Adam Andrzejewski | The Depth of the Swamp

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide

February 2020  • Volume 49, Number 2 • Christopher Caldwell

Bloomberg Sells ‘Sustainability,’ but Buyer Beware

Virtue-signaling corporate standards may be better for financial firms than they are for investors.

Trump has few alternatives to Yucca

The Trump administration bailing on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the nation’s long-delayed nuclear waste storage site has exposed the reality that the United States does not have viable alternative solutions.

“It’s clear we don’t have a way forward for a repository of nuclear waste at the moment,” said Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University.

Until recently, the Trump administration had proposed funding to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain despite a political onslaught from Nevada’s political delegation fighting against the site ever being completed.

President Trump, due to face voters this year in politically important Nevada, flipped the script with a tweet this month that seemed to take Yucca Mountain off the table. He said previous administrations “failed to find lasting solutions,” and he committed to exploring other “innovative approaches.”

His subsequent budget proposal vaguely pledged to initiate “processes to develop alternative solutions” by working with states and other stakeholders.

The administration plans to form an interagency working group to determine more precise next steps. In the few details described in the budget, the White House indicated that Trump supports the implementation of an interim storage program and research on “alternative technologies” to handle nuclear waste.

Democrats running for president also uniformly oppose Yucca Mountain, but they have not clearly articulated an alternative.

Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government promised nuclear power plants that it would handle the waste. The law, amended five years later, directed the Energy Department to take possession of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and dispose of it in a deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain.

“We have seen every kind of ‘other than Yucca’ proposal,” said Jordan Haverly, director of energy and environmental policy for Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, a longtime Yucca supporter. “All of them talk about these great new ideas, but eventually get to a point where Yucca is still the law as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.”

Indeed, alternatives to handle the nation’s 80,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants have not yet borne fruit.

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Do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama.

Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause

By Victor Davis Hanson    March 1, 2020

New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama

amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/new-impeachment-rules-would-snare-obama/

March 2, 2020

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms. 

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them. 

At least he did before the Trump hysteria.

Criminalizing Politics

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This Is No Time to Go Wobbly on Capitalism

As Democrats embrace outright socialism, some CEOs and Republicans call for unwise compromises.

Bloomberg’s Business Nanny

The Sustainability Accounting board is a stalking horse for progressive politics.

The Incompetence Party

The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s that many voters doubt the party’s ability to govern anymore.

Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.

It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democratic Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.

The Democrats resemble Europe’s aging political parties—Britain’s Labour, France’s Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. All have simply deflated with voters.

Signs of public fatigue with the Democrats could be seen in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Besides incompetence, the big story out of Iowa was low turnout. In New Hampshire the story was voter indecision. Once past Bernie’s 25% cement-block base, many voters were flipping a coin in the voting booth to pick from the other candidates.

What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren, by now a household name, got dropped to fourth place? Joe Biden’s humiliating fifth is a personal disaster, but what does that say about the party itself?

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