Libertarian: The Next Big School-Choice Case

“The Supreme Court is now preparing to weigh the constitutional merits” of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, reports Damon Root at Reason. It turns on a school-choice program that creates “a tax credit for individuals and businesses that donate to private, nonprofit scholarship organizations” — but in 2018 Montana’s Supreme Court “declared religious schools entirely off-limits to the program,” citing the state Constitution’s prohibition on giving money to religious organizations. Yet past US Supreme Court rulings let school-choice programs include religious schools, and the federal Constitution can’t “mean two different things in two different states.” So, if “the Supreme Court follows its own precedents,” the case “looks to be a winner for the school choice side.”

Iconoclast: Trudeau the Hypocrite

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the “most woke, virtue-signalling and PC-crazed leader in the history of Mankind,” has tumbled “off into a pit of shameless hypocrisy,” Piers Morgan guffaws at the Daily Mail. Earlier this week, Trudeau, who has been “keen to paint himself as the male Mother Teresa,” was found to have worn black- and brownface on multiple occasions. Trudeau’s apology is “predictably self-flagellating,” but he refuses to resign, even though he’d have demanded another politician’s “head on a plate” for similar shenanigans. “I detest the modern cancel culture,” Morgan notes, but Trudeau’s “barefaced hypocrisy that should render his position untenable. Live by the woke cancel culture, die by it.”

Conservative: Kavanaugh & the Legitimacy Crisis

“It is impossible to separate the latest attack on Justice Brett Kavanaugh from the political strategy of the Democratic Party,” Matthew Continetti opines at the Washington Free Beacon. On Sept. 16, two days after The New York Times ran a discredited attack on Kavanaugh, Axios AM described “Democratic plans” to portray the justice, President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as three “villains.” For the Democrats and their allies in the media, “the goal is neither objectivity nor factuality. It is de-legitimization,” using journalists as “instruments of a political agenda.” Kavanaugh is a pawn in this “crisis of legitimacy that is coursing through our institutions.” This ruthless assault on the nation’s institutions is fresh proof that the left is “willing to break rules, and lives, to achieve social transformation.”

2020 watch: Trump Will Trounce Biden or Warren

President Trump will have “little difficulty” beating current Democratic frontrunners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, predicts David Catron at the American Spectator. Polls that now show Trump losing to either Democrat are as “useless” as the 2016 polls that incorrectly showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump. It’s not clear how long Biden will hold on to his position as frontrunner, and his gaffes aren’t helping him. Warren’s radical agenda, endorsing “Medicare for All” and a “wealth tax,” hasn’t helped her connect with non-white voters. Meanwhile, Trump has “the largest campaign war chest” in US political history, and he is not “hesitant to carpet-bomb his opponent when the time comes.” Biden and Warren, on the other hand, are “out of touch with voters.”

Space race: It’s ‘Earth First’ for Sanders

For people who care about NASA’s plans to return to the moon, a Bernie Sanders presidency would be “a gut punch,” warns Mark R. Whittington at The Hill. “Under a Sanders presidency, no space exploration will take place,” the candidate preferring to invest massive amounts of money in his plans to “address climate change by remaking the American economy” and to “nationalize the American health-care system.” Because President Trump “warmly supports investments in space,” even just a Sanders nomination for president would make space exploration a partisan issue, when NASA’s leaders have worked hard to make it a bipartisan affair united by the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Democrats, take note, urges Whittington: Space is “too important to be part of a political war.”

Compiled by Karl Salzmann