Biden administration rule could lay groundwork for final dismantling of US institutional care

 Henry and Elizabeth Lahrmann were born with severe neurological damage. As infants, they were diagnosed with profound intellectual disabilities and suffered from West Syndrome, a seizure disorder. Today, both are tube-fed and quadriplegic, and their infantile spasms developed into an intractable condition characterized by periodic, life-threatening seizures. Despite these challenges, their mother, Caroline, says that Henry and Elizabeth are happy, largely because of where and with whom they live.

As children, Henry and Elizabeth lived at the Heinzerling Memorial Foundation, a 100-bed intermediate care facility (ICF) in Ohio founded in 1959 by a couple who mortgaged their family home to build and staff an institution offering around-the-clock care to severely disabled kids. Henry and Elizabeth thrived on Heinzerling’s campus, Caroline said, where they developed lifelong friends and grew increasingly independent with the aid of the facility’s protective environment and wraparound medical services.

“It’s the institution that gives them greater independence,” Caroline said in 2019. “Henry can wheel himself independently. He is safe everywhere he goes, and that gives him more independence. Elizabeth is getting so much more socialization at an ICF than she would get at home,” where, Caroline said, Henry and Elizabeth would be comparatively isolated. Today, Henry and Elizabeth continue to live happily at an Heinzerling-operated ICF.

Caroline is thrilled with her now-adult children’s care. Members of the Biden administration, however, are not.

Prominent disability advocates, who have found sympathetic ears in Biden’s cabinet, have long argued that “congregate settings,” like Heinzerling, are “segregated”—meaning, in this context, that they are predominantly inhabited by disabled people—and that government agencies should use their rulemaking and enforcement powers to disfavor and eventually close all such facilities, relocating residents to smaller, “community-based” settings. Such advocates—often higher-functioning disabled people who consider themselves spokesmen for the more severely disabled people living in institutional environments—argue that congregate settings unnecessarily limit residents’ freedom and are inherently prone to the kinds of abuse and neglect seen at some nineteenth- and twentieth-century asylums, care homes, and orphanages. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which interprets and enforces federal civil rights law relevant to health- and social-services providers and recipients, apparently agrees with the advocates’ position, and proposed a rule late last year that could upend the lives of millions of Americans like Henry and Elizabeth.

The proposed rule would amend OCR’s interpretation of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which bans disability-based discrimination in federally funded programs, in two major ways. First, it would bar state child-welfare agencies from considering congregate institutions, such as Heinzerling, “the most appropriate long-term placement for children, regardless of their level of disability.” Second, it would redefine “integrated settings” as those that give disabled people the “opportunity to interact with non-disabled persons to the fullest extent possible” and “are located in mainstream society.” Both changes were drafted with lawyerly precision and, if published as drafted, will eventually be leveraged by activist nonprofits and disability-rights ideologues in the Justice Department to shutter nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, and more.

OCR’s first change applies specifically to disabled foster children. The agency asserts that it is “never”—under any circumstances, and “regardless of” a child’s “level of disability”—appropriate to consider a congregate setting the “most appropriate long-term placement” for children. While the agency does not and could not know this to be true in every case, it justifies this claim by appealing to the Department of Justice’s assertion in a 2021 lawsuit against Alaska, and to “research in the field.” The “research” that both Justice and OCR cite—the latter in favor of the broad proposition that institutions are “never” appropriate long-term placements for disabled children—is a single 2014 literature review, which even concedes previous studies’ finding that disabled children in congregate institutions have seen “improvements in clinical symptoms.”

While OCR insists that its guidance reflects the scholarly consensus, the agency is reasoning backward from an ideological premise: that no one, no matter how severely disabled, wants or needs institutional care, and that, consequently, every congregate institution for people with disabilities should be closed. This has been the organizing principle of disability-rights advocacy in the United States since the Kennedy administration and is the stated position of many disability-rights groups. ADAPT, for example, a leading disability-rights nonprofit with which the Biden administration’s head of the Administration for Community Living once joined in protest, believes that “no one,” no matter their age or level of functioning, “needs to live in a nursing home.” ADAPT thus supports the “demise of the nursing home industry,” and advocates for serving all people, regardless of age or disability, in “community-based” settings.

While OCR’s guidance on Section 504 supposedly applies only to disabled foster children, its argument that a congregate setting is “never” an appropriate long-term placement for “children” does not distinguish between foster and non-foster children. Like the agency’s citation of the Department of Justice’s 2021 finding in Alaska, this sentence—“Congregate care should never be considered the most appropriate long-term placement for children, regardless of their level of disability”—likely will be cited out of context in future guidance to substantiate the federal government’s claim that no disabled child, foster or otherwise, should be sustained in a federally funded institutional setting. (While Henry and Elizabeth are not foster children, their cases show that some disabled children can be appropriately served in institutional environments, undermining OCR’s claim to the contrary.)

The rule, if published as proposed, will enable a massive lawfare campaign against state foster-care and disability systems. States that continue to use Medicaid funds to sustain severely disabled children like Henry and Elizabeth in congregate settings, even when such placements are voluntary, will face expensive lawsuits. The cost of those suits will give states an irresistible incentive to move kids like Henry and Elizabeth out of institutional settings without the children’s, their parents’, or their treatment professional’s consent. In the past, such transfers have sometimes been conducted by force and have resulted in higher than expected mortality rates for transferred residents.

While this portion of the proposed rule applies only to children, OCR and related agencies will likely apply its logic to adults in the future. Consider the arbitrariness of the agency’s position. Is there a meaningful clinical difference between a 17-year-old with severe mental disabilities and an 18-year-old with the same disabilities? If it is categorically inappropriate (“never appropriate . . . regardless of level of disability”) to place the 17-year-old in a long-term institutional setting, why would it ever be proper to place the 18-year-old in such an environment?

This, to disability-rights advocates, is a feature of the agency’s guidance: it would enable eventually declaring institutions of all kinds—nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, addiction-recovery centers, disability-specific campuses—categorically unsuitable and ineligible for federal funds. Joe Biden staffed OCR and related disability agencies, such as the Administration for Community Living, with lifelong disability-rights advocates, who almost certainly intend this ban on long-term childhood institutional placements to enable their longer-range goal: banning institutional placements for people of all ages, and closing all “institutions,” according to activists’ belief that no disabled person, no matter their age and “regardless of level of disability,” is better served in an institution than in a “community-based setting.”

That this is the agency’s intention is made clear by its second proposed change to the Section 504 guidance. OCR proposes to redefine “integrated settings”—a term of art describing settings eligible for federal Medicaid reimbursement under the home- and community-based-settings (HCBS) program—as those that allow “individuals with disabilities the opportunity to interact with non-disabled persons to the fullest extent possible; are located in mainstream society; offer access to community activities and opportunities at times, frequencies and with persons of an individual’s choosing; and afford individuals choice in their daily life activities.”

This change contains an implicit tension—it says, on the one hand, that an integrated setting is one where disabled people have “the opportunity to interact with non-disabled persons to the fullest extent possible”; on the other, it says that service recipients should be able to access “community activities and opportunities” with persons of their “choosing.” Can people with disabilities choose to receive services in a setting—a hospital, a campus, or some specialized facility—where people with similar disabilities congregate, and receive community-designated federal reimbursement for the costs associated with receiving those services? Given that another constitutive element of the agency’s integrated-settings definition is that the settings be located “in mainstream society,” the answer would seem to be “no.”

The agency is drawing a stark line between “integrated” and “segregated” settings to potentially lay the foundation for using Medicaid reimbursement rates to disfavor, and eventually close, “segregated” settings. Today, federal regulators allow certain congregate settings—such as farmsteads and other campus-based environments—to be deemed “integrated,” and thus eligible for HCBS reimbursement, if they allow residents adequate access to the broader community. Thus, a campus-based setting, while not located in “mainstream society,” could still get HCBS funds. The proposed guidance seemingly renders such settings ineligible for this funding. That’s significant, because disability-rights activists in the federal bureaucracy have incrementally pursued the goal of restricting what qualifies as “integrated settings” to those with the fewest disabled people living together. Pennsylvania, for example, has interpreted the federal guidance such that it restricts the size of Medicaid-eligible group homes to those with four or fewer residents. At the same time, these agencies have sought to expand the definition of “segregated settings” to include most campus-based and congregate facilities. If disability-rights groups’ statements are to be believed, the agency’s reason for etching a sharp distinction between “integrated” and “segregated” settings into HHS’s binding interpretation of federal law is to lay the foundation for eventually changing federal reimbursement rates for the two forms of service—with the eventual goal of giving states an irresistible incentive to move all patients in “segregated” (that is, congregated) settings into “integrated” settings, and eventually ceasing all federal payments to so-called segregated settings.

This has been activists’ long-standing plan: to dismantle institutional care in the United States. The University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration, for example, encouraged states to “use Medicaid rebalancing and other incentives to downsize and close all [intellectual and developmental disabilities] facilities serving 16 or more people.” Similar logic would be used to shut down most nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, addiction-treatment centers, and other forms of congregated social services, with the vanguard of the disability-rights movement calling for the abolition of long-term care.

OCR’s guidance is morally and practically indefensible. It could set the stage for the end of institutional care in America and disrupt the services received by thousands of disabled children across the country. Congress should use its review powers to prevent the proposed rule change from being published as final in the Federal Register. Barring that, a future administration should repeal the ban on federally funded long-term institutional placements for foster children and draft a new interpretation of Section 504 that asserts that “integration” does not always mean living in a setting with as few disabled people as possible.

Similarly, regulators should acknowledge that the friendships that people with disabilities forge in disability-specific (“segregated”) settings are just as valuable as the friendships they make in supposedly “integrated settings.” When Joey Jennings, a Pennsylvania man with severe autism whom I profiled two years ago for City Journal, was living in “the community,” he was evicted from several group homes, sent to six psychiatric wards, and regularly had the police called on him when he went to the local swimming pool, where his outbursts endangered the children swimming with him. When he was admitted to an “institution,” he was able regularly to use the on-campus pool and made friends with similar challenges. Countless children and adults with disabilities have had similar experiences.

“Community integration,” Caroline Lahrmann told me, “to these advocates, is defined as the most access to non-disabled people.” She said that the attitude was “discriminatory . . . toward people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” since it “implies that it is less valuable to form relationships with them, that they are not as valuable to be living with. My children don’t care whether someone is disabled or not—they just see people.”

John Hirschauer is an associate editor at City Journal.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/morally-and-practically-indefensible

'Official rationale’ for Biden’s oil, gas leasing halt?

 Senior lawyers at the Interior Department were caught off guard by President Biden‘s abrupt halt of new oil and natural gas lease sales shortly after taking office and wrestled to put an “official rationale” on the decision, emails obtained by The Washington Times show.

More than a month after the January 2021 executive order from Mr. Biden, career Interior Department officials relied on internet searches for news articles with media statements from agency representatives to respond to concerned governors of states affected by the decision.

What sparked the internal confusion was a March 1, 2021, letter from the Western Governors’ Association requesting to be consulted about the fate of future leases. Senior Interior Department attorneys set out on a quest to uncover the “official rationale” for Mr. Biden‘s executive order as they deliberated on how to respond to the Western Governors’ Association, a bipartisan group of 19 states.

On March 4, 2021, senior litigation specialist Merry Gamper sent an article by The Associated Press to Wendy Dorman, an agency attorney-adviser in the division of mineral resources. Ms. Gamper cited the response of Interior Department Communications Director Melissa Schwartz in the article.

“The onshore sales were postponed to confirm the adequacy of underlying environmental analyses, said Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz,” Ms. Gamper wrote to Ms. Dorman.

Ms. Dorman responded: “Merry, Thanks for your efforts in trying to track down the official rationale for lease sale postponements. I didn’t know where to begin.”

The episode raises questions about why attorneys handling administrative policies appeared to be kept out of the loop for so long.

The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The department produced internal emails for the Functional Government Initiative in response to a public records request.

“It turns out the ‘most transparent administration ever’ is not even transparent with its own career agency employees,” said Peter McGinnis, a spokesman for the government watchdog group. “Political appointees should certainly be responsible for making key decisions, even if that means sometimes overruling career staff. But keeping them in the dark well after the decision is made is downright dysfunctional.”

Days after taking office in January 2021, Mr. Biden signed a series of executive orders on climate change, including the pause on oil and gas drilling lease sales in public waters and on public lands pending an environmental review.

A yearslong power struggle ensued among the president, Congress and the courts as the fossil fuel industry, states and environmentalists slapped the administration with lawsuits.

The administration was eventually forced to lift its moratorium and make new lease sales under the Inflation Reduction Act despite the president’s 2020 campaign promise for “no new drilling.” Sales under Mr. Biden pale in comparison with those of his predecessors.

The Interior Department issued a five-year plan last year that includes the fewest new drilling leases since the program began. Only three are slated for 2024 to 2029.

The email exchanges provided to Functional Government Initiative include heavy redactions from the Interior Department. Ms. Gamper, Ms. Dorman and other top officials also struggled to track down an internal memo with more information. The agency did not provide the memo as part of the records request.

Ms. Gamper sent two additional news articles to Ms. Dorman with more statements about Mr. Biden‘s executive order from other state and national representatives.

One was an S&P Global article quoting Interior spokesman Tyler Cherry saying the pause “necessitates the postponement of proposed offshore and onshore lease sales on federal lands while the comprehensive review is underway.”

The other was from the Wyoming-based Casper Star-Tribune quoting a spokeswoman at the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming office stating the “delay will provide the new administration with time to ‘get up to speed’ and ‘go over environmental reviews.’”

“Once again, this is excellent intel,” Ms. Dorman said.

The Western Governors’ Association and the office of Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who co-authored the 2021 letter to the Interior Department, told The Times that their inquiry to the agency ultimately went unanswered.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/13/inside-secret-struggle-to-find-official-rationale-/

FTC Fails to Rewrite Antitrust Laws--Good

 Back in 2021, then-32-year-old Lina Khan’s rise to chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was heralded in the press as a new era in antitrust, and a forthcoming revolution that would jettison forty years of antitrust law in our nation. 

True to her progressive viewpoint, Ms. Khan used her position to target tech companies, on the flimsy basis that big companies were somehow antithetical to competition. To the cheers of many in Washington, she wielded her new power to pursue an agenda with the singular emphasis on breaking up big businesses. 

The four-decade-old standard that has guided our antitrust system is the familiar “consumer harm” doctrine, which, in simplified language, states that in order for a business to be guilty of an antitrust violation, there must be some degree of consumer harm.

In Chair Khan’s world, however, consumer harm was never a consideration. Instead, a company’s large size was enough to warrant investigation and legal action. 

Overwhelmingly, her pursuits have been blocked both in the courts and in Congress. She partnered with Representative Ciccilline at the House Judiciary Committee and her allies in the Senate to usher in a new standard for antitrust laws, but the bills she championed died in Congress, never having gained a critical mass of support. 

Her failed track record is extensive – and it’s worth revisiting her many forays to kill America’s thriving competition. 

In 2022, Ms. Khan set her sights on Meta’s acquisition of Within Limited. The FTC sued to block Meta’s attempt to purchase the virtual reality company, with the Khan standard of “Too Big to Exist” as the basis of the lawsuit. The court rejected the FTC’s novel legal theory. And today, her failure to block this merger has become another American success story, with the augmented reality market expected to reach $454 billion by 2030 with 23 million jobs across numerous companies. 

More recently, Khan has devoted taxpayer dollars to blocking Microsoft’s acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard. Now twice, the federal court has rejected the FTC’s case, with a Biden-appointed judge finding that the merger would “enhance, not lessen, competition in the cloud-streaming market.” Even more to the point, the judge found that the “FTC has not raised serious questions whether the proposed merger is likely to substantially lessen competition.” 

The FTC’s years-long pursuit of Amazon defies any premise of a legal framework. Ms. Khan has targeted one of Amazon’s most popular practices on its website – matching rivals’ discounts. This practice benefits consumers in the form of lower prices, fuels competition, and, significantly, mirrors a popular longstanding practice of physical stores. The FTC has failed to identify a remedy or alternative conduct for Amazon to pursue. Does it really make sense for the government to demand that retailers showcase less-than-great deals for consumers. 

Artificial Intelligence is a new area for Ms. Khan, and she has announced her intention to investigate companies involved in the AI space, where companies are leading a revolution in business, medicine, cybersecurity, defense, and more. 

Ms. Khan tipped her hand in a recent interview in which she spoke of her desire to “make sure these dominant firms aren’t maintaining their monopolies” in AI. Never mind that she has so degraded the definition of “monopoly” that even when new markets are developing and a dozen or so companies are competing in a space, she imagines monopolies. 

American innovation continues to thrive, despite the FTC’s best efforts to stifle growth. Every week the “Magnificent Seven” continue to drive the market to new highs – the Dow hitting 38,000, the S&P hitting 5000, and the individual stocks hitting all-time highs.  These household names – Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – together are worth more than the stock markets of the UK, Japan, France, China and Canada combined.  

The FTC’s adventures in rewriting antitrust laws have come at a significant cost to U.S. taxpayers. Ms. Khan’s whack-a-mole approach of hitting as many things as she possibly can, hoping to land a win, means Americans get to pay for the government’s misguided anti-business lawsuits through their taxes, and in the form of higher costs as consumers as businesses have to shell out massive legal fees to keep an ever-encroaching FTC at bay. 

As we enter Lina Khan’s final year at the helm of the FTC, we can be grateful that her agenda has been, for the most part, thwarted. Her failures highlight the rigor of our antitrust standard, and the competitive edge that America enjoys when we steer clear of an anti-business regulatory culture. Here’s to another year of failed launches at the FTC. 

Barbara Comstock is a former congresswoman and member of the Virginia House of Delegates, current senior adviser at Baker Donelson and adviser to NetChoice.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2024/03/15/the_ftc_fails_to_rewrite_antitrust_laws_1018697.html

Biden Administration Attacks Democracy Abroad

A friend sent me a link that, upon opening it, I initially thought I had been directed to The Babylon Bee. I rubbed my eyes and pored over the blurb again. Amazed, I remembered Mr. Biden’s State of the Union declaration: “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at—both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Of course, I was aware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters have been assiduously attacking American democracy. Indeed, in recounting how the Democratic Party is anything but democratic, Victor Davis Hanson concluded:

The Left talks grandly of ‘democracy dies in darkness’ as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection. The verbiage masks the most comprehensive effort in modern American history to radically change, destroy, or warp American laws, customs, and traditions for the short-term aim of gaining and retaining political power.

The rationale is that the left is of such superior morality and wisdom that it has the right to violate the Constitution or the hallowed traditions of the country to achieve the higher end of ensuring a progressive agenda.

However, I was unaware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters had been attacking democracy abroad. Of course, I knew the Authoritarian Axis of communist China, Putin’s revanchist Russia, terrorist-state Iran, and the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships had been persistently attacking democracy. But none of these rouge states besieging free peoples were the target of the Biden administration’s call for regime change.

The ever so nuanced Biden administration does not seek regime change within a barbarous regime developing nuclear weapons, exporting terrorism, and orchestrating its proxies’ murdering of innocents—a rouge nation like, say, Iran. No, the Biden administration is attacking the democracy of our ally Israel.

This issue is over the war in Gaza and how it is affecting democracy—American democracy, specifically Mr. Biden’s re-election chances.

According to The Times of Israel’s “White House exploring how to force Netanyahu out—report,” which was based upon an earlier piece in New York Magazine, “The Biden Plan to Ditch Netanyahu: The “come to Jesus moment” is already here, according to Israeli and U.S. sources, Mr. Biden has a problem in his Democratic voter base. The crux is that many Muslim-Americans and Jewish-Americans differ on what should happen in Gaza, and substantial numbers of both groups are loyal Democratic voters. This point was forcefully driven home to the Biden team when a large segment of Michigan’s Muslim-American community expressed their opposition to the administration’s Gaza policy by voting “uncommitted” in Mr. Biden’s recent primary.

Never having been accused of being Solomonic, Mr. Biden has decided the way to save himself is to throw the Bibi out with the bathwater. Thus, he and Vice President Kamala Harris have adopted their own version of the leftist trope, “We support the troops but not the war:”

In the event the new American position over Netanyahu remained unclear, Vice President Kamala Harris left no doubts in a Friday interview with CBS News, which asked, ‘Are the Israelis at risk of losing U.S. aid if this continues?’ Harris replied, ‘I think it’s important for us to distinguish, or at least not conflate, the Israeli government with the Israeli people.’

You mean the Israeli voters who elected the Netanyahu government? Or just the Israeli voters who oppose it and agree with the Biden administration? Both? It matters little, for this canard is designed to pacify American Democratic voters.

So, what is this “new American position over Netanyahu?” In many ways, it is the old Obama administration policy of thinly veiled public contempt for the Prime Minister and the subtle undermining of Israeli foreign and domestic policies:

Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and an authority on the relationship between the two countries, says the White House has been unhappy with Netanyahu for a long time, ‘but now, in my view, they’re even angrier, and they are sharpening the tone. Biden is not coming at him personally, but off the record and in closed meetings, the sentiment is clear. They disagree on many things: on Gaza the day after the war; on the Palestinian Authority; on a return to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; all very significant issues.’

Methinks the former ambassador spoke too soon. Presently, Democratic politics have spurred Mr. Biden to make a public display of his loathing for Netanyahu and opposition to Israeli policies. Consider Mr. Biden’s allegedly accidental “hot mic” remark that, in his characteristically tone-deaf words, “I told him, ‘Bibi’—don’t repeat this—‘you and I are going to have a come to Jesus moment.’”

Still, political necessity required a pretext to mask Mr. Biden’s problem with his Democratic base. The Biden team could not appear to be saving its political behind by sticking it to our ally. So, what could explain the administration’s pivot (well, its public pivot, anyway) away from the Israeli government? Claim your disinterested, noble motives and project your actual squalid motives onto someone else, namely Prime Minister Netanyahu.

This is something of a pivotal moment,” says Daniel Seideman, an Israeli attorney and expert on the geopolitics of the country. “The danger of regional war is palpable. They are thinking in terms of the Cuban Missile Crisis [or] of 1938. Things are going on that could easily trigger a broader conflict, and preventing that is clearly the administration’s interest—and Netanyahu is not being cooperative.

One supposes “cooperative” would be Prime Minister Netanyahu taking military advice from the Biden administration’s, whose maladministration wrought the deadly fiasco that was the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, or taking strategic advice from a president who, for over half a century, has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy issue.

This is the pretext for the Biden administration’s attack on Israeli democracy, a scant six months after our ally suffered a Hamas terrorist attack that claimed 1,200 Israelis murdered, 250 kidnapped, and scores more raped and tortured:

One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, ‘I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.’

Through its words, deeds, and leaks, the Biden administration is heralding its continuing attacks upon Israeli democracy, including: trotting out Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-New York) to parrot the president’s calumnies against the Israeli Prime Minister and demand new elections; unilaterally declaring America’s installation of a sea pier for Gaza (which Israel publicly supports); announcing the U.S., Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates air lift without telling Israel; an executive order sanctioning West Bank settlers and their supporters, including Israeli policymakers; and signaling the administration’s receptiveness to recognizing a Palestinian state in Gaza and in the West Bank. With friends like these…

Evidently, the Biden administration is suffering from a bout of cognitive dissonance, letting it be known that they consider Prime Minister Netanyahu an “afterthought,” but at the same time fixating upon his political demise:

An American source familiar with the administration’s thinking says the White House realizes that ‘Netanyahu is in a corner of his own making. He has no room to maneuver. He is screwing us. The politics of this have to completely change, and I think time is running out.’

Seideman says the administration is getting ready ‘to put Netanyahu to the test in ways that have not happened before. ‘Are you with us or are you against us? We’re not going to dictate the result. But if you’re against us, there will be consequences.’

One cannot help but notice how this is far more apt concerning Mr. Biden’s political situation vis-à-vis his Democratic base. Yet, in dumping upon the present Israeli government to improve Mr. Biden’s own political prospects, he and his team are oblivious to the import of what they are citing as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s abysmal approval ratings. Per New York Magazine:

Netanyahu is highly vulnerable at home. For months, he’s faced blistering anger from the family members of the remaining hostages, whose fate he seems ambivalent about at best. A recent poll shows that a majority of Israelis, 53 percent, believe Netanyahu is extending the war so as to ‘survive politically,’ not to defeat Hamas.

Hence, if the Biden team truly believes Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet are irredeemable, warmongering extremists, the situation will soon resolve itself without their election interference. The Israeli voters will do it of their own accord, without them. In fact, given how deftly they have alienated large swaths of their own Democratic Party base, they will likely alienate Israeli voters and boost the Prime Minister’s support, especially as New York Magazine concedes, “there’s not much Biden can do to force him out, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to undermine Netanyahu politically.”

I’m rubbing my temples now, pondering the administration’s folly, wondering why I clicked that damned link, and praying it was indeed for the Babylon Bee.

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/16/the-biden-administration-attacks-democracy-abroad/

It’s Not Too Late to Stop Temu

 The San Francisco 49’ers may have lost the Super Bowl, but star running back Christian McCaffrey still had plenty of prize money to take home after staring in ads for Temu, a discount everything store website that aired three ads during the game. McCaffrey partnered with the controversial retailer on the ads and pre-game social media posts, telling his millions of followers about his favorite Temu products.  Fans and viewers were left to wonder if McCaffrey knew he was participating in such blatant Chinese propaganda and pushing products undoubtedly made using slave labor.

It’s fair to give 49’ers Running Back Christian McCaffrey the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully he and other influencers will take a hard look at what they are promoting before they cash the check, but Temu and its ally, the CCP deserves no such reprieve. 

Temu has been aggressively trying to compete with more established online retailers, and their recent Super Bowl ads were a bold move to continue the momentum after airing 2 ads in last years Big Game. In 2023 Temu became the most downloaded app in the U. S., but what many don't realize is that Temu's success is built on the backs of slave labor.

Temu's low prices rely on labor provided by enslaved Uyghur Muslims held by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang region of China.

The Chinese government has been accused of using forced labor to produce goods for export, including clothing, electronics, and other consumer goods. This is not only a violation of human rights but also a threat to the global economy. The use of forced labor allows China to produce goods at a lower cost than other countries, giving them an unfair advantage in the global market.

Furthermore, the use of forced labor in China is a threat to national security. Many companies rely on China for manufacturing, and the use of forced labor in China can disrupt the supply chain and lead to shortages of goods. This can have a significant impact on the global economy, as well as on the companies that rely on China for manufacturing.

Based on numerous reports, publicly available data, and various investigations from Congressional committees, Temu is engaged in the very worst of these practices and in direct violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.  They fail to respond to Congressional inquiries, stonewall journalists, and spend millions on flashy ads and high profile influencers to distract from the truth behind Temu. Three years ago the UFLPA began to track companies known to be using slave labor and created a designated list. Temu should be at the top.

Temu may claim to be separate from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but any objective review of their practices, and failures to comply with Congressional inquiries regarding sources of their cotton and labor practices tells a much different story.  It is time for companies like Temu to be held accountable for their complicity in these human rights abuses.

Temu is reminiscent of another company that has courted controversy given its Chinese roots. It was not so long ago Tik-Tok was the only bi-partisan enemy of Washington. Despite President Trump’s best efforts to interfere in the Tik-Tok takeover that has consumed much of popular culture in the last four years, with users now reaching close to 200 million, most in Washington are resigned to the fact that it will be almost impossible to ban an app with such a critical mass of U.S. consumers. Unless Temu is held accountable for their UFLPA violations, Temu could be the most downloaded app in the U.S. for the second year in a row.

There are a lot of politicians in Washington that talk tough on China and claim to stand against the plight of the enslaved Uyghurs. They submit resolutions, and spout rhetoric from the Senate floor. They send out letters to their constituents and form committees and sub committees to condemn but when given the opportunity, why won’t they do more? It’s not too late. 

Ryan Costello, U.S. Congressman 2015-2019 (R-PA6) .

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2024/03/15/its_not_too_late_to_stop_temu_1018705.html