Libertarian: Biden vs. Biden on Criminal Justice

Joe Biden’s new criminal-justice-reform plan “aims to remedy many ­injustices caused by policies backed by . . . Joe Biden,” quips Reason’s Christian Britschgi. As a senator in the 1980s, Biden sponsored the law imposing “mandatory minimum sentence for drug offenders” and creating the “disparity between crack and powder cocaine,” which are “now two policies Biden says should be eliminated completely.” He likewise supported the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, expanding the application of the death penalty, which “he now says should be abolished.” Since his new positions are more closely aligned with modern Democrats, “voters will have to decide for themselves whether this represents a genuine change of heart or a more cynical attempt to stay in tune with a party base hungry for reform.”

Conservative: Colleges’ ‘Diversity’ Waste

Colleges and universities have been “dumping truckloads of money to build increasingly bloated diversity offices,” moans John Merline at ­Issues & Insights, yet a study in the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy reports that the effort has delivered virtually no results. The bloat has done more harm than good, because it has caused “an equally large ­increase in tuition inflation.” And all the cash goes to creating “loads of high-paying feel-good jobs that have little or nothing to do with educating students.” Good news: Since these offices make no difference, colleges can fix the economic problem their “rampant waste” has created by cutting “overhead costs back to where they were, say, 40 years ago.”

Culture watch: Boy, Do We Need Mr. Rogers Now

The trailer for the upcoming Fred Rogers biopic, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” dropped this week, and it promises to honor his legacy as “a rare humble presence, more concerned with kindness than anything else,” The Washington Examiner’s Madeline Fry writes with relief. “When public figures too often make the news for showing themselves not to be the people we’d hoped,” it is nice to discover Rogers has no ­“dubious ­history” to uncover. Instead, the film focuses on how he “helped countless children cope with personal trauma” and was “peaceful but fierce” when “defending his method of doing it.” He established himself as a “hero to many kids,” and it is “refreshing and inspiring” that “he gets to ­remain one.”

Campus beat: Disinvited at Middlebury

Invited to lecture at Middlebury College, Ryszard Legutko recalls at First Things, he learned on arrival that his talk “had been canceled by the college president . . . who had not bothered to inform me of her decision, explain it or apologize.” A letter to students later cited “security and safety risks,” since the student who planned to protest his presence had turned violent at past demonstrations. “The last time I thought of such risks at a university was under the martial law in “communist Poland,” the Polish politician and philosopher recalls, bemoaning how Middlebury has legitimized force “as a part of academic life.” But two rebels ­invited him to give an “underground” talk in one class; he wound up ­addressing 40-plus students there and again over dinner. That they “got fed up with the ideologues’ opportunism, cowardice, intimidation and dogmatism, and had the courage to say no and to stand by their principles, is a sign of hope.”

From the right: ‘Mueller Time’ Will Disappoint

Justice Department instructions that ex-special counsel Robert Mueller stick to his report when questioned by Congress will frustrate both parties, smiles Andrew McCarthy at The Hill. Republicans “want to home in on apparent investigative irregularities” that predate Mueller’s investigation, while “Democrats want to push Mueller” to say that only department regulations stopped him from finding obstruction of justice. If Mueller refuses to go beyond his report, he will have “foreclosed the Democrats’ key line of inquiry,” while Republicans will get their answers later, as “DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon release his report dealing specifically with that issue.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Mark Cunningham