNC is excited to have another opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to Staceys political aspirations by, yet again, denying her the keys to the Governors mansion come November 2022, RNC spokesman Garrison Douglas said.

Incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp immediately jumped to rail his potential opponent in the general election as a mascot for far-left politics.

Whether Kemp will remain the nominee next fall, however, remains contingent on a potential primary against former U.S. Sen. David Purdue who is weighing a challenge. Former President Donald Trump has already pledged to campaign against Kemp next year.

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GOP Salivates Over Stacey Abrams Announcement - The Federalist