Andrew Sullivan today makes a case for removing the rigid statutory ban against the entry of HIV positive people into the United States (even as visitors), and treating the disease like other serious and communicable conditions. He is exactly right. The ban now on the books is not only unreasonable (given what we now know about how the disease is and is not spread) but utterly unenforceable, and creates a dangerous perverse incentive, encouraging people with HIV to go untreated and unreported—thus increasing, not lowering, the risk they will spread the disease. When I was in the White House, we made inquiries on the Hill (at the President’s personal request, if I’m not mistaken—though I don’t recall that with certainty) about removing the ban by statute, and found a mix of (mostly) disinterest and (a little) hostility on both sides of the aisle. There is now a bipartisan effort to attach a provision removing the ban to the PEPFAR reauthorization bill. I hope it succeeds.
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Stick a Fork in O’Rourke
If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if ...
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In Defense of the Electoral College
Senator Elizabeth Warren has joined a growing chorus within the Democratic party in calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. Speaking at a forum in Mississippi on Monday night, Warren said that she hoped to ensure that “every vote matters” and proposed that “the way we can make that happen is ...
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Bartending Helped Her Recognize Cohen’s Lies
She's not a fan.
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Ivy-League Schools Wither
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A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of ...
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Betsy DeVos Strikes a Blow for Religious Freedom
Last week, Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that the U.S. Department of Education will stop enforcing a provision in federal law that has long barred religious organizations from contracting with private schools to provide federally funded “equitable services,” such as tutoring and professional development. In ...
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A Southern Parent’s Take on the Admissions Scandal
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There’s a Partisan Fiction at the Heart of the Case against the Electoral College
On the substance of the defense of the Electoral College, consider me four-square behind our editorial today. This paragraph is key:
In our era of viciously divisive politics, the states are arguably more necessary than they have ever been. Critics of the Electoral College bristle at the insistence that it ...
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Chicago Police Union Calls for Probe of Prosecutor’s Intervention in Jussie Smollett Case
The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police has requested that the Department of Justice open an investigation into Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett hate-crime-hoax case.
Foxx ultimately recused herself from the investigation, but only after asking Chicago Police ...
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In Defense of the Iraq War
Today is the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and Twitter is alive with condemnations of the conflict -- countered by precious few defenses. Yet I believed the Iraq War was just and proper in 2003, and I still believe that today. When Donald Trump condemned the war during the 2015 primary campaign and ...
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