EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin argues that, for Republicans in the House and Senate, “the challenge in the wake of this election is to think beyond defining themselves against Obama”: Republicans should “spend the next two years putting forward elements of their public case and policy agenda and preparing the ground to take the presidency and more fully assume the mantle of America’s governing party.”
Senate Republicans may be tempted to reinstate the judicial filibuster for lower-court nominees, but EPPC President Ed Whelan warns that this would be a “profoundly foolish and destructive diversion” that would “seriously impair the ability of Republican presidents to get their ideal judicial nominees confirmed.”
EPPC Senior Fellow James C. Capretta cautions Republicans who are eager to repeal Obamacare to “be realistic about what they can do while President Obama remains in office.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin and co-author Ramesh Ponnuru encourage Republicans to advance reforms to the higher education system, “an arena in which misguided federal policy causes many families great anxiety and exacts enormous costs.”
Roger Scruton Takes on Thomas Piketty
EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Scruton writes a blistering critique of the left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argues for aggressive taxation and redistribution to combat wealth inequality. Piketty’s approach is politically unworkable in the United States, Scruton explains, because Americans “don’t want to confiscate wealth from the wealthy, but to create wealth for themselves.” Piketty’s approach also would result in “accumulations of power in the hands of the ‘expert advisors’ – in other words in the hands of people like Piketty.”
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EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel talks with Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, “a voice of reason, moral wisdom, and interreligious cooperation in a volatile situation” in the face of Russian aggression. (See also Mr. Weigel’s criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church leaders who have “functioned as agents of Russian state power in matters having to do with Ukraine.”)
EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen observes that the State Department’s differing responses to episodes of violence involving a rabbi with joint U.S.-Israeli citizenship and a Palestinian-American teenager “reveal how perverted the Obama administration’s moral compass is.”
In the Federalist Papers, EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin finds a model of a “practical argument made by engaged partisans who, because of their engagement and not despite of it, could see beyond their party and beyond their time.”
EPPC Fellow Mary Rice Hasson reports on the growth of an alarming campaign by “eugenics-minded liberals … for the long-term ‘temporary’ sterilization of America’s young women, on a massive scale.”
Surveying the legacy of anti-semitism in Europe, EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel observes that “confessionally serious Christians in Europe (and America) … may now be in a position to attempt the rebuilding of a Europe safe for Europe’s Jews and restorative of Europe’s cultural foundations.”
Despite the increasing “hyper-moralization” of politics, EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner points out that “for most people, most of life is – and the most important things in life are – lived outside of the arena of politics.”
EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen argues that President Obama’s recent comments about stay-at-home mothers “opened a window to his stale, doctrinaire thinking.”
EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel highlights recent theories of the origins of the universe that “make possible a new dialogue between physics and theology, or, more broadly, between science and religion.”
