The Week

• The Washington Stupid Sons of Bitches was a close second.

• In his long, rambling press conference, President Biden was talking about NATO responses to Russian aggression against Ukraine. “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades,” he said. “And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.” The phrase “minor incursion” set off alarm bells, including in Kyiv. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said there was no such thing as a “minor incursion.” The White House and Biden himself immediately issued clarifications, with the president saying, “If any — any — assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” and “Russia will pay a heavy price.” Throughout his long career, Joe Biden has always put his foot in his mouth. In domestic politics, this can do relatively little harm. On the world stage, it matters a lot.

• At this very moment, President Vladimir Putin is busy mobilizing a force large enough to invade and overpower Ukraine. It is an interruption to the world’s business much as the Cuban missile crisis was in the real Cold War. The issue is security. In the West, possible Ukrainian membership of NATO is thought a safeguard, but in Moscow it appears to be plainly confrontational. Mutual accusations of deceit are raising the level of tension. Ambassadors have gone beyond parliamentary language on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly. Ukrainian ministries and offices are subjected to cyberattack. NATO members have been flying in advanced weaponry and stationing forces at key points in Eastern Europe. However, Germany broke ranks by refusing to help except in token ways. Taking land may be Putin’s proximate goal, but breaking NATO could be a side benefit.

• Donald Trump makes life hard for his apologists. They have pretended that Trump was just raising questions, or standing on his legal rights, or doing something other than trying to undo the 2020 election results. But in his January rally in Conroe, Texas, Trump cut to the chase. Referring to efforts in Congress to clarify the Electoral Count Act, Trump said those efforts prove that “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome. . . . Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power. He could have overturned the election!” Overturned the election: Mark his words. For good measure, Trump offered, if reelected, to pardon January 6 rioters, and called for “the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta” if investigations into his conduct escalate. “Our country and our elections” will be “corrupt” — unless he gets his way. Trump is not the only demagogue on the American scene. But he is certainly among the worst, and most incorrigible.

• Starting as an acolyte of Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich became a leading conservative in his own right in 1994 when, inspired by his Contract with America, the GOP won a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. A rocky tenure as speaker — his own party ousted him after a bad 1998 midterm — and a failed run for the presidency in 2012 soured him. Since then he has become an acolyte of Donald Trump. In this capacity he has speculated that members of the House Select Committee investigating January 6 “face a real risk of jail time” if the House changes hands in November. It is a sad fall, from historic figure to pale copy of a failed politician.

• Supply chains remain snarled, but it’s well past the time when they could be held wholly responsible for high inflation. The latest GDP figures confirm that spending has been growing faster than usual: It’s up 11 percent over the last two years, compared with 9 percent over the two before that. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues have been sounding more hawkish as the evidence of excess spending has accumulated, but they may have to accelerate their schedule of interest-rate hikes — and tell the markets they plan to stay the course until spending growth moderates.

• President Biden nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision. The Dodd-Frank law of 2010 created the role as a powerful regulator of the financial industry. Raskin has been outspoken on climate policy and is part of the Left’s new attempt to get its policy preferences through financial regulation. That would be mission creep from the Fed, an institution tasked by Congress with maintaining full employment and low and steady inflation, the latter of which is becoming a problem in recent months, and neither of which is about climate policy. The progressive argument is that climate change could pose financial risks, but if that’s the standard, then just about anything would be within the Fed’s remit. Congress has elected representatives who get to make policy decisions about energy and climate change. The Federal Reserve has unelected central bankers who don’t. If Congress wanted the Fed to be a policy-maker on a wide array of issues, it would have written the Federal Reserve Act differently. We would encourage Raskin to run for Congress instead, but the incumbent in her district is her husband, Jamie (D., Md.), so she probably isn’t game.

• Joe Biden’s border policy is nothing to be proud of, and the administration apparently realizes it. Body-cam video unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request captured a cop at an airport near White Plains, N.Y., asking federal contractors last year about the stealthy off-hours arrival of illegal immigrants. A contractor explains that “DHS wants everything on the down-low.” Meanwhile, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin got footage of single adult males being processed through a nondescript location in Brownsville, Texas, to be flown to cities around the country. An ICE source told him that these kinds of releases have been taking place quietly since last spring. Every time an illegal immigrant is allowed into the country, it creates a permission slip for others to come. Unsurprisingly, monthly Border Patrol apprehensions have been at record numbers for nearly the entirety of Biden’s presidency, topping 150,000 almost since the beginning. Ultimately, Congress should change the rules to make it easier to enforce our borders. Until then, though, Biden could drastically diminish the flow by reinstituting the programs he inherited from Trump. Instead, he’s opened a sluice at the border and hopes, through subterfuge, to keep people from noticing.

• Congressional Democrats introduced their America COMPETES Act, a 2,900-page, $250 billion boondoggle of a partisan industrial-policy bill. Advertised as an anti-China measure, this bill is clearly designed to distribute benefits that will sustain the president through his current political slump. Certain key provisions would have an incidental impact on U.S. competitiveness: Like a version passed by the Senate last year, the House bill would provide $50 billion in subsidies to the semiconductor industry, and other provisions would streamline the processing of Uyghur and Hong Kong refugees. But the bulk of the bill is really about directing gobs of research funding to universities across the country, for projects that have little to do with U.S. national security, to be overseen by people serving in absurd new positions created by the bill, such as the chief diversity officer of the National Science Foundation. Along the way, Democratic lawmakers have fought amendments to protect the research produced with the new funding from Chinese espionage efforts. We can be sure that fear isn’t being struck in Beijing.

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership continued its long decline in the U.S. in 2021. Only 10.3 percent of American workers were union members, down from 10.8 percent in 2020. The disparity between the public and private sectors is huge: 33.9 percent of public-sector workers were unionized, but only 6.1 percent of private-sector workers were. The disparity across states was large as well, ranging from South Carolina’s 1.7 percent to Hawaii’s 22.4 percent (with New York in second at 22.2 percent). Organized labor hasn’t been about labor for quite some time. It turns out that if people want to donate some of their paycheck to progressive activism, they have many options to do so without joining unions.

• After the Supreme Court’s decision that OSHA’s vaccine mandate for large employers was unconstitutional, Starbucks announced that it would no longer require its employees to be vaccinated. It had announced a few weeks earlier that employees would need to get vaccinated or else face mandatory weekly testing. In the absence of the federal mandate, however, it changed its mind. Starbucks employs 228,000 people and said that the “vast majority” of them are fully vaccinated. It is still urging its employees to get vaccinated. But in just the past few weeks, vaccine mandates have gone from being the policy of the Democratic administration to being too strict for Starbucks, a Seattle-based company known for its progressive activism. The season of Covid mandates seems to be ending, even on the left.

• A taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health study examining the sexual practices of “young men who have sex with men” recruited boys (and girls who identify as boys) as young as 13. Researchers at Columbia University offered up to $275 to gay and transgender-identifying adolescents in exchange for reports of their sexual activity on the MyPEEPS app. In pursuit of “strategies to manage stigma,” researchers asked minors whether they have “condomless anal sex” and invited them to take part in sex-themed “interactive games and activities.” The underage participants also traveled to in-person follow-up interviews, the cost of which was reimbursed by NIH. All this “research” without ever stopping to acquire parental consent. Sounds like the researchers could use some stigmatizing themselves.

• Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg thinks he can eliminate traffic deaths. “Zero is the only acceptable number of deaths and serious injuries on our roadways,” said Buttigieg in a letter. Your tax dollars are at work in pursuit of this goal. The Department of Transportation is using $14 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law to pursue its “Safe System Approach.” So much for fixing crumbling bridges. But there is no crisis of traffic deaths. The motor-vehicle-fatality rate has steadily declined over time and been below 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled since 2002. It did increase in 2020, but it’s not clear how consultant-speak from Buttigieg and a host of regulatory actions by the expanded DOT bureaucracy are going to help the situation. Zero deaths and zero injuries is, meanwhile, less a goal than a declaration of frivolity.

• Untold thousands of stolen and rifled-through packages, their debris mounting along miles of Union Pacific rail lines in downtown Los Angeles, call to mind train heists of the Wild West. But those thieves never had it so good. Today’s stolen-property syndicates and low-level scavengers are enticed to ransack freight trains at a rate of 90 containers per day, a breathtaking 160 percent increase year over year, because they have no concerns about capture. Golden State Democrats pushed through 2014 “reforms” making theft of up to $950 a misdemeanor. From there, progressive prosecutors, such as Los Angeles DA George Gascón, philosophically content with wealth redistribution on the express track, plead grand larcenies down to mere trespass — in the few cases they take at all. California’s misgovernment is not, in this case, only California’s problem. The rail lines, adjacent to giant ports that receive 40 percent of U.S. imports, convey a significant portion of this haul, teeming with high-end goods, across the country. The trains are an easy mark, slowing (or stopped by brake-pulling bandits) at well-known junctures where the marauders pounce. With inflation rising and store shelves sparsely stocked, we recall that monitoring interstate commerce is the main thrust of federal law enforcement. Where are the Biden Justice Department and the FBI?

• New York police officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, responding to a domestic-violence call in Harlem, were gunned down. Rivera died on the spot; Mora lingered for four days before succumbing. (The perp, a career criminal, was shot and killed by a third officer.) Rivera’s funeral filled St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Fifth Avenue with mourners in blue. The eulogy by his widow Dominique Luzuriaga was the nightmare of every cop’s relative, made real: the phone call, the ride to the hospital, the walk to the deathbed. She also called out Manhattan’s newly elected soft-on-crime DA Alvin Bragg. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. . . . I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.” Questioned about the widow’s remarks, Bragg issued the statement that “my office will vigorously prosecute cases of violence against police and work to prevent senseless acts like this from ever happening again.” But focusing only on heinous crimes fosters an atmosphere of general lawlessness, which in turn produces more heinous crimes. May the lesson be relearned before more officers and civilians pay with their lives.

• Times Square is one of the great battlegrounds of American city life — and the good guys are not winning. As in the Bay Area and in cities around the country, a general retreat in policing and the refusal of so-called progressive prosecutors to do their jobs and prosecute crime has in New York City produced utterly predictable results, among them a dramatic increase in shoplifting and robbery, with petit-larceny cases up — officially — by more than a quarter year over year, a figure that almost certainly fails to capture the actual scope of the problem: Why bother reporting a crime that police will not investigate and that prosecutors will not prosecute? In a development with both practical and symbolic aspects, the Rite Aid on Times Square has closed its doors for good, after having been looted repeatedly during the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 and then subjected to such constant shoplifting that theft was imposing losses of $100,000 a month on the store. That’s bad for Rite Aid, for the people who worked there, the people who rely on retailers, and the city as a whole — as Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute reports, Manhattan is missing 28 percent of the retail jobs it had a couple of years ago. Once a seedy nexus of pornography and prostitution, Times Square enjoyed a resurrection during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years that was symbolic of the broader city’s renewed vitality. And as Times Square slips back into depravity and chaos, it once again acts as a bellwether.

• When Democratic state representative Forrest Bennett unveiled a new bill in the Oklahoma legislature, he found himself in unexpected company. Bennett’s legislation stipulated that a father’s financial responsibility to his child and his child’s mother begins at conception. “If Oklahoma is going to restrict a woman’s right to choose,” he wrote on Twitter, “we sure better make sure the man involved can’t just walk away from his responsibility.” Pro-lifers, who were supposed to be shown up by the bill, instead celebrated it, seeing it as an affirmation of the principle that human beings have claims on us from their earliest stages. Alas, Bennett’s progressive colleagues weren’t taken with the bill — not least because it had drawn the wrong fans. The pushback prompted Bennett to quickly apologize and to promise to rework the text. “I understand how the language in my message and bill both hurt the cause instead of helping it, and I apologize for not being more thoughtful,” he tweeted in response. Perhaps people who don’t share his cause should take up his idea, in Oklahoma and elsewhere.

• The “ERA Coalition,” joined by Senator Ben Cardin (D., Md.) and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.), demands that the National Archives accept the Equal Rights Amendment as a ratified part of the Constitution, and backs a lawsuit seeking to compel the archivist to accept the filing. Joe Biden issued a statement “calling on Congress to act immediately to pass a resolution recognizing ratification of the ERA.” But Congress imposed a deadline for a sufficient number of states to ratify the ERA, which expired four decades ago. The legal case for the ERA having expired is so strong that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diehard supporter, declared in 2019 that “we’ll be starting over again collecting the necessary states to ratify it.” The Office of Legal Counsel and D.C. federal district judge Rudy Contreras, an Obama appointee, have taken Ginsburg’s position. Today’s OLC, under pressure from Biden, said its old analysis was flawed but reiterated that “the ERA Resolution has expired and is no longer pending before the States,” and that “the only constitutional path for amendment would be . . . to propose the amendment once more and restart the ratification process among the States.” It’s time for feminist activists to accept that this amendment died around the same time as bell-bottoms.

• The Supreme Court said it would hear two cases concerning universities’ discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Colleges have for decades, and with the connivance of the courts, been flouting the clear command of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that they not discriminate. In 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the Court, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Today’s justices, less inclined to venture into policy-making, should instead conclude that what’s necessary is obeying the law.

• Everyone on the Supreme Court is fully vaccinated, and thus at very low risk for serious illness from Covid. In recognition of this, Neil Gorsuch has declined to wear a mask to oral arguments. He is the only justice to do so, and progressives — who have been lately ratcheting up their attacks on the character of the Republican-appointed justices — have become obsessed with Gorsuch’s unmasked face. After Sonia Sotomayor, who is diabetic, stayed home during the Court’s argument over vaccine mandates, NPR’s Nina Totenberg wrote a story claiming that Gorsuch had refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts to wear a mask. Totenberg implied that Sotomayor had asked Roberts to do this. Problem one: Roberts denied that he had made such a request. Problem two: Gorsuch and Sotomayor issued a joint statement also denying that Sotomayor had made such a request. NPR, bizarrely, has stood by its story. Journalists are the one group that can come up with more creative interpretations than judges.

• The decision by London’s Metropolitan Police to look into the parties/work events held in 10 Downing Street during the pandemic lockdowns has given Boris Johnson a reprieve. A report on those gatherings by senior civil servant Sue Gray could not include anything that could prejudice the police investigation, and when its remnants were published, they amounted to a bureaucrat’s tut-tutting. Johnson’s next hurdle will be dealing with the police’s conclusions. Only then will Gray’s full report appear. If Johnson is to survive politically, he will need to reassure skeptical Conservative MPs that he is still an asset. If local elections in May go badly, they will not be sentimental.

• The Scottish police force has asked for more time to enforce the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, after a huge surge in reported crimes. Even before the law was introduced, police warned that it would be difficult to enforce on account of its subjectivity (the law threatens up to seven years’ imprisonment for use of language perceived by a “reasonable person” to be “threatening, abusive, or insulting”). Calum Steele, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, told the Times of Scotland that he expects the rise in reported crimes “will be people taking offence at things they read on Twitter and don’t agree with.” Police visited the founder of a charity that assists pregnant victims of domestic abuse after her commitment to single-sex spaces upset trans activists online. The police explained that they needed to “ascertain what [her] thinking was.” We can’t imagine that any of this is going to reduce the country’s supply of hate.

• Canada’s cross-border trucking vaccine mandate touched off a nationwide protest that culminated in a convoy of trucks descending on Ottawa demanding an end to all Covid restrictions in the country. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is quarantining after testing positive for Covid and refuses to speak with protesters, who say they won’t leave Ottawa until all Covid restrictions are lifted. The protesters have used methods we disagree with, blocking roads and preventing residents of Ottawa from moving freely about their city. In that way, the protesters are no better than environmentalists who block highways to protest climate change, and the tactic of blocking traffic should be opposed no matter who is doing it. That being said, it seems that public opinion has shifted dramatically in a short period of time. A survey from the Angus Reid Institute on January 12 found that only 39 percent of Canadians wanted Covid restrictions lifted; the same survey on January 28 found that 54 percent supported ending restrictions. The Trudeau government brought this protest upon itself. It provided no evidence to the public on why the trucking vaccine mandate was necessary beyond a general pro-vaccination sentiment, and nobody could seriously believe that unvaccinated truck drivers posed a significant threat to spread Covid at a national level. It seems that our royalist neighbors to the north have a little more fire in their bellies about opposing government power than we thought.

• Some people say the Kremlin ought to have a “sphere of influence.” As far away as Ireland? The Russian navy was set to conduct exercises off the coast of Ireland, in that nation’s “exclusive economic zone.” Irish fishermen protested, saying this would adversely affect their livelihood. Russia, choosing not to press the matter, backed down. In more serious news, Russia, China, and Iran conducted joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean. That is a grouping — an axis, if you will — to concentrate the mind.

• Afghanistan continues to unravel into a humanitarian crisis. According to NBC News, “The problem is vast — not only is the country dealing with a long-running drought, and a usually frigid winter, 23 million are going hungry, there have been outbreaks of measles, dengue fever, and acute watery diarrhea.” That number is up from 14 million in September. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that due to a lack of Western funds, “several thousand health facilities across Afghanistan have been closed in recent months. Those that remain open are struggling to operate with severe shortages of staff and medicine.” To make things worse, the western part of the country also experienced an earthquake recently. The Taliban are increasing the strictness of their religious policing and reimposing many of the same restrictions on women that characterized their first brutal regime. They are simply uninterested in the economic well-being of the Afghan people. Many commentators predicted this economic collapse last year. It doesn’t seem that the Biden administration did anything to prepare for it. American forces may be out, but the consequences of Biden’s botched withdrawal are still unfolding.

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a master of magical thinking. His destructive and imbecilic economic policies have ruined the Turkish economy, and he has responded by killing the messenger. To be more precise, he hasn’t gotten around to killing him yet, but he has dismissed the chief statistician of the Turkish government for giving him the bad news about the country’s persistent inflation and the consequent cratering of the Turkish lira. And here is where the magic comes in: Turkey is suffering destructive inflation in part because the Erdogan government has kept interest rates artificially low in the hope of spurring economic growth, and now Erdogan is attempting to cure his cheap-money problem with a flood of more cheap money, pressing for even deeper interest-rate cuts. His idea is that spurring economic growth will help productivity catch up with the inflated money supply, which is an almost plausible approach except for the fact that it relies on inflating the money supply further still — Erdogan expects the Turkish economy to give itself a piggyback ride. The Turkish autocrat has a pious aversion to alcohol, but somehow he still needs to sober up.

• The U.S. Olympic Committee, and other national Olympic committees, have warned their athletes not to bring their own phones or other electronic devices to China. These devices, said the U.S. committee, “are subject to malicious intrusion, infection, and data compromise.” It is advisable, said the committee, to “assume that every device and every communication, transaction, and online activity will be monitored.” Meanwhile, the Chinese government has warned athletes from all over the world not to criticize Chinese policies during the Games. In a pre-Olympics seminar, Human Rights Watch advised athletes to save criticisms for when they return home, for their own safety. Olympic athletes from around the world are getting a taste of what daily life is like for people in China.

• Twitter is not a medium given to carefully calibrated expression. Almost everyone who uses it has jumped to a conclusion too quickly, worded something poorly, or deleted tweets after thinking better of them. So it wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy that Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute fired off a couple of late-night tweets whose wording he regretted, except that he had just been hired for a position at Georgetown Law School and an outrage mob is demanding his preemptive firing. Shapiro tweeted that Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, would be Joe Biden’s best Supreme Court pick, and criticized Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman on the grounds that the pledge excluded the best candidate. Then, he said that Biden’s pledge meant that he’ll instead nominate a “lesser black woman.” It was an unfortunate phrase, but Shapiro’s meaning was clear, he has consistently opposed racial preferences on principle, and he has previously cited a black woman (Janice Rogers Brown) as being someone he would nominate for the Court if he had the chance. He has since deleted the tweet and apologized for its phrasing. The university has defended much more provocative speech from progressive faculty. Instead, the dean of the law school, William Treanor, denounced Shapiro in harsh terms and placed him on administrative leave pending an “investigation.” Overwrought students staged a sit-in. Firing Shapiro would be a cowardly act signaling the school’s intellectual and moral inability to stand up for fairness, free and open expression, and even minimal ideological diversity.

•The New York Times published a piece about the emerging generation of young women who are comfortable discussing their periods, yet uncomfortable (or so it would seem) with being women. The article’s author, Pooja Makhijani, informs us that “young people” are looking for alternatives to disposable menstrual products. (An odd statement, since half of “young people” have no discernible need for them.) Makhijani says that “the average menstruator” goes through thousands of tampons in “their” lifetime. Menstruator? And again, “new menstruators often turn to a parent for products and advice.” Of course, on getting her first period, a young woman usually turns to her mother (or failing that, a sister, aunt, or another woman she trusts). But saying so requires acknowledging the existence of the female sex category. Instead, in the name of inclusivity, women are to be reduced to the crude sum of their sexual function. Would we ever insult men — sorry, ejaculators — in this way?

• The U.S. Navy SEALs fight and train by land, sea, and air — but not in Washington State parks. “It is difficult to find peace in the woods when armed frogmen might be lurking behind every tree,” attorneys for the Whidbey Environmental Action Network argued when filing suit to bar the SEALs from the Evergreen State’s parks and beaches. While Navy special operators have conducted cold-water exercises along the Washington shoreline for over 30 years, local residents now claim that the training is environmentally and psychologically traumatic. “I do not care to catch a glimpse of apparently armed men skulking around and I DEFINITELY do not want to risk having my young grandchildren see such a sight,” one resident wrote to state regulators. (The Navy says it does not conduct any live-fire or explosives training in the parks.) The Navy’s unofficial motto is Non sibi sed patriae — “not for self, but for country” — which is clearly something these people do not understand.

• The law of unintended consequences can be a boon. A school board in Tennessee removed Maus, Art Spiegelman’s pictorial novel of the Holocaust, from the local curriculum. The board objected to some curse words and some nudity. When news of the board’s action spread, sales of Maus boomed. Spiegelman said the same thing happened in Russia, when the government banned Maus in 2015. A different school district, in Washington State, has struck To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic, from its required-reading list. The racial politics are too dicey, evidently. In 2020, a California school district forbade the teaching of Mockingbird, for the same reason. Those who cherish American culture can only hope that young people, and other people, read the book on their own.

• A 19-year-old British-Belgian teen just broke two Guinness World Records when she became the youngest woman to fly around the world solo in a microlight aircraft. Zara Rutherford, herself the daughter of two pilots, has been flying since she was 14 and earned her first license in 2020. After her takeoff on August 18, 2021, her three-month goal was slightly put off by visa and weather issues in various countries, including poor visibility due to Seattle wildfire smoke and China denying her access to its airspace. Covid restrictions hindered her ability to explore her stops along the way. Rutherford said that one of her goals with the trip was to raise awareness of women in flight. Congratulations to Rutherford, and give us a wave next time you fly over the U.S.

• George Will, continuing the libertarian period of his career, has reiterated his endorsement of assisted suicide “enveloped in the proper protocols.” He acknowledges the danger that it will not be, but does not consider that danger decisive. “Life is lived on a slippery slope.” But the existing assisted-suicide laws fall short of the protocols Will seeks. Oregon does not require that patients be facing a “hideous death,” or enduring any pain at all, to have their suicides blessed by the state. It’s worse abroad: Germany requires no diagnosis of illness at all. Canada combines assisted suicide with organ donation. The slope is steeper than Will allows, we are further down it than he realizes, and his own principles ought to make him join pro-lifers in trying to resist and reverse the downward slide.

• The version of Fight Club released in China has a different ending from the one you may remember from the 1999 movie. Instead of collapsing buildings, there’s text explaining that “the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.” In China, the first rule of Fight Club is that the party is leading us into a glorious future.

Replacing Breyer

Stephen Breyer is retiring at the end of the current Supreme Court term, at the age of 83, after 27 years on the Court. We wish him good health and a happy retirement. We wish we could be equally cheery about the prospect that his replacement will be faithful to the Constitution and laws of the United States.

The first choice will be Joe Biden’s. With a 50–50 Senate and an impending fall election, he will have to choose carefully to ensure that his selection can be confirmed. He has made a bad first step, unwisely limiting his options by preemptively declaring during the 2020 campaign that his first Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman. In a stroke, he disqualified dozens of liberal and progressive jurists for no reason other than their race and gender.

Unlike Donald Trump, Biden did not run on a named list of potential candidates, so he will then have to sell his nominee to the public. That nominee is almost certain to be a progressive who treats the written Constitution as something closer to a suggestion than binding law. Even if Democrats remain united enough to provide the votes to confirm such a nominee, Republicans should extract a political cost in the midterm Senate races for doing so. The last three cycles of Senate elections have shown that fidelity to the Constitution is a winning political issue for Senate Republicans.

In terms of how she will rule on the bench, it may not matter much whom Biden nominates. Conventional, institutionalist liberals tend to be every bit as results-oriented and lockstep-loyal on the bench as hair-on-fire progressives. Conservatives get nervous about every Republican nominee; Democrats have not sent a genuinely independent justice to the Court since John F. Kennedy appointed Byron White.

Breyer’s own career illustrates the limits of what a “moderate” liberal looks like. He was occasionally sensible in business cases and matters of low political salience, and he voted to strike down the most coercive aspects of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. But that was about it. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed the previous year by Bill Clinton, he was sold as a moderate almost entirely on the grounds that he would not impose a knee-jerk objection to the death penalty. But on the Court, Breyer became a single-minded crusader to use every available argument to hobble capital punishment, no matter how disconnected those arguments were from the text and history of the Constitution. He was a reliable and invariable vote for abortion, same-sex marriage, and other liberal and progressive social causes. In recent years, he became progressively more shrill on matters relating to the Covid pandemic.

So let us have another national argument about whether the Supreme Court should follow the written Constitution or not. There is no reason to shy away from the fight.