Author: RealClearWire

Commentary: The Reckoning Has Come for K-12 Sex Abuse, and You the Taxpayer Are on the Hook

RealClearWire
High School students in the classroom

The teenage female athletes at California’s Pomona High School said they felt special when a handful of coaches there took them under their wing, spending more time with them than others, providing extra encouragement, sharing personal stories and, sometimes, seemingly harmless flirtatious talk.

One track team member was amazed at a Nevada meet when she saw the coaches drinking, smoking marijuana, and sharing the party scene with teammates. But that attention turned to tragedy at a subsequent meet in Las Vegas when a coach brought the 16-year-old to his hotel room, plied her with alcohol, and, she says, raped her.

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Former Secret Service Chief Wanted to Destroy Cocaine Evidence

RealClearWire
Kimberly Cheatle

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.

Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.

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Commentary: Let’s Leave the Marxism on the Capitol Steps

RealClearWire
Elizabeth Warren

The United States has become the largest market in the world, and at the same time it delivers the highest standard of living to its citizens compared to the world’s other major economies. Contrast this success with other large economies such as China, where despite being the world’s second-largest economy, its citizens have a standard of living that has more in common with the developing world than a global powerhouse. Now China is facing demographic challenges that raise the prospect that as a nation, it may get old before it gets rich. Layer its long-standing repression and authoritarianism on to its economic challenges, and one is hard-pressed to see a domestic policy regime worthy of emulation.

Likewise looking to America’s south, and one is struck by the generations of squandered opportunities for prosperity in South America. As a region, South America has been buffeted by financial collapses, runaway inflation, and geopolitical instability. For nations digging out from a legacy of ruinous fiscal and economic policies, there is no easy route forward, only difficult tradeoffs. Argentina has certainly charted a new course and there is hope that near-term pain may pave a path forward to stability and long-term growth. But the present pain is very real.

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Commentary: The DEI Trap

RealClearWire
Kamala Harris and KBJ

Kamala Harris’s sudden ascendancy within the Democrat Party, with nary a peep from other ambitious Democrats, spotlights the uncomfortable contradictions of identity politics and the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement. 

Americans universally believe that everyone should have a fair shot at opportunities regardless of sex or race, which is why the kind of racism and sexism that was once so prevalent is so rare today.

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Secret Service Whistleblowers: Acting Chief Cut Security Assets

RealClearWire
Secret Service

Just days after Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe denied playing a direct role in rejecting repeated requests for added security measures and assets for former President Trump, whistleblowers have come forward refuting those claims and blaming Rowe for some of the agency’s security failures that led to the July 13 assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and left rallygoer Corey Comperatore dead and two others wounded.

Other whistleblowers are coming forward citing more systemic problems with the Secret Service, the vaunted agency whose primary job is to protect presidents, vice presidents and former presidents and their families.

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Commentary: Draining the Swamp Is Now a Job for Congress

RealClearWire
Congress

Wading into the confusing abyss of administrative law, on June 28 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overruled the much-criticized 1984 decision in Chevron, restoring the bedrock principle — commanded by both Article III of the Constitution and Section 706 the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act — that it is the province of courts, not administrative agency bureaucrats, to interpret federal laws. This may sound like an easy ruling, but the issue had long bedeviled the Supreme Court. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, an administrative law expert, supported Chevron prior to his death in 2016. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice John Roberts sure-footedly dispatched Chevron.

If, as I wrote for The American Conservative in 2021, “Taming the administrative state is the issue of our time,” why did the Supreme Court unanimously (albeit with a bare six-member quorum) decide in Chevron to defer to administrative agencies interpretations of ambiguous statutes, and why did conservatives — at least initially — support the decision? In a word, politics. In 1984, the President in charge of the executive branch was Ronald Reagan, and the D.C. Circuit — where most administrative law cases are decided — was (and had been for decades) controlled by liberal activist judges. President Reagan’s deputy solicitor general, Paul Bator, argued the Chevron case, successfully urging the Court to overturn a D.C. Circuit decision (written by then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg) that had invalidated EPA regulations interpreting the Clean Air Act. Thus, in the beginning, “Chevron deference” meant deferring to Reagan’s agency heads and their de-regulatory agenda.

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Commentary: Buttigieg’s Bold Crime Claim Doesn’t Hold Up

RealClearWire
Pete Buttigieg

“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”

“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”

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Acting Secret Service Chief Played Key Role in Limiting Resources for Trump

RealClearWire

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.

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Commentary: The Beginning of the Revolution Our Kids Need

RealClearWire

A revolution is underway. Parents, physicians, and principals have seen the devastation inflicted on an entire generation of children raised on screens, and they are taking bold steps to end “phone-based childhood.” Politicians are joining the cause, too, with Congress on the brink of passing bi-partisan legislation to protect kids online – the first significant law of its kind in nearly 30 years. The catalyst for this revolution is Jonathan Haidt’s new bestselling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

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Commentary: With Chevron Dead, It’s Time to Challenge the Feres Doctrine

RealClearWire
Supreme Court

Last month the Supreme Court ended the 40-year precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine. When the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling was handed down in 1984 there was nil understanding that it would enable the burgeoning 20th Century administrative state to dig its foundation down to societal bedrock. This legal precedent tied the hands of lower courts over the next 40 years, forcing them to defer to administrative agencies on how to interpret the law in areas that congress did not offer crystal clarity.

Chevron opened the door for succeeding precedents like the 2005 ruling in the National Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Services case, which enabled governmental agencies to “override judicial constructions of ambiguous federal laws by promulgating their own conflicting, yet authoritative, interpretations.” In 2020, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Brand X opinion, lamented the ruling, rightly noting that it further ensconced judicial doctrine to the point of “administrative absolutism.” In essence, Chevron, and subsequent precedent under its umbrella, allowed presidential administrations to legislate around congress through cabinet agency directors.

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