The Week

• So it turns out conversion therapy works for Cuomosexuals.

• Public health can justify coercive measures, but our presumption should be against them. Since those who have not gotten the COVID vaccine are mainly risking their own health, the government should not require private citizens to get shots. It’s a different matter when the government requires it of members of the armed forces, whose health is its direct concern. Private employers have the legal right – and some of them, such as nursing homes, very good reason – to make vaccination a condition of employment. The risks don’t as yet justify government mask mandates, either. Conservative opposition to these mandates, however, can also go too far. Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.), whose policies on COVID have inspired a lot of hysterical opposition, should arguably let school districts decide their own mask policies rather than forbid them to institute requirements. His signing a law stopping cruise ships (along with other businesses) from requiring passengers to be vaccinated was an overstep. Surveys, and common sense, suggest that most prospective passengers want that requirement, and there is no good reason for government to thwart customers and companies alike. The country’s antibody count may be rising, but we are dangerously low in forbearance for one another.

• “Vaccine passports” have been hotly debated for months, usually in terms of how a requirement that people offer proof of vaccination before traveling, going to shops, etc., would affect privacy and liberty. Less attention has gone to the practical questions of how passports would work, given that we have not instituted a secure system for establishing who has and who has not gotten the vaccine. Notwithstanding this difficulty, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio says that “proof” of at least one shot will be required for indoor dining, gyms, and concerts. The policy’s main goal, to the extent it has one, has to be to protect the unvaccinated from themselves, since they pose little risk to the vaccinated. It may nudge a few people to get vaccinated, especially if inertia has stopped them. What it will mostly do, though, is provide suppliers of fake IDs with a new line of business.

• Eighteen Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, have joined with Democrats in support of one of President Biden’s chief domestic priorities. They agreed to authorize $550 billion in new infrastructure spending and allowed Biden to tout a bipartisan achievement. It’s spending that we don’t need and can ill afford. The nation’s infrastructure is not crumbling, and what legitimate needs exist can be easily addressed from the hundreds of billions of dollars that had already been slated for infrastructure. And it isn’t as if the federal government has all sorts of money to throw around. Quite the contrary; the U.S. was on an unsustainable fiscal path before COVID-19 hit, and then lawmakers added $6 trillion in new spending during the pandemic. The White House budget projected that debt as a share of the economy would exceed the prior record – set during World War II – by the end of the year. Despite repeated promises that the new bill would be paid for, the Congressional Budget Office found that it would add a further $256 billion to deficits. As bad as this is, it is only the warm-up act. Immediately after securing the votes needed to pass this bipartisan deal through the Senate, Democrats advanced a $3.5 trillion budget resolution to enact a sweeping progressive agenda. If this is what Republicans consider reasonable compromise, we’d hate to see what they consider capitulation.

• On a pure party-line basis, Senate Democrats voted to approve that $3.5 trillion budget resolution. The 2020 Democratic presidential primaries were portrayed as a clash of the resurgent Left and the more traditional liberal wing of the party, but the reconciliation bill shows that while traditional Democrats were said to have won the battle, the Left has certainly won the war. With socialist senator Bernie Sanders at the helm of the Budget Committee, the resolution he spearheaded would erect the foundation for many of the radical ideas he advanced during his own presidential campaigns. It would offer universal pre-K, subsidized child care, free community college, and government housing assistance, expand Obamacare, create a new government-run health-care program for low-income Americans, and add dental and vision coverage to the currently unsustainable Medicare system. The resolution also advances many priorities of the Green New Deal and even promises amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. While it is not a done deal yet, the bill would be able to pass without a single Republican vote. Those lost Georgia Senate seats are proving costlier and costlier with each passing day.

• From 1976 to 2020, regardless of partisan control of Congress, every annual appropriations bill funding Medicaid included the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortions for enrollees except in rare circumstances. Before leaving town for the August recess, House Democrats ended that streak by unanimously voting for an appropriations bill without the amendment. Taxpayer funding of elective abortion is both unpopular and a pernicious policy that increases the abortion rate. The Hyde amendment has saved tens of thousands of lives from abortion each year it has been in effect. The good news is that appropriations bills can be filibustered, and that means Republicans in the Senate can and will block final passage of this one. The bad news is that the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is not subject to a filibuster, and Democrats are trying to use the bill to create a new “Medicaid-like” program that would fund abortion-on-demand. (The new program would at first be available only in the twelve states that rejected Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.) That means it will likely fall to West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin to prevent the creation of a new Medicaid program that will provide direct taxpayer funding for elective abortions. In June, Manchin said: “I’m going to support Hyde in every way possible.” If the senator meant what he said, he must make clear that he will vote against any reconciliation bill that uses taxpayer dollars to fund elective abortions.

• The House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot began with testimony from police officers who were in the thick of it. D.C. cop Michael Fanone recounted being “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country.” His comrade Daniel Hodges, who was crushed between two Capitol doors by the rioters, said there was “no doubt in my mind” that his assailants intended to kill members of Congress. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn recalled a group of 20 reviling him for his race. Capitol Police sergeant Aquilino Gonell thought, “This is how I’m going to die, defending this entrance.” The Capitol riot was a Walpurgisnacht of vandalism and fruitcake ideology, unleashed by the reckless rhetoric of President Trump and his most hard-core supporters at the rally that preceded it and over the months before that. What other connections, if any, they had with the ensuing mayhem, the committee should determine. Beware of the committee’s partisan orientation. But be more wary of those who would bury this shameful episode in oblivion.

• In March 2020, the federal government suspended student-debt repayments. The suspension has been extended several times, and the Biden administration has announced a new expiration date of January 2022. The moratorium never made much sense as pandemic-related relief – being neither targeted to those in need nor an effective means of economic stimulus – and makes even less sense now, when the economy is roaring back and unemployment is especially low for degree-holders. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that borrowers needed more time to “plan for the resumption of payments.” A more credible rationale might be that the administration needs more time to plan how to make sweeping student-debt forgiveness permanent through executive action, as Democratic politicians, most prominently Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, have been demanding for months. To judge from Biden’s lawless extension of an eviction moratorium (see below), the fact that this would be an abuse of executive power and that Biden has recently expressed resistance to the idea wouldn’t pose much of an obstacle.

• Biden fêted auto manufacturers at the White House to celebrate his administration’s new fuel-economy rules, with representatives from Ford, General Motors, and other companies announcing their commitment to curbing carbon emissions by shifting to electric vehicles. Tesla, far and away the largest EV producer, was conspicuously absent. Like any good party planner, Biden had to make sure his guests meshed, and the guests of honor – the United Auto Workers – are not fans of Elon Musk. Climate change, the White House tells us, is an existential threat, but not so existential as all that.

• New polling indicates that California governor Gavin Newsom may be in danger of becoming the second Democrat to be recalled from that position in less than 20 years. Even after Californians successfully collected the almost 2 million signatures necessary to trigger an election, conventional wisdom said Newsom would prevail. The data reply that that’s anything but assured. A recent University of California, Berkeley poll pegged support for Newsom at 50 percent, and for his recall at 47 percent. Were a comparative few persuadables to shift into the latter category, and a few too many of his supporters to stay home on Election Day – September 14 – Newsom would be out of a job. Whatever the result, the fact that deep-blue California is even considering ejecting a long-time Democratic golden boy from office is a stunning indictment of the party’s basic governing competency in addressing energy policy, an ever-expanding homelessness crisis, and crime, among other endemic problems in the state. Maybe one day California voters will take these issues into consideration prior to one of their regularly scheduled quadrennial elections.

• On August 3, Democrats in Ohio’s deep-blue eleventh congressional district went to the polls to nominate the replacement of former Democratic congresswoman Marcia Fudge, who now serves in Biden’s cabinet. Nina Turner, a Bernie Sanders acolyte, lost by six percentage points to Shontel Brown, who had the backing of House majority whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. Nina Turner’s loss is being touted as another defeat of the Bernie Democrats by the Biden Democrats. A marginally more moderate Democratic Party is marginally better for the country, but it’s hard for conservatives to greet the news of Brown’s victory with anything approaching enthusiasm. Recent actions in the House – from unanimous support for taxpayer funding of abortion to plans for another multi-trillion-dollar spending spree – have served as a reminder that there’s more that unites the Biden Democrats and the Bernie Democrats than that divides them.

• It’s getting harder and harder to parody our politics, in large part thanks to people like Cori Bush. A Missouri congresswoman who pays for private security while advocating the defunding and disbandment of the police – you know, those paid to protect the little people – Bush explained the apparent contradiction in a recent interview, saying, “I’m going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life. If I end up spending $200,000, if I spend ten more dollars on it, you know what, I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up. And defunding the police needs to happen.”​​ We have to admit, this is just about the last politician we would have expected to embrace privatization.

• The SEC has now accepted a proposal from NASDAQ to insist that all the companies it lists have at least two “diverse” directors, “including one who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+,” or to explain why not. It is hard to see what this new requirement has to do with a company’s financial performance or how it respects the ability of a company’s shareholders – its owners – to decide for themselves who sits on their board. NASDAQ is itself a publicly traded company (and so free to set its own rules), but its market position is so strong that its regulatory authority is akin to that wielded by a public body. As in the case of various other institutions, from the SEC to the Fed, NASDAQ now appears to be straying from its original mandate in furtherance of a political agenda made worse, in its case, by the absence of any scrap of democratic legitimacy.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body, has released its sixth ballyhooed assessment. The panel declared “unequivocally” that mankind had contributed to the changing climate, something that will surprise those who were under the impression that the matter had already been, as they say, settled. But settling that point does nothing to settle what the risks of climate change are or how to mitigate them. Much of the West’s governing class is eager to rely on the hairshirt. What would then be left of prosperity and, for that matter, democracy (there is an unmistakably authoritarian side to much contemporary climate policy) is not too pleasant to contemplate. And these remain our best tools for meeting present and future challenges.

• There was some more good news regarding Michael Mann’s absurd lawsuit against National Review and others over a blog post from nearly a decade ago that he didn’t like. The Superior Court of the District of Columbia granted the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s motion for summary judgment, so CEI is out of the suit. The court also denied Mann’s motion to reconsider an order that granted NR’s motion for summary judgment from a few months ago. On the other side of the ledger, the court is, dismayingly, allowing the case against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg to continue to a jury trial (Steyn wrote the offending blog post, which included a quote from Simberg). Neither Steyn nor Simberg should be expected to go to trial in order to defend speech that is protected by the First Amendment, and the fact that they are still being harassed, years after this saga began, represents a continuing failure of the courts, of the anti-SLAPP laws that are designed to prevent precisely this sort of thing from happening, and, most important, of Michael Mann himself. We can only hope that the jurors called upon to hear this travesty of a case will have the good sense to finally bring it to a close.

• Nearly three decades and a trillion dollars later, Lockheed Martin’s F-35C aircraft are finally off on their first deployment aboard the carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). Years of delays, cost overruns, and procurement snags have seen the F-35 sluggishly gestate through five presidencies, with the final product still relatively unproven and becoming prematurely outdated by the day. The Department of Defense and Lockheed developed variants of the multirole F-35, known also as the “Lightning II,” for the needs of the Air Force, Marines, and Navy in bombing, fighting, and recon. While pilots rave about what the craft can do once airborne, the maintenance demands and expense of the program keep many of these new planes grounded and useless. The opportunity costs are enormous, with resources and time diverted to a plane that does not provide the best solution for reconnaissance, air-to-air combat, or air-to-ground missions. It is a choice of broad mediocrity over focused excellence.

• A report issued by Representative Michael McCaul (Texas), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, concludes, “The preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019.” It points out that the WIV made some unusual purchases that month, such as a $606 million procurement to overhaul the facility’s air-conditioning system. The procurements followed the disappearance of a virus database from the lab’s website, suggesting that a leak had taken place and that officials were scrambling to cover it up. McCaul also points to the role that WIV researchers played in a disinformation campaign to suppress discussion of a possible leak. The report highlights important information that has been too often overlooked, and sets a benchmark for Biden’s pending intelligence-community review of the origins question.

• American forces have not yet withdrawn from Afghanistan, and already our embassy there felt compelled to issue this bulletin: “The U.S. Embassy urges U.S. citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options. Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul.” The Taliban seizes town after town, murdering as they go. They move from house to house, looking for members of the security forces or employees of the government, dragging them out and killing them. Soon, the Taliban might have control of the whole country, much to the advantage of their fellow terrorists, including al-Qaeda. Our full withdrawal from Afghanistan is a disaster, in both security terms and moral ones.

• Fox host Tucker Carlson went to Hungary to do a sit-down with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán used the occasion to tout his border policies, which have insulated his small country, struggling with emigration, from the million Syrians (and those pretending to be Syrians) unwisely admitted in a swoop by the EU. But border control is not the only issue in the world. Orbán the self-styled Christian traditionalist cozies up to Xi and Putin – heirs of the very communist autocrats he once opposed as a young dissident (Hungarian media censored a question an apparently unaware Carlson asked him about Xi). American conservatives looking to Orbán as a model are indulging in political fantasy tourism (the Triumph circle in the mid Sixties did the same with the Carlist remnant in Franco’s Spain). American traditionalists should stick with America’s traditions – including ordered liberty, capitalism, and constitutionalism.

• News from Hong Kong continues to be very dark. Among those arrested are five members of the General Association of Hong Kong Speech Therapists. They are charged with publishing seditious books for children. In the United States, President Biden has offered temporary safe haven – 18 months – to Hong Kong people who are currently here. Presumably, they will not be required to return to Hong Kong and risk arrest, even after a year and a half. Hong Kong is beyond our saving, but we should help those of its residents we can.

• The debasement of a once great American brand continues. In an interview on CNBC, Nike CEO John Donahoe doubled down on his comments defending his company’s operations in China. “We take a very long-term view with China. We’ll continue to invest in China while also operating a very responsible global supply chain,” he said. Nike lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act, so its definition of “responsible” may be idiosyncratic.

• At a press conference in Manila, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Delfin Lorenzana, his Philippine counterpart, announced that the Duterte government would stick with our treaty encompassing joint military exercises and basing rights for U.S. personnel. President Rodrigo Duterte had said in a fit of pique last February that he would terminate the agreement, after the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning the brutality of his anti-drug campaigns. His reversal is a major victory, averting fears that a key U.S. ally in the Indo-Pacific would leave Washington’s orbit. Duterte’s move to abrogate the treaty didn’t make much sense to begin with, as his country is contending with Beijing’s aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea. Now the U.S. and the Philippines can redouble their cooperation to confront the China threat.

• Escaping tyranny in their home country, many Belarusians have fled to Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. One such was Vitaly Shishov, who led an organization called “Belarusian House in Ukraine.” Its purpose was to help refugees there. Shishov, age 26, was found hanged in a park – almost certainly a murder meant to look like a suicide. Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, does not believe that his remit ends at his borders. Then there is the case of Krystina Timanovskaya. She was a member of Belarus’s track team at the Tokyo Olympics. She criticized the team’s coaches – whereupon her country’s authorities tried to bundle her back home. Japanese authorities were able to keep her from being sent back. She is now in Poland, on a humanitarian visa. Meanwhile, her family and friends in Belarus are in jeopardy because of their ties to her. The downfall of the Belarusian dictatorship cannot come soon enough.

• Alta Fixsler has struggled for her life since her birth in December 2018. The daughter of Israeli citizens, she has been receiving life-sustaining treatment at a hospital in Manchester, England. Although her prognosis is grim, hospitals in Israel have agreed to care for her. Meanwhile, the State Department has granted her a visa to travel to the United States for medical assessment and treatment. Under neither plan would the National Health Service in the United Kingdom incur any cost, thanks to the charities and other institutions that have stepped up. Even so, Alta’s doctors in the U.K. want to withdraw life support and prevent her from traveling. A judge on the U.K. supreme court has affirmed their decision. The European Court of Human Rights rejected an appeal by the parents, who say that withdrawal of treatment would violate their religious beliefs. The girl’s life barely flickers but nonetheless elicits respect from those who want to make sacrifices on her behalf. The law’s insistence that her life is not worth preserving, and that her parents should not be allowed to act otherwise, is monstrous.

• A professor at a University of California medical school recently was recorded begging forgiveness – “if you can summon some generosity to forgive me!” etc. – for uttering the words “when a woman becomes pregnant.” Students alerted to the menace of transphobia had complained, and the professor, doing a very good impersonation of a Maoist self-criticism session, stated, “The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.” (Really? What about cannibalism or genocide or serving on the Cleveland school board?) Reporter Katie Herzog has collected a sampling of these stories, and they are both terrifying and absurd. Not to be outdone by the woke medical students, the American Medical Association has recommended removing “sex” as a category from birth certificates, because it has the “potential for discrimination.” And they wonder why people won’t just “listen to the science.”

• Until recently, National Public Radio banned editorial staff from attending “marches, rallies, and public events” and taking stances of advocacy on “controversial” or “polarizing” issues. They are now allowed to express support for “the freedom and dignity of human beings, the rights of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.” One of National Review’s editors regularly participates in public prayer vigils for an end to abortion outside abortion clinics, where too often women feel as if they have no other choice than to end the life of their unborn child. Should a pro-life NPR editor exist, may she now join?

• Even before the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles had secured her position as the greatest female American gymnast and perhaps the greatest of all time – the “GOAT,” as the kids say – among gymnasts of any nation or gender. With four gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, 19 more in World Championship competition, and feats of athleticism so extravagant they fed talk of rules changes to stop her, the 24-year-old faced sky-high expectations in Tokyo. Biles repeatedly proved her toughness as a survivor of sexual abuse and a competitor who played through innumerable injuries. But she is also human. In Tokyo, she got the “twisties,” gymnast talk for becoming disoriented in the air and losing track of where the ground is. A visibly shaken Biles withdrew mid-event from the team competition. She was unfairly vilified as a quitter in some right-wing quarters, but the decision was prudent; gymnasts have died from being unable to land well. Meanwhile, the same media that stoked the pre-Olympic hype machine tried to paint her withdrawal as a heroic and admirable blow for self-care rather than an understandable setback. A healthy society honors heroes and heroines for what they accomplish and overcome. Biles rebounded to claim a single bronze medal on the balance beam. We salute her landing.

• Linda Dunegan felt shame for her mother’s occupation. Both had fled Vietnam in 1975, with the help of an American, the mother’s second husband. The family moved to America. The parents divorced. Mother and daughter ended up in Alaska. The mother worked as a waitress and then, because the pay was better, as an exotic dancer in Anchorage. Meanwhile, the daughter had grown to love the Christian faith, first for the material help that she and her mother had found at a local church, and then for the truth that its members helped open her eyes to. In her late forties, Dunegan, now a real-estate investor in Anchorage, sought to buy a building that had housed a long-running strip club, one that perhaps her mother had worked in. Walking through the dusty building, she and the prospective pastor saw past the catwalk and the poles, but the owner was slow to sell. Dunegan prayed. After five years, the owner relented. Fantasies on 5th, as it was called, has given way to Open Door Baptist Church. “The redemption story is not for the public,” says Dunegan. “It was for me and for my mom.”

• A memorial plaque will be erected at Fort Benning for Felix Hall, an 18-year-old African-American Army private who was lynched at the fort more than 80 years ago amid World War II. The perpetrators of the lynching were never arrested and tried, and the fact that Felix Hall was serving his country in defense of freedom only magnified the heinousness of the crime committed against him. Let his memory be honored.

• Ron Popeil made a fortune by hawking a vast array of household inventions on television, beginning in 1959 with the Ronco Chop-O-Matic vegetable slicer. But his greatest invention was creating a revolution in direct marketing. Popeil’s late-night TV ads persuaded thousands of viewers to skip the second half of Gilligan’s Island, grab the phone, dial Ronco’s operators (who, conveniently, were always standing by), and order the company’s latest miracle – Pocket Fisherman, Cap Snaffler, Mr. Dentist, even GLH-9 (a.k.a. Hair in a Can). His genius lay in persuading sleepy viewers that making that call would greatly change their life for the better – even with devices as manifestly useless as the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler. But wait, there’s more! Popeil’s other great insight, as 60-second spots gave way to half-hour infomercials, was that TV ads really could be more entertaining than the programs, and could attract viewers on their own merits. Dead at 86, R.I.P.

• On the afternoon of February 23, 1945, an Associated Press photographer snapped a shot of six Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, a Japanese island that was the site of a heated battle in the final stages of the Second World War in the Pacific theater. The image captured the tenacity and fighting spirit of the U.S. armed forces throughout the conflict and soon was elevated to the status of a national icon. It appeared on a postage stamp that summer. A life-size replica adorns the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. “Frankly, I didn’t see it,” said Colonel Dave Severance 20 years later, referring to the famous flag-raising. “I was with some of my other men” and “involved in combat.” All the same, as battalion commander, he had dispatched the six men to the mountaintop and so remains forever near the center of that famous moment in American history. He was portrayed in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film about the Battle of Iwo Jima and its legacy. A decorated veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well, he retired in 1968. Dead at 102. R.I.P

Exit Cuomo

Those streaks you see in the night sky are the Cuomonid meteor shower, caused by the disgrace of New York’s three-term governor. State attorney general Letitia James issued a report detailing eleven accusations of sexual harassment against Andrew Cuomo, prompting calls for his resignation from President Biden, both of New York’s senators, mayoral candidate Eric Adams, and a raft of other pols, almost all Democrats. Seeing no options, he finally followed their advice.

His father, Mario Cuomo, a man as upright as he was liberal, would be appalled by Andrew’s grossness. His only contribution to his son’s debacle was a family culture of wariness amounting to paranoia. The only person Mario ever talked to was Andrew; the only person Andrew ever talks to is himself.

Cuomo’s sexual scandals follow the unraveling of his reputation as a COVID-fighter. His tough-talking press conferences were widely hailed. But his performance was disastrous, as he sent COVID-sufferers to nursing homes, where many perished. Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.), by contrast, looked at the evidence, kept the ill and the vulnerable apart, and saved thousands of lives.

Cuomo is not falling alone. Roberta Kaplan, a founder of the feminist lobbying group Time’s Up, helped brainstorm a hit piece meant to attack one of Cuomo’s accusers – a favor in return for Cuomo’s pro-abortion record. Although the piece never ran, Kaplan resigned once her complicity came out. Good riddance.

Cuomo’s passing leaves a hole in New York politics that the AOC-left aspires to fill. That is a fight for tomorrow. For now, the Empire State enjoys a much-needed cleanse.

The Eviction Disgrace

In early August, President Biden renewed the same federal eviction moratorium that he had been told repeatedly was unconstitutional. Worse still, Biden took his action with the open intention of gaming the court system in order “to keep this going for a month – at least.” Evidently, those “norms” we’ve heard so much about will be kept on ice for a while longer.

In July, the Supreme Court confirmed that, by acquiescing to the request, the CDC had “exceeded its existing statutory authority” and was obliged to stop doing so by the end of the month. In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh suggested that the program could continue only in the wake of “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation).” Not only is President Biden aware of this ruling, he has repeatedly instructed his team to look into it. Per Gene Sperling, an aide, Biden “not only kicked the tires, he has double-, triple-, quadruple-checked” the legality of the measure. The result? In Biden’s own words, “the bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”

Alas, Biden did not talk only to legal experts. He also talked to figures such as Representatives Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) and Cori Bush (D., Mo.), both of whom told him that extending the moratorium was the right thing to do whether or not it was legal. When he was obliged to choose between his oath of office and the desires of the progressive wing of his party, he chose the latter.

It is telling that Congress, which has been happy to spend trillions of dollars fighting COVID-19, has nevertheless declined to change the law – perhaps because, the legalities aside, it has realized that the moratorium is making a mess of its other initiatives. One of the core aims of the various relief measures that have been signed since last year has been to prevent unemployed Americans from getting behind on their bills, including rent, during periods in which they were unable to work. By adding an eviction moratorium on top of its spending – and, thereby, deferring rent arrears into the future – the federal government has managed simultaneously to limit the immediate demand for its $46.6 billion rent-assistance program, to discourage renters from finding work, and to ensure that the brunt of both problems will be felt by the millions of small-time landlords who do not have access to the Treasury’s largesse.

Given our rising federal debt, and the higher-than-usual risk of inflation, it would be unwise for Washington, D.C., to add to this number. But, if it must, it should do so in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution and that will not undermine Congress’s broader aims. President Biden has made it clear that he cares about neither of these things. Congress, and the Supreme Court, should make it clear that they do.