House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will roll out a four-part plan dubbed “Commitment to America” that outlines priorities for House Republicans at a Pittsburgh, Pa., event on Sept. 19.
McCarthy has said the midterm elections will be a referendum on Democratic control of Washington, but with the plan he also aims to give voters a reason to vote in favor of the GOP.
Axios was first to report on the planned Pittsburgh rollout event.
The “Commitment to America” has been in the works for more than a year. McCarthy assigned more than half of the members of the GOP Conference to different issue “task forces,” some of which have released legislative text and plan frameworks.
Messaging memos distributed by McCarthy’s office before the August recess outline four priorities: “An Economy that is strong,” focusing in part on moving supply chains from China to the U.S.; “A nation that is safe,” highlighting migration policies and the U.S.-Mexico border; “A future that is free,” outlining policies concerning public schools; and “a government that is accountable,” promising oversight and investigation into the Biden administration.
McCarthy previewed the plan in a speech from Scranton, Pa. last week ahead of a primetime address from President Biden that warned about threats to Democracy from “MAGA Republicans.”
“We will fight to stop inflation and lower the cost of living. We will fight to lower the cost of gas. We will stop taxpayer dollars from being wasted on failed programs,” McCarthy said. “We will pass the parents bill of rights so parents have a say in their children’s education. We will defend American sovereignty. We will conduct vigorous oversight, check abuses of power and hold all wrongdoers accountable, including our Department of Justice. We will move the supply chain from China back to America. We will pass tough laws and legislation to make our communities safer.”
The “Commitment to America” title references former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” plan that preceded the “Republican revolution” House takeover in 1994. Gingrich spoke to House Republicans at their annual retreat in March of this year.
But it is also not an entirely new concept for McCarthy. He also revealed a “Commitment to America” plan in 2020.
“We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”
That was President Biden during his Inauguration Speech in January 2020. Nice words. Hard to argue against. After all, America has always been at its best when unified. During World War II and after 9/11. Division has never served us well.
Fast forward to September 2022. President Biden is averaging around 42 percent approval, still the lowest of any first-term president in the history of polling, from Truman to Trump. Inflation, sitting at 8.5 percent (it was 1.4 percent in Jan. 2021), is still by far the public’s number one concern going into the midterm elections. FiveThirtyEight gives Republicans a 75 percent chance of taking back the House of Representatives. And six in 10 voters believe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan will worsen inflation, per a new CNBC poll.
So it appears the White House strategy is to avoid talking about inflation or the economy in general, or still-way-too-high gas prices at nearly $4.00 per gallon (gas was about $2.40 per gallon when Biden took office), or the violent crime continually plaguing American cities, or the essentially open U.S. border or 300 Americans dying each day from opioid/fentanyl overdoses. Instead, the plan appears to be to make the midterms a referendum on Donald Trump voters.
“There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans! And that is a threat to this country,” Biden declared in a divisive speech in Philadelphia last week
“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country,” he tweeted afterward.
So not only was the leader who promised to unify the country attempting to do the exact opposite of that, he did so flanked by ominous red-lighted walls and with two Marines as props behind him. Whoever at the White House thought that either of these optics was a good idea should seek employment elsewhere.
The speech wasn’t as warmly embraced as the White House had anticipated, either. “Whatever you think of this speech the military is supposed to be apolitical,” CNN’s Brianna Keilar tweeted. “Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that. It’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it.”
Caught off guard by the blowback, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded to Keilar directly. “Except it’s not political. In the same way CNN isn’t political but has made the same warnings,” he retorted.
And when Biden was asked by Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy about the tone and divisiveness of his speech after he accused 74 million Trump voters of being a direct threat to democracy, the president pretended he never said such a thing.
“You keep trying to make that case. I don’t consider any Trump supporters a threat to the country,” Biden said, contradicting what he had said less than 24 hours earlier.
We’ve heard this kind rhetoric from Biden for some time: If you oppose Biden and his party on federalizing voting laws, for example, you’re on the side of George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. Biden later denied having made that comparison too.
In a related story, a Quinnipiac poll taken earlier this year shows a plurality of Americans believe Biden has done more to divide than unite the country.
But another poll out last week should be more alarming. A YouGov/Economist poll shows more than 40 percent of voters believe the U.S. could be in a civil war before the end of the decade. Biden’s mixed messages about unity aren’t helping matters one bit.
Almost a quarter of all young adults received mental health care treatment last year, according to recently released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The number of adults aged 18 to 44 who received mental health care in the past 12 months saw the biggest increase from 2019, rising from 18.5 percent to 23.2 percent. The percentage of all adults who received mental health treatment also increased from 19.2 percent in 2019 to 21.6 percent in 2021.
The percentage of adults aged 45 to 64 who received treatment saw a more modest increase from 20.2 percent to 21.2 percent, while the percentage of adults aged 65 and older decreased slightly from 19.4 percent to 18.9 percent.
The CDC considered adults to have received mental health treatment if they reported taking prescription medication for their mental health, receiving counseling or therapy from a mental health professional or both.
Women were more likely to have received mental health treatment during men during 2019, 2020 and 2021, but the amount who received treatment increased for both. The data shows 28.6 percent of women of all ages received treatment in the past 12 months in 2021, up from 23.8 percent, while 17.8 percent of men reported receiving it that year, up from 13.1 percent.
Researchers found differences in who was most likely to receive mental health treatment by race among adults aged 18 to 44. Non-Hispanic white adults were the most likely, with 30.4 percent having done so in 2021.
Only 14.8 percent of non-Hispanic Black adults, 12.8 percent of Hispanic adults and 10.8 percent of non-Hispanic Asian adults reported receiving treatment in 2021.
Non-Hispanic Asian adults remained the least likely to receive treatment in each of the three years reviewed.
The CDC reported increases among adults aged 18 to 44 regardless of the type of location where they live. The percentage rose from 16.8 percent to 22.2 percent among those living in large metropolitan areas, 21.1 percent to 24.6 percent among those in small or medium metropolitan areas and 20 percent to 25.2 percent among those in nonmetropolitan areas.
The CDC reviewed data collected by the National Health Interview Survey from 2019 to 2021 for its analysis.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is voicing support for a safety zone around his nation’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, echoing a call from a United Nations watchdog.
“If the content of this proposal is to demilitarize the territory of the nuclear power plant — and this is logical, as it was the Russian military presence that put the Zaporizhzhia plant on the brink of a radiation disaster — then we can support such a demilitarized protection zone,” Zelensky said in an address to his country late Tuesday, referring an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposal announced earlier in the day.
“I believe that the world not only deserves, but also needs the representatives of the IAEA to force Russia to demilitarize the territory of the [power plant] and return full control to Ukraine,” the Ukrainian president added.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said there is an “urgent” need for measures to prevent a nuclear accident at the plant, which lies on the front line of the war in Ukraine and has already been damaged by shelling.
Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia power plant in March — early on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — but it continues to be operated by Ukrainian technicians.
Will Donald Trump be charged with a crime? Will Hunter Biden be indicted? Those questions may be answered in due course, but due course is not likely to be anytime in the next two months.
With Labor Day behind us and the November midterm elections just over the horizon, the “60-day rule” against major prosecutorial moves is triggered, meaning … well, it’s not clear exactly what it means, probably because there is no rule.
In the interests of avoiding the specter of having elections decided by law enforcement actions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) follows loose guidance that cautions against taking major public steps in investigations that could influence political campaigns. The objective is to forfend such scandals as Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s nakedly political and substantively meritless indictment of former Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger just four days before the 1992 presidential election. Shortly after President Reagan’s successor, then-President George H. W. Bush, lost that election to President Bill Clinton, a federal judge threw out the indictment over legal shortcomings. Bush ultimately pardoned Weinberger in connection with the Iran-Contra affair that Walsh spent years investigating.
It does not take much deliberation to grasp why the 60-day guidance is admonitory rather than mandatory. Plainly, there are some situations in which it would be irresponsible for the DOJ to refrain from law enforcement actions that could become public in a politically fraught case. For example, if there were legitimate fears of evidence-tampering and -destruction, or of witness intimidation, it would be irresponsible for prosecutors to turn a blind eye just because an election was on the horizon. Also, if the investigation involved a continuing crime, as opposed to a post facto probe of a completed crime, prosecutorial delay would contribute to additional law violations against innocent victims.
Some politically fraught cases, moreover, involve potential threats to American national security — a concern the Justice Department has highlighted as its rationale for seeking a judicial search warrant to search former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. We need not venture a premature judgment on whether that concern was valid. For present purposes, the point is that, in principle, it would be wrongheaded in national security cases for law enforcement officials to drag their feet in a manner that prioritized the political calendar over protecting defense secrets, and the methods and sources for obtaining them.
In my many years in federal law enforcement, my objection to the 60-day rule was more basic: Failing to take action can be just as prejudicial as taking action. Let’s say the FBI had overwhelming evidence that a candidate for public office was taking bribes or involved in a fraud scheme, and let’s assume that the evidence was sufficiently compelling that, in an ordinary case, arrest and indictment would proceed. It would be perverse for the suspected politician to get extra solicitude — consideration that the average person would not get — because he is seeking an office of public trust that, the evidence shows, he is unfit to hold.
Obviously, I am not saying that consequential action ought to be taken on the basis of weak evidence or, a la Walsh, legal deficiencies. I am simply saying that when an investigation has reached the point where charges are appropriate, the presumption should be in favor of filing charges. Otherwise, the public would be denied information that would be given in a normal case, and we could end up with a corrupt person in office.
Because there actually is no written 60-day rule, there is also some vagueness on the matter of to whom the “rule” purportedly applies. In the months before the 2020 election, for example, then-Attorney General Bill Barr took pains to say that no one potentially implicated in prosecutor John Durham’s “Russiagate” investigation was on the ballot; ergo, the guidance against taking major investigative steps (including possible charges) on the eve of an election did not apply. The public took this to mean that then-candidate Joe Biden was not a subject of the probe, but that Durham might file charges against other former officials.
Nevertheless, an investigative subject need not be on the ballot for law enforcement actions to have an impact on elections. Obviously, Biden’s poll numbers have ticked up a bit, as have polls forecasting the midterm prospects of congressional Democrats, in the past four weeks during which controversy over the Mar-a-Lago search has been in the public spotlight. The fact that Trump is not on the ballot has not stopped Democrats from treating the midterms as if he were.
Analogously, Hunter Biden was not on the ballot in 2020 but Democrats and their media friends labored zealously to keep scandalous stories about him out of the public eye in the campaign’s closing weeks. They understood that potential law enforcement influence over the election’s outcome did not necessarily hinge on whether Biden fils was a candidate.
In any event, rather than a 60-day-rule, we should see the Justice Department as aspiring to a rule of reason: In the absence of good cause, do not take unnecessary public action that could unfairly prejudice one side of an election campaign; but also, do not refrain from taking arguably necessary public action when omission would damage the public interest, even if that means the action may have some impact on elections.
Prior to the midterms, I don’t expect consequential action, such as indictments, in the investigations involving Donald Trump and Hunter Biden. But proper law enforcement actions should not be seen as prohibited, either. Over the past eight years, we’ve had too many instances of investigators trying to game the electoral calendar. They should just stick to law enforcement. It’s a hard enough job.
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Former United Nations Ambassador Kelly Craft launched her long-anticipated campaign for Kentucky governor on Wednesday, saying the state’s “best days are ahead of us” as she joined a crowded lineup of Republicans competing to challenge Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear next year.
Craft has spent years cultivating connections within the GOP as she and her husband, coal magnate Joe Craft, donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates. Now as she transitions from party activist to political candidate, she enters the fray with advantages — the ability to tap into her family’s wealth to finance her campaign and her resume from Republican Donald Trump’s presidency.
Craft touted her Kentucky roots and offered broad themes in her campaign announcement.
“I’m running for governor because I know our best days are ahead of us,” Craft said in a news release. “This movement is for all of us who still believe that we can lead in education, that government doesn’t get a seat at our kitchen table and that our kids should grow up in safe neighborhoods.”
For more than a year, political insiders from both major parties in Kentucky had wondered if, or when, Craft would enter the hotly contested GOP primary for governor. The party votes are in May 2023 and the general election is in November 2023.
Trump first appointed Craft to serve as U.S. ambassador to Canada. During her tenure, Craft played a role in facilitating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, Trump’s long-sought revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The updated trade deal has benefited workers, farmers and businesses in Kentucky and across the country, Craft’s campaign release said Wednesday.
But her connections with Trump, who easily carried Kentucky in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, were neutralized by his endorsement this year of Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s bid for governor in the Bluegrass State.
Craft was born in Lexington — the state’s second-largest city — and was raised on her family’s farm near Glasgow in south-central Kentucky.
The Crafts have been major donors in supporting academic initiatives and institutions in the state, and she stressed her commitment to education in her campaign rollout. She pledged to direct “maximum financial resources” to support education, calling it the “most important duty” for government, while cautioning that it “has to be in partnership with parents.”
Kentucky has tilted decidedly toward the GOP in recent years, but Beshear has consistently received strong approval ratings from Kentuckians in polls.
The Democratic governor is expected to highlight his management of the state’s economy in asking voters for a second term. Kentucky has posted records for job creation and investments during his term and has recorded its lowest-ever unemployment rates.
Beshear also has won bipartisan praise for his administration’s responses to epic natural disasters — tornadoes that tore through western Kentucky last December and historic flooding that inundated parts of eastern Kentucky in late July.
Besides Craft and Cameron, the GOP candidates for governor include state Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, state Auditor Mike Harmon and state Rep. Savannah Maddox.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Tuesday penned an an op-ed in The Washington Post urging their colleagues to pass legislation guaranteeing federal protections for marriage equality.
The two called on the Senate to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which would guarantee legal marriage regardless of a couple’s sex, race, ethnicity or national origin.
“Individuals in same-sex and interracial marriages need, and should have, the confidence that their marriages are legal,” Baldwin and Collins said in the op-ed. “These loving couples should be guaranteed the same rights and freedoms of every other marriage.”
The Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the House in July, would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriage.
“While a wedding ceremony and party are rites of passage that everyone should be able to enjoy if they wish, a legally binding marriage comes with another set of amazing rights and responsibilities,” Baldwin and Collins added, noting the tax benefits and the right to visit spouses in the hospital.
A 2013 Supreme Court ruling found that the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that prevented the government from recognizing same-sex marriages for the provision of federal benefits was unconstitutional, effectively legalizing same-sex marriage. However, the law has remained in place.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, the right to privacy — which was previously used by the courts to guarantee interracial and same-sex marriage without codification by Congress — has been called into question.
Senate Democrats have recently considered adding the issue of marriage equality to the short-term government funding bill that Congress must pass by the end of the month. However, a spokesperson for Baldwin told Politico that the congresswoman is not in favor of this approach.
“That is not the Senator’s preferred path as she would like to see it taken up sooner,” Baldwin’s spokesperson said, per Politico.
True, the decision of the Trump-appointed judge ordering the naming of an independent special master to screen the seized documents is a psychological victory for former President Trump and his MAGA followers, but it is a Pyrrhic victory of little practical significance.
On Aug. 8, the FBI seized 11,000 documents, with and without classification markings, as well as 1,800 other items from Trump’s office and storage room in his Mar-a-Lago home.
Among the documents seized were roughly 500 documents that the FBI deemed potentially subject to the attorney-client or executive privileges. The executive privilege documents purportedly reflected communications between Trump and his advisers while he was in the White House.
True, Judge Cannon temporarily enjoined the government from reviewing and using the seized material pending the special master’s review. But the Justice Department had told Cannon that the review had already been completed, and the judge was careful to exempt from her injunction Department of National Intelligence (DNI) screening of the seized materials to assess the potential damage to national security coming out of disclosure of the seized documents. DNI Director Avril Haines said that she is in the throes of that screen and will report her findings to Congress.
Moreover, the injunction only enjoined “further review and any use of the materials seized…for criminal investigative purposes.” So, prosecutors should be free to continue to present other evidence to the grand jury, interview witnesses and follow leads derived from sources independent of the documents.
But the case is, by no means “doomed.” It is merely the first lap around the track.
The government will undoubtedly appeal the order to the 11th Circuit as it is dead wrong. Enjoining an ongoing criminal investigation, even temporarily, is an extraordinary remedy, which should raise eyebrows in the court of appeals.
In any event, unless reversed, the appointment of the special master and the review will proceed expeditiously. The FBI performed its review of the seized documents in three weeks.
The crimes involved in the search and seizure are serious. Implicated are three criminal statutes carrying heavy jail time: Title 18 USC §793 dealing with espionage; 18 USC §2071 dealing with mishandling of government documents; and 18 USC §1519 dealing with obstruction of the investigation of the other two offenses.
Violation of any of these statutes, however, does not turn on the contents of any of the seized documents. The documents were contraband. It was illegal for Trump to possess them as they were government documents belonging not to him but to the United States.
Trump will claim executive and attorney-client privileges with regard to some, but not all, of the documents found in the boxes, closet and desk drawers of his Mar-a-Lago headquarters, and the special master will make recommendations to Judge Cannon resolving any disputes. The FBI did what it does in all cases involving the seizure of arguably privileged documents. It established a “Chinese Wall” between the investigative team and a special team of agents who would review arguably privileged documents. Of course, there is the possibility of a leak, and the special master review will lend the appearance of credibility to the privilege screen, thus assuring that the government’s document case is taint free. In fact, Judge Cannon may have done Attorney General Merrick Garland a favor.
It is significant that Trump did not assert executive or attorney-client privilege when he turned over 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives in January 2021. He waited until April 2022 to raise the issue when the Archives advised him that it intended to provide the 15 boxes to the FBI.
When President Biden waived any executive privilege, the FBI obtained access in May. Trump never sued at that time to enjoin the transfer on grounds of executive, attorney-client privilege or any other grounds.
But it really doesn’t matter, and it bears repeating, the investigators were not inquiring into the contents of the documents (with the possible exception of the classified documents) but whether Trump’s possession of government documents at Mar-a-Lago was criminal.
Trump’s claim of privilege is weak with regard to the government documents. There is a tort-crime exception to attorney-client and executive privileges, which holds that there is no privilege if there is a crime involved in the communication. There is also no attorney-client privilege between Trump and White House lawyers since the client is not Trump but the United States.
So, what does a special master add to the mix? It strikes me as a lawyer as an abuse of discretion. Trump has a full inventory of the documents seized, and could easily advise the Justice Department of those presumably few documents he claims are privileged. It does not appear that Judge Cannon would be overburdened in reviewing these herself as she put the outside number at 500 — about the volume of a best-selling novel. Then, she could decide what is privileged and what is not. She will have to decide the issue anyway since she must inevitably pass on the special master’s recommendation.
A special master might be subject to more political pressure than a federal judge. A special master might be threatened, as was Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed the search warrant.
A former president, like a sitting president, is not above the law. Yet, Judge Cannon treated him differently from you and me. Believe me, we don’t get a special master with all the delay that might entail, and an injunction against a criminal investigation.
Judge Cannon has apparently swallowed the Trump line that the FBI and the Department of Justice are out to get him. He has just called them “vicious monsters.” What will he have to say about a special master who makes adverse recommendations to the court?
The point is that there should be no delay in a criminal investigation. If Trump is ever indicted, he can then make a motion to suppress evidence he contends was privileged or illegally obtained.
Judge Cannon has stood criminal procedure on its head by ordering threshold special master screening of documents that may never be offered in evidence. If indicted, Trump will have the opportunity afforded to every other criminal defendant to question the introduction of the documentary evidence against him.
As the iconic Federal Judge Learned Hand aptly said: “Our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays, and defeats the prosecution of crime.”
Toobin is wrong. We have not seen the end of the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents.
James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
A majority of Americans in a new Gallup poll said that inflation-driven price increases are causing moderate or severe financial hardship.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they are facing financial hardship, according to the survey giant, which noted that the percentage has steadily increased in recent months, rising from 45 percent in November and 49 percent in January.
While lower-income families are experiencing fairly similar levels of financial hardship as last fall, middle-income and upper-income families are starting to feel the pinch more than before, the polling shows.
Since last November, the percentage of middle-income families experiencing financial hardship went up 17 points and the percentage of upper-income families reporting hardship rose 12 points, according to the poll.
Gallup characterizes lower-income families as making less than $48,000, middle-income families as making between $48,000 and $89,999, and upper-income families as making more than $90,000.
Along party lines, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that inflation is causing financial hardship, with 67 percent of Republicans reporting financial hardship compared to 44 percent of Democrats.
In response to rising prices, Americans facing financial hardship are trying to reduce their spending, travel less or cancel vacations, and drive less or use less gas, according to the Gallup.
Inflation will likely remain a key factor in the upcoming midterm elections, as a central part of Republicans’ critique of the Biden administration and Democrats.
While inflation dipped slightly in July as gas prices dropped, it remained abnormally high at 8.5 percent.
And while an August Gallup survey found that confidence in the economy had improved, most Americans still rated the economy negatively.
The new survey of 1,500 respondents, conducted between Aug. 1 and Aug. 22, has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Since last week, the California electric grid operator has been sending out frantic messages warning residents to avoid using electricity, or charging their electric vehicles, as the system becomes overloaded due to continuing heat.
“#ISO has issued an Energy Emergency Alert (EEA) 1 effective today, from 4 p.m. – 9 p.m. Consumers are strongly urged to use less #energy to avoid rotating #poweroutages,” the California ISO tweeted out Tuesday.
The timing was impeccable.
Just days before the crisis started, which is expected to continue in the coming weeks, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced a ban on all gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
“We can solve this climate crisis if we focus on the big, bold steps necessary to cut pollution. California now has a groundbreaking, world-leading plan to achieve 100 percent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035,” Newsom declared in a statement. “This plan’s yearly targets — 35 percent ZEV sales by 2026, 68 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035 — provide our road map to reducing dangerous carbon emissions and moving away from fossil fuels.”
A number of Democratic-controlled states are expected to follow Newsom’s lead.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm applauded the move, telling Fox 11 Los Angeles she thought it “could be” used as a national model for the rest of the country.
“Yeah, I do. I think California really is leaning in,” Granholm said about the idea. “And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric.”
The left’s current push for a rapid transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles is being done under the guise of fighting climate change and cleaning up the environment. This is a nice idea, but it’s far from the truth when it comes to how electric vehicles are made and the toll they take on the environment, starting in production and ending with battery waste.
For example, the production of electric vehicles causes more “dangerous” carbon emissions, which Democrats like Newsom claim they will eliminate.
“Compared with traditional internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicles, greenhouse gases released while manufacturing battery-electric cars account for a higher portion of life-cycle emissions. As the EV hype gains momentum, battery production and research is powering ahead and sales are growing. That means material emissions are going to rise to more than 60 percent by 2040 from 18 percent today, according to consultancy firm McKinsey & Co.,” Bloomberg reports.
And what happens when the batteries, made with slave labor through strip mining in China and Africa, go bad? Where do they go?
“Breaking up is hard to do, and in few places is that more true than breaking up and reclaiming the materials in an EV battery. These are big, heavy, complex arrays of materials and packaging that don’t recycle like a water bottle,” CNET explained last year. “The lithium, nickel, cobalt and other elements inside an EV battery present a toxic challenge that recycling attacks by keeping batteries from ever being truly discarded.”
Using the standard of carbon emissions, electric vehicles aren’t necessarily cleaner or greener than traditional vehicles. Technology will evolve to tackle the issue, but should be done through the private sector on a logical timeline, not through government force or mandates to ban gas vehicles they falsely claim are worse for the environment. A number of start-up companies are already looking into ways to recycle batteries and manufacture more efficiently. They’re also using fossil fuels to get them there.
“Realistically I think we need to use oil and gas in the short term, because otherwise civilization will crumble,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, leader of the world’s largest and most successful electric vehicle company, recently told a conference. “One of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced is the transition to sustainable energy and to a sustainable economy. That will take some decades to complete.”
Electric vehicles don’t exist without fossil fuels and neither does a functioning, modern world. This reality is running right into decrees to ban fuels that work to keep society functioning. How will people get to work if they can’t charge their electric vehicles in places like California?
The current and rapid push for electric vehicles isn’t about saving or cleaning up the environment for future generations, it’s about controlling how people travel and their freedom of movement. Total reliance on the grid with electric vehicles ensures government bureaucrats, coming off of their power highs from the COVID-19 pandemic, will have total control over how much people travel, when they travel, how far they can go and when they can work. Saving the environment, a noble idea, is just an excuse.
Pavlich is the editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.
