#GOP’s problem isn’t Liz Cheney and other commentary

From the right: GOP’s Problem Isn’t Liz Cheney

Rep. Liz Cheney “has taken every opportunity to assail” President Donald Trump “and the stolen-election narrative,” so she has “likely talked herself out of a Republican leadership position,” predict the editors at National Review. But the problem isn’t that “Cheney is making obviously true statements”; it’s that “Republicans consider her obviously true statements to be controversial.” It’s not Cheney, after all, “preventing Republicans from moving on and repairing the wounds from the 2020 election. It is Trump himself.” The movement to oust her is based purely on her insistence on debunking Trump’s “mendacious claims” about a “stolen” election and refusing to vote against certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. “It’s a sad commentary on the state of the House GOP that this has now become a condition of advancement.”

Conservative: Dems’ Plan To ‘Redesign’ America

“The Democratic Party has given up on the American dream,” laments The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger. President Biden’s proposals, notably his American Families Plan, would “redesign” America, which raises the questions: Is “upward mobility still important”? And if so, should it happen “through Washington or individual effort”? Liberals are trying to “displace the country’s originating idea of individual opportunity with a broad birth-to-death entitlement state.” Yet welfare “eroded the American dream for many black Americans by disincentivizing upward mobility,” and now “Biden Democrats” want to spread this “malgovernance” — without even asking if that’s what Americans want.

Hypocrisy watch: Biden Dodged His ‘Fair Share’

“How can someone who avoided more than $500,000 in taxes to fund his luxury lifestyle demand that others ‘pay their fair share’ under massive tax hikes?” wonders Chris Jacobs at The Federalist. Addressing Congress, President Biden used the words “fair share” five times to justify proposed tax hikes needed for “the biggest expansion of government since” FDR. But on leaving the vice presidency, “he and his wife Jill exploited a tax loophole of questionable legality”: They classified “$13.5 million in book and speech income as profits from their two corporations, rather than as cash wages,” letting them “avoid paying $513,540 in payroll taxes” that fund Medicare and ObamaCare. Candidate Biden ran ads saying, “ObamaCare is personal to me.” Except, it seems, “when it comes to paying the bill.”

Ex-cop: Rights Groups Are ‘Tarring’ Police

At City Journal, ex-cop Ari Maas expresses “dismay” at “civil rights” groups making “false claims about police.” A “third-generation Jewish American” whose grandparents had to flee the Nazis, Maas “personally benefited from the hard work” of groups that fight discrimination. Yet their laudable records haven’t stopped the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center “from painting every police officer with the same broad brush.” When a cop takes a life, it’s not, “as the ADL contends, evidence of a system that ‘target[s] and devalue[s] black, brown and indigenous lives.” Statements by other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, which claims racism “pervades law enforcement,” are similarly “dangerous.” By “tarring the entire policing profession,” these groups “weaken their ability to help true victims of civil rights abuse.”

Centrist: Big Tech Sees Free Speech a Danger

“It may be too harsh to expect anything more from a board that literally monitors one of the world’s largest censorship programs,” Jonathan Turley writes at Fox News of the Facebook board’s ruling “that it was absolutely right to suspend Trump but [Facebook] may want to reconsider the permanent ban, given the absence of any objective standard to support it.” The flaw: Facebook and its board assume “it can and should censor views deemed ‘misinformation’ or dangerous,” that “censorship is justified” and “content neutrality is dangerous” — and Twitter and other social-media firms agree, as do top Democrats. Beware: “Private companies can still destroy free speech through private censorship,” especially when they’ve won “immunity from lawsuit under the view that they would be neutral providers.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board