“Biden health officials have quietly revoked the previous administration’s approval of Medicaid work rules in two states, as they move quickly to unwind one of former President Donald Trump’s signature health policies.
Federal Medicaid officials on Wednesday sent letters to Arkansas and New Hampshire officials, informing them that the administration had formally scrapped the federal government’s permission for the states to mandate that some enrollees work, volunteer or attend school as a condition of coverage.”
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“The Trump administration in 2018 issued guidance letting states, for the first time, to implement work rules in the Medicaid program, contending it would incentivize healthy people to find employment. Democrats argued the work rules were designed to shrink the safety net health program’s rolls, and courts have blocked the rules where they have been challenged.
The Biden administration last month began the process of eliminating work rules in the roughly dozen states where they had been approved. The states, which are predominantly Republican-led, were given until last Friday to submit information to CMS defending the work rules. In some states, Democratic governors inherited work rules from their GOP predecessors but sought to avoid enforcing them.”
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“The Supreme Court is still weighing whether to review lower court rulings against work rules in Arkansas and New Hampshire, and revoking the programs could make the case moot.”
“If every basic fact is disputed or called into doubt, we lack a common, agreed-upon reality. We become unable to deliberate or compromise or make informed decisions. Liberal democracy itself becomes an unsustainable enterprise.”
“the GOP has embraced many policy positions—and attitudes—that have little to do with advancing human liberty. Throughout my career, conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues and at odds on others, but now we’re like residents of different planets.
For instance, both groups agreed on the dangers of Soviet expansion. Libertarians, however, warned that giving American security agencies too much power would undermine liberties at home. Conservatives and libertarians worked together to fight progressive assaults on property rights, but libertarians wondered why conservatives couldn’t see how the drug war undermined those goals.
Still, we had many opportunities to work together. Whereas conservatives in Europe never had a problem using big-government to achieve their ends, American conservatives were about “conserving” America’s particular traditions. Our nation’s founding fathers were classical liberals, so conservatives often defended libertarian ideals.
The Trump era solidified long-brewing changes in the conservative movement, as it moved toward a more European-style approach that wasn’t concerned about limits on government power. Trump wasn’t a political thinker, but a marketing savant who tapped into popular and often-legitimate resentments of the increasingly “woke” Left.
Republican politicians mostly stood by Trump, even as he shattered democratic norms and reshaped conservative policy prescriptions, less out of fear of Trump himself and more out of fear of the conservative grassroots voter. What does it even mean to be a conservative these days?
In 2020, the GOP dispensed with its platform and passed a resolution stating its enthusiast support for the president’s agenda. Party platforms are unenforceable, but they provide the faithful with an opportunity to create a mission statement. Apparently, being a conservative now means supporting whatever the leader happens to believe.
Such an approach is temperamentally and philosophically non-conservative, as are many of the goals of the Trumpiest wannabes. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), best known for giving a fist pump to MAGA protesters before some of them stormed the Capitol, recently introduced a plan to boost the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.”
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“MAGA conservatives want libertarians to join their tribe, but their publications offer frequent attacks on the free market. The populist right wants to boost federal spending, impose draconian immigration controls, expand the power of police and spy agencies, step up the drug war and, well, stop when you see something of value to libertarians.
Since Reagan, conservatism has revolved around four concepts, explains Jonathan Last in The Bulwark, a right-leaning anti-Trump publication. There was “temperamental conservatism,” which worried about the consequences of progressive social engineering. There also was “foreign-affairs conservatism,” “fiscal conservatism” and “social conservatism.”
“‘Conservatism’ as it is now viewed by the majority of people who identify as conservatives—and who once believed in all or most of those four precepts—is now about one thing and one thing only: Revanchism,” Last wrote. Sure, I had to look it up, but “revanchism” means “a policy of seeking to retaliate, especially to recover lost territory.”
Yes, that “own the libs” approach has muscled out principled discussions about long-held conservative ideals and goals.”
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“slow change rather than dramatic progress, a focus on prudence, trust in human liberty and variety, respect for societal norms, love of virtue, and commitment to social peace—are at odds with the nihilistic bomb throwing of a conservative populist movement that seems as radical at times as its progressive enemy.”
“One of the most damning indictments of President Donald Trump’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election was that he allegedly pressured Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud.” The Washington Post first reported this detail on January 9, and countless other mainstream media sites publicized it.
But that reporting was wrong. Trump never used the phrase “find the fraud” during his December phone call with Frances Watson, the chief investigator within the secretary of state’s office; moreover, he never promised Watson that she would be a “national hero” if she did discover evidence of fraud.”
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“Watson discovered an audio file during an effort to retrieve documents for a public records request. This file, which was published last week by The Wall Street Journal, makes clear that the quotes supplied by the anonymous source were erroneous.
During the call, Trump told Watson that she had “the most important job in the country” and that she would be praised “when the right answer comes out.” He also made several incorrect statements, and continuously asserted that he had actually won the state of Georgia.
“I won Georgia, I know that, by a lot, and the people know it,” said Trump. “Something happened. Something bad happened.”
Trump deserves criticism for repeatedly and loudly making this false claim, which eventually culminated in some of this more rabid and deluded supporters assaulting the U.S. Capitol. But the notion that he pressured Watson to specifically uncover evidence of fraud looks much weaker now that a recording of the call has been released.
Trump’s other call with Georgian election officials, a transcript of which has been available for months, continues to look quite bad for him: He repeatedly stated an exact number of votes that he would like the investigators to discover. It would not be wrong to conclude that Trump inappropriately exerted pressure on Georgian election officials. But he did not say precisely what the media alleged that he had said”
“Many Republican legislators at both the state and national level are profoundly misguided about Section 230. They seem to think it’s getting in the way of conservatives’ free speech rights when in reality it gives Big Tech additional legal cover for continuing to platform right-wing speech. Legislation aimed at hurting social media companies will ultimately end up hurting the kinds of speech that have flourished on Facebook and Twitter but would not have been published in mainstream media outlets.
If anything, that’s disproportionately likely to be right-wing speech.”
“group-egalitarians claim that, absent injustice, we should have equal representation of groups in every human enterprise. But how can that be? If groups matter, some people are going to bounce a basketball 100,000 times a month and other people are going to bounce it 10,000 times a month. If groups matter, their members will not do the same things, believe the same things, think the same things, or act and react in the same ways. Groups have their own integrity, expressing themselves in how they live their lives, raise their children, and spend their time. This will inevitably result in a different presence of groups across various human activities. They will not have similar occupational or professional profiles. They will not be present in the same proportions as members of the National Academy of Sciences, as tenured faculty members, as tech entrepreneurs, hedge-fund managers, small shopkeepers, single parents, or petty criminals.
It follows that respecting groups’ integrity while demanding group equality is simply a contradiction. Attempting to impose equality despite that contradiction will only lead to disappointment, tyranny, and more racism.”
“the committee has declined to list statues of Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet in the era of the #MeToo movement, it has become clear that his treatment of women was far from exemplary. His comments on North Vietnamese Communists reveal a blind spot toward the totalitarianism that continues to affect many Vietnamese and billions of others. Of course, these defects, like those of Washington and Lincoln, are no reason not to celebrate King’s great contributions with monuments—as Chicago has rightly done.”
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“Liberal societies allow people to pursue their own projects (and, increasingly, identities). And yet even a liberal society needs some shared ties of national memory to hold people together despite their differences. The Chicago committee suggests that monuments to such a memory should either be removed entirely or be transformed into screens on which we can project contemporary grievances. In attacking the best of our forebears, Lightfoot and her committee not only make our common past a casualty of our divided present. They also threaten the foundation on which our future would be built.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/we-don%E2%80%99t-need-subsidized-housing-11954.html
“what the Court held in Uzuegbunam, which was decided in an 8-1 vote with only Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent, is that this case is not moot. Because Uzuegbunam sought “nominal damages” — a kind of automatic payment for a victorious plaintiff who isn’t entitled to any other relief, and that is often just a single dollar — Thomas’s majority opinion concludes that Uzuegbunam still has a live dispute with the college over whether he is entitled to that one dollar.”
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“Despite the case’s provocative facts, Uzuegbunam has little to say about the First Amendment, or about broader cultural disputes about campus speech. The issue before the Court was limited to whether Uzuegbunam could continue to press his lawsuit even though he personally has very little to gain from it.
But the stakes in this case were quite significant, and they led to an unusual alliance among liberal and conservative groups that frequently butt heads in the Supreme Court. The case produced a raft of amicus briefs from conservative religious groups that urged the Court to rule in favor of Uzuegbunam, but left-leaning groups such as Public Citizen, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Humanist Association also filed briefs in support of Uzuegbunam.
The latter organization frequently files lawsuits seeking to vindicate the separation of church and state, and it feared that a ruling against Uzuegbunam could undermine those suits.
Public Citizen’s brief explains why left-leaning groups found common cause with the religious right in this case. First, they argue, allowing claims for nominal damages to move forward facilitates “the sound development of constitutional law in contexts in which traditional compensatory damages may not be appropriate.”
Imagine, for example, a slightly different version of the facts in Uzuegbunam. In this hypothetical, a civil rights organization believes that colleges throughout the country are systematically giving lower grades to Black students. So they identify a student hurt by this alleged discrimination, and file a lawsuit seeking to establish a legal precedent that will apply to all campuses across the country — or at least within a particular federal judicial circuit.
But just when they are about to win their case, the defendant college backs down, agrees to raise the plaintiff student’s grades, and seeks to dismiss the case as moot. Under Uzuegbunam, this lawsuit could still proceed so long as the plaintiff asked for nominal damages — and thus the civil rights organization would still be able to secure the binding precedent that it seeks.
Additionally, Public Citizen’s brief says, if a plaintiff can move forward with a claim for nominal damages, that plaintiff may be able to “obtain an award of attorney’s fees.” Federal law permits the “prevailing party” in many civil rights suits to receive “a reasonable attorney’s fee” from the defendant — basically, the defendant is ordered to pay for the victorious plaintiff’s lawyers.
The purpose of this law is to encourage lawyers to bring suits that vindicate individuals’ civil rights; attorneys would understandably be reluctant to do so if they weren’t sure if they’d be paid for their efforts. And such fees can provide the operating funds that allow nonprofit litigation shops to employ much of their staff.
So, while the plaintiff in Uzuegbunam is likely to earn considerable sympathy from conservatives, the stakes in this case went far beyond disputes over campus speech. Had Uzuegbunam lost this case in the Supreme Court, the biggest losers might have been civil rights attorneys arguing cases traditionally associated with the political left.”
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“In the early ’90s, when conservative lawyers couldn’t even dream of prevailing in the kinds of lawsuits that get taken seriously by the current Supreme Court, conservative justices spent a lot of time swatting down cases brought by civil rights and environmental groups. So it was easy to see why a judge like Scalia might want to make it harder for plaintiffs with marginal claims to bring lawsuits. Today, however, strict limits on who can bring a federal lawsuit are at least as likely to hinder a pro-gun organization or a religious conservative as they are to halt a lawsuit brought by a left-leaning party or organization.
And so Roberts finds himself alone, with none of his fellow conservative justices (or, for that matter, the Court’s three liberals) embracing his narrow view of who is allowed to pursue a federal case.”