Monthly Archives: August 2025

A Weakness in Good People

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal is deeply along the right track.

The most reliable way to understand dictators’ thoughts is to read their own writing…. From Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (1902) to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925) and Mao’s “On New Democracy” (1940), the blueprints for conquest are there in black and white. So it is with Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021).

Add Stalin to that, and there are a host of others in recent and distant history. A weakness that good people have, though, is that having read those dictators’ words, as many of us (most of us, at least of some of them?) have, too many of us don’t believe they really mean it—they’re just exaggerating for effect, or they’re too mad to be taken seriously, or…any excuse to dismiss avert our eyes will do.

It is a serious weakness: good people have an extremely difficult—often fatal—time believing the depth of evil and depravity that exists in dictators and especially of their willingness and intent on acting on their written intensions.

It’s necessary to take them at their word. And then to take the necessary next step: hold them to their word and move sternly to preempt them. And where preemption fails, to counter them decisively and totally, as we finally did in eradicating Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, remaking those nations as friendly to and respective of their neighbors.

Bureaucrats Leaving

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This time from the CDC. Following Susan Monarez’ removal as CDC Director (which she was contesting as I wrote this, but my point remains the same), several top CDC officials resigned. This isn’t the chaotic mess that some pundits want us to believe, though.

Monarez is on her way out, one way or another, because she repeatedly

clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and members of his staff….

Kennedy is her boss, and her insubordination was actively cheered by the Progressive-Democrats in Congress. Senator Patty Murray (D, WA):

I had serious doubts about CDC Director Monarez’s willingness to stand up against RFK Jr’s personal mission to destroy public health in America—I’m glad that I was wrong[.]

I’ll elide comment on the Progressive-Democrat’s cynically conclusory characterization of Kennedy’s “mission.” There are a couple of reasons why government bureaucrats these days leave beside wanting to move on after having been in such high pressure jobs for some time. One is that they’re disgruntled that they’re no longer in control of government policy (viz., Fiona Hill’s infamous “quite cross” testimony during Trump I’s first impeachment) and are instead relegated to their proper role of carrying out the directives of their bosses and of their bosses’ boss, the President. In frustration, they quit or are fired.

Another reason is that they disagree with those policies and they believe that they cannot in good conscience support them, so they resign. Of the latter two departure reasons, this is the honorable one.

In either case, the disagreements are good things to argue during the discussions at the heart of any decision process. Those discussions should necessarily be private, and once the boss has made his decision, the only honest thing to do is to carry them out, the bureaucrats’ disagreements no longer being relevant, or to resign. Continuing to resist, especially leaking their disagreements to the press, exposes such individuals for what they are: self-important bureaucrats who happen to have, in the present cases, medical or science degrees. They are, on net, no loss when they go.

In the end, a net benefit: the President—whomever he might be from administration to administration—gets a crop of bureaucrats who are on board with his policies rather than being saddled with self-important Know Betters believing themselves the government’s policy makers.

And then We the People can then make a more informed decision about whom to hire into the White House, more confident—or at least less unconfident—in the premise that the policies we’re voting up or down have been his and not those of that crop of bureaucrats.

“Unprecedented Violation of Norms”

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That’s what Greg Ip said about removing Federal Reserve Bank Presidents in his Wall Street Journal piece decrying (otherwise generally legitimately) the Federal Reserve’s potential loss of its independence.

Removing bank presidents would be an unprecedented violation of norms. But Trump has demonstrated repeatedly he is willing to violate norms.

Couple things wrong with that claim. First, such a removal would certainly go against norms, but there would be—can be—no violation. Norms are habits, even traditions, but there is nothing at all binding in them. Calling moves against norms “violations” is exaggeration even if the phrasing is…the norm.

Second, and most importantly, using the idea that such a move would be unprecedented, never before done, to argue that it ought not be done here is, at best, singularly bad logic. Everything humans do—every single thing nature does—was once done for the first time, was once unprecedented. If we never did anything that had never been done before, 10,000 years of human hunter-gathering, civilization, and advance would never have happened, and we’d still be competing with apex predators for road kill on the savannah.

Tending to not doing something never before done, tending to stay within “norms,” is highly useful: it lends a measure of stability and predictability to human actions, and that’s especially useful in matters of law. That cannot, though, be allowed to prevent doing something better just because that better something is unprecedented.

Tying back to the center of Ip’s piece, removing Fed Bank Presidents before their term is up, removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook before her term is up, may or may not be good ideas, but they should be decided on the merits of the individual cases, not on the never-been-done-before nature of the removals.

Hypocrisy of Progressive-Democrats

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Recall the bodice-ripping and the hysterical threats to counter-gerrymander engaged in by Progressive-Democrat politicians and governors, particularly the governors of California and Illinois, because Texas gerrymandered. Here is a table showing the extent of Progressive-Democrat gerrymandering, done explicitly to limit, even to completely shut out, the Republican Party from their States’ Congressional delegations (California and Illinois highlighted).

MA: 36% Republican, 0 seats
CT: 42% Republican, 0 seats
ME: 46% Republican, 0 seats
NM: 46% Republican, 0 seats
NH: 48% Republican, 0 seats
RI: 42% Republican, 0 seats
VT: 32% Republican, 0 seats
HI: 38% Republican, 0 seats
DE: 42% Republican, 0 seats

CA: 38% Republican, only 9 of 52 seats (20.9%)
IL: 44% Republican, only 3 of 17 seats (17.6%)
NY: 43% Republican, only 7 of 26 seats (26.9%)
MD: 34% Republican, only 1 of 8 seats (12.5%)
NJ: 46% Republican, only 3 of 12 seats (25%)
OR: 41% Republican, only 1 of 6 seats (16.7%)

This is their dishonesty, too, since hypocrisy is a subset of that.

H/t Frank Tuslow and ralflongwalker.

Not Really

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President Donald Trump (R) wants the Senate to get rid of its Blue Slip Rule, which a couple of New Jersey Progressive-Democrats used to block attorney Alina Habba’s Senate confirmation as US Attorney for New Jersey even from getting out of committee. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors claim that threatens the Senate’s role in the checks and balance structure of our Federal government. Never mind the editors’ obfuscatory natterings about the machinations Trump has been going through to get her in that position as Acting US Attorney; the alleged threat to checks and balances is the thrust of their editorial.

The editors finished with this in their penultimate paragraph:

Yet that’s [getting rid of the Blue Slip process] up to the Senate, and the Founders gave the chamber its advise-and-consent power for a reason.

The role of the Senate under our Constitution, in the present context, is precisely to provide advice and where warranted consent to a President’s nominations. That’s the whole Senate, though, not one or two self-important or virtue-signaling (or both) Senators. Even the erstwhile filibuster of judicial nominations required a significant collection of Senators—more than 40 of them—to enact a block.

The time of Blue Slips never was, legitimately, and it’s time for the blockage to be cleared away.