This is a bad choice for AG that would undermine confidence in the law. Mr. Trump lauded Mr. Gaetz’s law degree from William and Mary, but it might as well be a doctorate in outrage theater. He’s a performer and provocateur, and his view is that the more explosions he can cause, the more attention he can get. “It’s impossible to get canceled if you’re on every channel,” he once said. “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.”
Mr. Gaetz has no interest in governing. When Republicans took control of the House in 2022, it was with a small margin. Rather than work to get things done, Mr. Gaetz sabotaged Speaker Kevin McCarthy before finally leading a rebellion to oust him. Eight Republican malcontents plunged the GOP into weeks of embarrassing paralysis, since Mr. Gaetz had no alternative that could command a majority. Finally Speaker Mike Johnson emerged.
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The larger objections to Mr. Gaetz concern judgment and credibility. The U.S. Attorney General has to make calls on countless difficult questions of whom to investigate and indict. Mr. Gaetz’s decisions simply wouldn’t be trusted. He’s a nominee for those who want the law used for political revenge, and it won’t end well.
Also highly critical of the Gaetz nomination is National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar. Two slices:
If you thought Donald Trump was going to make a sane pick for attorney general, then treat yourself to a round of sausage: He has announced that he intends to nominate none other than Matt Gaetz, the odious Florida congressman, to the position. Not some minor post (where his absence from the House would at least be welcome addition by subtraction), but one of the three most important positions in the entire administration.
It remains to be seen whether this is all an imposture — as often as people joke about the idea of “Trump playing 4-D chess” (when in fact he pretty much never does), there is a chance that Gaetz’s nomination is designed to fail in the Senate, either to lay the groundwork for a more acceptable (but still fiercely Trump-loyalist) candidate later or to cast the Senate as the designated Establishment scapegoats for subsequent Trump legislative failures.
But it will be almost impossible to confirm Gaetz, as well it ought to be. Leave aside the fact that Matt Gaetz only ever “practiced” law for 24 months at a small-time law firm in northwest Florida. (He was given the job as a favor to his father, Don Gaetz, a member of the Florida senate.) Leave aside the fact that Gaetz is most famous as the man who plunged the House of Representatives into weeks of chaos last year by toppling Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a revolt that accomplished exactly nothing except time-wasting. Leave aside, even, the transparent reality that Gaetz is not being nominated to serve as anything but a lickspittle toady and hatchet man to yield to Trump’s most unmediated instincts.
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I usually like to end my pieces with some kind of joke, or rhetorical flourish. (Such as: “Matt Gaetz’s first big initiative upon becoming attorney general will be to retroactively lower the nationwide age of consent to 16.”) But I don’t feel like it tonight. Gaetz is so utterly unworthy of being attorney general, so transparently farcical as a serious pick, that his selection at all is indefensible. If he is confirmed, Senate Republicans have lost their spine and their credibility. If Trump thinks he can provoke a constitutional crisis by forcibly adjourning the Senate against its will, he will both forever alienate his own party and be unanimously crushed by the Supreme Court. I cannot quite say with certainty that Gaetz will never serve as attorney general. What I can say with certainty is that he should never set foot inside the Department of Justice unless it’s for questioning by law enforcement. He should take care to bring an actual lawyer with him, if so.
Joining in the just criticism of Trump’s reckless nomination of Matt Gaetz is Andrew McCarthy. A slice:
Nevertheless, Gaetz was among the leading proponents of the effort to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, which means he took the constitutional-law position that the vice president had the authority to invalidate electoral votes that had been certified by the relevant state governments — or, at least, to remand the votes back to the states, despite their certification, for further proceedings aimed at getting state legislatures to reverse the result of the popular election. No one who took such a position is qualified to be attorney general of the United States — the federal government’s chief law-enforcement official (other than the president) among whose most important jobs is to defend the Constitution. Case closed.
Of course, that’s not the end of the case. Gaetz also dabbled in conspiracy theories that the Capitol riot had been led by left-wing radicals rather than Trump supporters, and that it may have been an inside job choreographed by the FBI. In this, Gaetz was either incredibly cynical or utterly incapable of grasping reality and applying basic criminal-law principles (no one gets entrapped into crimes of violence). In either event, he’s not AG material.
And here’s Dan McLaughlin on the indefensible nomination of the indefensible Matt Gaetz. A slice:
Matt Gaetz is such a terrible choice for attorney general that the odds are already high, within an hour of his nomination being announced, that he would fail a Senate confirmation vote.
It’s impossible to imagine any Democrat voting for him, so he can afford to lose only three Republicans (even assuming all 53 are there — a vote might have to wait for a replacement for Marco Rubio to be selected and seated, because Rubio will need to be confirmed himself before resigning). It’s not very hard to count to four votes on the Republican side (starting with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins) who will be against him.
No matter how enticing the reason, when Uncle Sam takes larger slices of the economic pie, the portion left for productive private enterprises shrinks, resulting in a smaller, less dynamic economy and fewer opportunities.
Then there is the very real risk that our creditors demand higher interest rates in exchange for buying more treasuries, making the problem bigger. They might also worry that the Federal Reserve will devalue our debt with inflation.
Ryan Mills is right: Trump’s ‘beautiful’ tariffs will “send retail prices soaring.” A slice:
In that light, the retail-federation report looks at two scenarios: a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports with an additional 60 percent tariff on Chinese imports, and a 20 percent universal tariff with an additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods. The report’s authors also assumed that U.S. trading partners won’t retaliate, which seems highly unlikely.
The authors found that under the two scenarios, clothing prices would increase 12.5–20.6 percent; shoe prices would increase 18.1–28.8 percent; furniture prices would increase 6.4–9.5 percent; household appliance prices would increase 19.4–31 percent; toy prices would increase 36.3–55.8 percent, and prices for travel goods (backpacks and purses) would increase 13–21.5 percent.
The price of a $50 tricycle could increase to as much as $78, according to the report. The prices of a $119 leather handbag could jump to $145. The price of a $650 basic refrigerator could go up to as much as $852.
The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) is often proposed as a pre-Soviet popularizer of Marxist economic theories due to its electoral successes in Germany in the decades before World War I. Using the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), we examine whether German-language print references to Karl Marx responded to the SPD’s adoption of the Marx-inspired Erfurt Program of 1891. In doing so, we account for the near-simultaneous repeal of Anti-Socialist censorship laws in Germany. Evidence of a boost to Marx’s citations from the Erfurt Program is modest, and cannot be distinguished from the effect of the censorship repeal on all socialist writers. These results suggest that the SPD’s role in popularizing Marx was minor compared to later events such as the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Despite her scattershot leadership style, Khan did have a clear mission: upending the consumer-welfare standard. For decades, the standard has required courts and regulators to train their attention on corporations that abuse monopoly power (or seek to obtain it via merger) in a way that stifles efficient competition. This narrow focus ensures that antitrust law promotes low prices, high product quality, and market innovation. But Khan attacked consumer welfare in ways large and small. Within days of assuming office, she shredded an FTC policy statement that had endorsed it. She brought enforcement actions that tried to evade the standard or to expand it beyond recognition. She strove to make it as hard as possible for any merger, regardless of consumer benefit, to move through the agency’s review process. On her watch, the FTC colluded with European regulators to block deals, and claimed, implausibly, that it had the authority to write its own antitrust rules.
