• Between the Hur report and his flailing response to it, Joe Biden had a rough couple of days last week. Fortunately, he’s already forgotten them.
• The Senate voted 70–29 to provide $95 billion of aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. In theory, the bill has majority support in the House, but the bigger obstacle is getting it to the floor. Speaker Mike Johnson has insisted that any aid package include provisions to secure the border, but Democrats are not going to go any further than the border bill that just died because conservatives opposed it for sins of omission and commission. Johnson might not even be able to bring the bill to the floor, because the Rules Committee would have to approve it first. Another alternative would be a discharge petition, whereby a majority of the House gathers signatures that force a floor vote. However, that would require several Republicans to join Democrats to undermine their own leadership. Perhaps the bill could be divided into its component parts—allowing Republicans so inclined to vote for aid to Israel but not to Ukraine. But Biden has vowed to veto any bill for Israel alone, which has dissuaded congressional Democrats from letting such legislation reach his desk. In summary, it’s difficult to envision what the path to House passage of the aid bill would look like. Oh, and did we mention that the House is not in session again until February 28 and faces a March 1 deadline to avert a partial government shutdown?
• On their second attempt, House Republicans impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. House Republicans focused on two charges. First, that Mayorkas has initiated a policy of knowingly releasing migrants into the United States who ought to have been detained. The second is that he repeatedly testified before Congress that he had “operational control” of the border, when in fact he was creating an uncontrolled crisis that threatens to bankrupt communities along the border, stresses the finances of major cities far from it, and has even led to school cancellations as the U.S. tries to cope with the resulting influx. There have been, by some estimates, more than 8 million enforcement encounters nationwide and at least 6 million illegal crossings. Mayorkas’s policy is to release migrants pending asylum hearings, sometimes scheduled years from now, that no one expects to be held. Every loophole for granting immediate release or even work permits is stretched. Beyond being an injustice to America’s citizens and workers and a major security risk, Mayorkas’s high-handed negligence is an offense to constitutional order itself: The executive branch is supposed to enforce the laws Congress makes. Even if a Senate trial is unlikely to result in Mayorkas’s removal, it has the potential to draw these points to the attention of the public.
• Donald Trump was speaking to one of his rallies in South Carolina. “What happened to her husband?” he asked. He was referring to Nikki Haley’s husband, Michael. “Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.” Knew what? Who knows? In fact, as Nikki Haley later pointed out, Michael is deployed to Djibouti, serving in the South Carolina National Guard. Trump subsequently addressed the matter on his social-media platform, Truth Social. “I think he should come back home to help save her dying campaign,” the former president wrote. We think that Republicans should nominate someone with an ounce of character.
• Special counsel Robert Hur honestly reported his lengthy observation of what the American people glimpse daily: The president is in serious cognitive decline, unable to recall basic information—e.g., when he was vice president, and what year his son Beau died (a tragic event during his vice presidency, about which he wrote a memoir). Instantly, Democratic wrath rained down on the prosecutor. It is cynically misplaced. Regulations required Hur to provide a “confidential report” to the attorney general, fully explaining his charging decisions in the investigation of Biden’s decades of mishandling classified intelligence. Merrick Garland, not Hur, decided to publicize the report’s blunt assessment. Hur found evidence that Biden acted willfully. Hur was required to explain why this evidence did not compel him to recommend indictment—his rationale being Biden’s mental incapacity, its likely effect on a sympathetic jury, and the possibility of lengthy litigation over his fitness to stand trial. It is not Hur’s fault that Democrats are hell-bent on nominating someone a jury might find too senescent to have formed criminal intent.
• The criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in Fulton County, Ga., is a theater of scandal—for the prosecutor. As we go to press, a judge in Atlanta has been conducting a hearing on whether District Attorney Fani Willis and the outside special prosecutor she hired, Nathan Wade, should be disqualified from the case. They conceded they have been having a romantic affair—albeit only after Willis suggested that the defendant who raised the issue was engaging in (what else?) racism. The salacious details matter because it is alleged that Willis paid Wade extravagantly out of county funds allocated to deal with her office’s Covid backlog and then financially benefited when the couple used the money for luxury vacations. (She says she reimbursed him in cash and thus has few records of it.) The court will consider whether not only Willis and Wade but the DA’s office as a whole must be recused. Love conquers all, and may yet quash this prosecution.
• There are many ways to explain Democrats’ pickup of New York’s third congressional district. Democrat Tom Suozzi, the election winner, had represented much of the district in a previous stint in Congress; his successor, Republican George Santos, became a national punch line before being expelled from Congress. Of course, Donald Trump has a different theory: Republican Mazi Pilip was not MAGA enough. Pilip, according to Trump’s excuse-making on Truth Social, was a “very foolish woman” who didn’t endorse him and tried to “straddle the fence.” Trump added—we will alter the capitalization to avoid yelling at our readers—“MAGA, which is most of the Republican Party, stayed home—and it always will, unless it is treated with the respect that it deserves. I stayed out of the race, ‘I want to be loved!’” Perhaps Trump’s erratic behavior and unpopularity in the suburbs of major cities such as New York offers a compelling reason for a Republican campaigning in a toss-up district to keep some distance from the former president.
• Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) announced that he will not be pursuing reelection—unwelcome news. Instead, he is opting instead to enter the private sector while continuing to work on foreign-policy issues. Unwelcome news. The four-term representative from the Dairy State and former Marine officer has led the most serious and successful committee in the House, the Select Committee on China. As Semafor’s Ben Smith described it, “interacting with Gallagher’s committee was like dealing with the government of a different, more functional, country.” Functional gets short shrift in the particularly fractious 117th Congress, and Gallagher’s recent vote against impeaching Mayorkas—he thought it unconstitutional—brought the wolves howling for his head. Gallagher is on firmer ground in noting that the “Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season.” But it must be said that there are several hundred others we would prefer to see leave office before Gallagher.
• The reckoning with the U.N.’s association with terrorism continues. The Israel Defense Forces recently found a Hamas intelligence center beneath the Gaza City headquarters of UNRWA, the scandal-plagued U.N. aid agency for Palestinians. The IDF didn’t catch it the first time they passed through the area, as the entrance to the tunnel is on the grounds of a school nearby. The half-mile-long facility, which journalists toured, is impressive, hosting a computer server farm and electrical equipment. It’s an intelligence gold mine. UNRWA leaders denied that they had any knowledge of the facility operating under them, an explanation undermined by the fact that the agency has lied numerous times about its links to Hamas. It’s even harder for UNRWA to claim ignorance about the weapons caches that the IDF discovered in the Gaza headquarters. Each new revelation—and there will be many more—is another argument for the agency’s total dissolution.
• On Sunday night, while 123 million Americans were watching the Super Bowl, Israel Defense Forces mounted a daring raid deep into the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. There, while under fire, the IDF liberated two of the hostages Hamas has held in its custody since the October 7 massacre. The successful raid isn’t just a coup for Israel but also a blow to its critics, who have maintained that Rafah is little more than a refugee camp packed with innocent civilians upon whom Israel is taking out its unjustified vengeance. Perhaps that explains why Israel’s critics are, even more than usual, rending their garments in anguish over this effort to save Israeli lives. “The Super Bowl has been used as a driver of war in the past,” read one especially unhinged reaction, from the Nation’s Dave Zirin. “Now we have ‘the Super Bowl massacre,’” he added in reference to the social-media hashtag campaign to which the joyless shut-ins who spent Super Bowl Sunday in psychological agony committed themselves. “Most Americans would also agree Israel has a right to respond,” the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch wrote. “But like this?” To the Israelis who did not seek this war and had few expectations that their captive family members would survive it, the answer is undoubtedly, “Yes.”
• U.S. intelligence agencies have learned that Russia is developing a not-yet-operational space-based nuclear weapon designed to destroy American satellites. Such a weapon would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The news was made public via a cryptic announcement by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, calling on the Biden administration to declassify information about the Russian program. In his statement, Turner did not give specifics about the new threat, but anonymous sources quickly revealed details to ABC News, to the consternation of the White House. No one should be surprised by Russian efforts to neutralize America’s technological edge even if such a move would violate the Kremlin’s treaty commitments. The world is growing more dangerous, and the era of our oceans’ buying us our safety has long since passed away.
• Tucker Carlson, late of Fox News, traveled to Russia to interview its president, Vladimir Putin. Nothing wrong with that in principle: Other journalists from the West have interviewed Putin. Carlson deserves credit for at least bringing up the imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. But on the whole he went easy on the man currently prosecuting a brutal war on Ukraine and sitting atop an autocratic state: He lobbed softballs, conceded Putin’s premises, and allowed him massive digressions purporting to justify the invasion of the Ukraine in the context of Russian history back to the ninth century. (Putin himself said afterward that Carlson was insufficiently challenging.) Carlson’s behavior following the interview has been even more disreputable. With a blinkered perspective reminiscent of gullible Westerners who came away impressed from curated visits to communist states during the Cold War, he called Moscow a nicer city than any in the United States, praising its subway system and grocery stores as far superior to America’s—ridiculous assertions easily disproved by anyone with even passing knowledge of the two countries. Carlson ought to know better. His vaunted skepticism of establishment narratives, unfortunately, gives out when the establishment in question is Russia’s autocracy.
• Dartmouth College dropped its SAT/ACT requirement for all applicants in June 2020, nominally as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficulty of administering standardized tests in lockdown conditions. The requirement remained suspended for several years, as part of a larger experiment throughout elite academia in relaxing standardized-testing requirements. Apparently Dartmouth was none too pleased with the resulting student body because it is now reinstating testing requirements for all applicants starting next year. It would be pleasing to believe that Dartmouth backtracked on its experiment because recent matriculating classes turned out to be shockingly unprepared; more likely it is because they turned out to be shockingly rich and white. That outcome should have surprised no one: When standardized testing—which allows even the poorest and least privileged to demonstrate intellectual ability—is removed from the mix, applications become the province of elites with access to résumé-padding extracurriculars and insider knowledge of the admissions process. The optimistic gloss is that learning is still possible, even for university administrators.
• Our long national nightmare is finally over, as anti-Israel student protesters at Brown University have finally ceased their weeklong hunger strike over the university’s refusal to divest its endowment of any investment funds that hold stock in companies supplying military goods to Israel. Student protest is nothing new, particularly at Brown (a notorious activist hotbed), but the university’s brush-off of the students’ complaints represents a praiseworthy stiffening of the spine of its president, Christina Paxson: In November, shouted down by students, she cravenly failed to read her prepared remarks defending the right of Jews on campus to so much as wear a Star of David. Perhaps the most amusing detail of the entire affair came from elsewhere: A handful of Harvard University students also went on hunger strike in solidarity with the Brown protesters . . . for twelve hours. One assumes that the smarter ones started the clock right after dinnertime.