Multiple reports say “Vice President Kamala Harris, currently running for president without an agenda, plans to ‘flip the script, on the border,” marvels the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. The idea is “to find a way to avoid blame for the Biden-Harris administration’s welcoming, encouraging, and accommodating more than 10 million illegal and unvetted border crossers who have entered the United States since Harris took office.” Yet “she has played a key role in border affairs in the last 3½ years”; this is “a disaster entirely of the president’s and vice president’s making. That will not change. One cannot ‘flip the script’ on a disaster.” “A candidate with an indelible record on an issue can’t just say the word and purport to be the opposite.”
“A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech,” warns Jonathan Turley at The Hill. “For over three years, the Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech,” and “as vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies.” Her VP pick, Tim Walz, “has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment,” including when Walz said: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Adds Turley: “With the addition of Walz, Democrats now have arguably the most anti-free speech ticket of a major party in more than two centuries. Both candidates are committed to using disinformation, misinformation and malinformation as justifications for speech controls.”
A Massachusetts judge has “greenlighted a student organization’s case against Harvard that alleges the university failed to protect the civil rights of Jewish students” from harassment and violence during campus protests, reports Bill Barr at The Free Press — “an unmistakable message to campus administrators” who won’t admit that “calls for the genocide of Jews violate their universities’ codes of student conduct” or practice a “brazen double standard” on academic freedom and free speech. But “this is more than a problem of doublespeak.” It seems schools “are making a deliberate choice not to” defend Jewish students. “The current crisis of campus antisemitism has laid bare for all Americans just how dangerous a cultural moment we are living in.” “We’ve seen this revolution before. It doesn’t end well.”
With the national debt topping $35 trillion and the country veering into “uncharted and dangerous” fiscal territory, “former Vice President Mike Pence is leading a new effort” to rein in runaway spending, cheers Reason’s Eric Boehm. “To get debt under control,” Pence’s nonprofit Advancing American Freedom “points out that lawmakers cannot simply focus on the discretionary part of the federal budget,” which accounts for less than 30% of spending. Rather, they must tackle entitlements, like Social Security, and hidden “tax expenditures,” such as “green energy subsidies.” Pence holds no elected office, but no one with power seems willing to engage the issue. “Pence has nothing to lose, and that means he’s free to say the things that others won’t. I hope he keeps talking.”
All the ugly news about President Biden’s decline has “not ceased to be pertinent because [he] is no longer running for re-election,” notes The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. “Since things keep happening in the world — for instance, this week, the nation that we’ve been arming for a defensive war decided to invade Russia — it seems like America could stand to learn a bit more about how the White House has been working recently.” Instead, “we’re getting the fulfillment of the bargain that was implicitly offered to Biden by his fellow Democrats — that by bowing out he would trade the shadow of scandal for the halo of self-sacrifice and coast through the final days.” Yet, “depending on Biden’s true capacities,” maybe “he should have resigned,” and some “crisis in the next few months” will “make the Democrats wish” he had.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board