#Bill Barr’s critics are wrong — again, and other commentary

Prosecutor: Barr’s Critics Are Wrong — Again

Attorney General Bill Barr’s call for US Attorneys to get tough on riotors, including charges for “seditious conspiracy,” met with “expert” pooh-poohing that National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy finds familiar: “These are the same arguments that legal experts posited when I charged terrorists with seditious conspiracy for bombing the World Trade Center and plotting to bomb other New York City landmarks in 1993. The experts were wrong then, and they are wrong now.” Yes, the Civil-War-era statute “is rarely used” — but only “because the conduct at issue,” such as conspiracies to violently oppose the government’s legitimate authority, “is historically unusual.” Claiming First Amendment issues is also “a smokescreen”:The defendants’ beliefs form “no part of the crime.” In short, “People who join in rioting are engaged in a form of domestic terrorism. They are likely to commit several federal crimes.” More: “Barr is right, and his critics’ arguments are as wrong as they were almost 30 years ago.”

Pandemic journal: Biden’s Bogus COVID-19 Slaps at Trump

They had no better ideas at the time, but “Biden and his stenographers in the mainstream media insistently claim that Trump has blood on his hands because he did not pursue some mythical perfect response to COVID-19,” points out RealClearPolitics’ J. Peder Zane. Biden and other Democrats pretend “Trump alone was downplaying the severity of the threat,” when in fact they all were. Indeed, they attacked “Trump’s efforts to contain the virus” early on. And Biden’s plans for the virus now “almost completely echo Trump’s actions.” Much as we still have to learn about the coronavirus, “we do know that the efforts to politicize the virus bring us no closer to a cure while exacerbating the cancer of rancor and division that is eating away at our body politic.”

Reality check: Most States Flush With Cash

Even as like Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats block a new coronavirus-relief bill, demanding hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local governments, James Freeman notes at The Wall Street Journal, it looks like “Washington has already overdone it when it comes to shovelling federal funds to state pols.” The “Wall Street research firm Strategas finds that, thanks in part to federal checks already received, state governments in general are already more than generously funded,” having closed the second quarter with a collective $129 billion surplus. The numbers support White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ charge that some want to “use this pandemic as a bailout mechanism for poorly run states.”

Foreign Desk: What the World Forgets About Merkel

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had a long successful stint in office, but The Week’s Matthew Walther reminds us that “for all her cunning, the most salient feature of Merkel’s leadership is its undeniably moral character.” With her dedication to the traditional definition of marriage and acceptance of refugees, Merkel has “showed us that even in its death throes, Christian democracy and the whole world of vanished humanism that it represents is the noblest political force to have emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War.” Merkel’s values may not outlast her, but “the ephemerality does not lessen her achievement. It makes it all the more remarkable.”

From the right: America Needs Fracking

Since 2008, the United States has move from being top world energy importer to one of the “largest exporters of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas,” but the push to ban fracking could undo hat progress, warns The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen. Daniel Yergin’s new book on global climate and energy sheds light on the “dramatic strategic consequences” for America if anti-frackers win big this November. The major beneficiaries of the “rapid decline in US oil production” would be Russia, Saudi Arabia and China, while the US partnership with India would lose one of its “critical foundations.” Fracking, Thiessen argues, has “produced a moment of American energy dominance. We should pause before we heed the calls to mindlessly disarm.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Mark Cunningham