Last year, the people rebelled against the elites. Now, says Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon, we have a revolt “of the government against the people.” There’s Michael Flynn, whose brief tenure as national-security adviser was done in by anonymous leakers with an ax to grind. Then there’s the Environmental Protection Agency staffers lobbying Congress to reject EPA chief-designate Scott Pruitt over policy differences. “Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president,” Continetti writes. But this fight between the people’s elected representatives and the permanent bureaucracy isn’t actually about policy at all, he notes: “It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.”
Stay together for the kids. It’s science. So says Rozina Sabur in the UK Telegraph, noting that about 70 percent of unhappy couples stick it out after the birth of their first child, according to the Marriage Foundation. “Research commissioned by the organization found that 68 percent of these couples report being happy 10 years on. Moreover 27 percent said they were ‘extremely happy,’ ” Sabur reports. The organization’s founder, Paul Coleridge, explains: “This study shows that because a couple is having a tough time adjusting to the demands of children, does not mean they will not come through it and end up with a really high-quality, high-satisfaction relationship in the long term.”
As Jazz Shaw notes at Hot Air, Congress is looking into complaints from two nations — Hungary and Macedonia — about the left-wing philanthropist and agitator George Soros: “Soros organizations were doing far more than charity work, actively engaging in party politics and attempting to push the largely conservative government there further to the left.” The reason this is Congress’s domain? “His group, Open Society Foundations, receives funding from USAID and that brings the government into the picture,” Shaw writes. After all, “if he’s going to be accepting tax money from Uncle Sam and then turning around and applying those funds to political interference in the business of other nations then we have a problem.”
While many commentators point to the decision by large insurers like UnitedHealth to drop out of the ObamaCare exchanges, they shouldn’t miss the significance of lesser-known Molina Healthcare’s announcement it might drop out after this year.
That’s because, says Megan McArdle at Bloomberg, “Molina is a company that specializes in covering poor people. Before Obamacare, they were a sizable player in the ‘Medicaid managed care’ model, and it seemed like the expertise they’d thusly acquired was allowing them to design the sort of plans that actually made money on the exchanges.” But now it looks like that’s no longer the case. And as long as some insurers are losing money, “the exchanges are not going to stabilize.”
Young liberals may be the energetic heart of the anti-Trump left, but, warns Joel Kotkin at The Daily Beast, that shouldn’t fool us into believing they’re fighting against authoritarianism. Indeed, “the millennials . . . could drive our politics not only leftward, but towards an increasingly socialist reality, overturning many of the very things that long have defined American life.” Millennials, Kotkin points out, are more socially liberal and favor a larger, activist government more than other generations have. “One reason: Millennials face the worst economic circumstances of any generation since the Depression, including daunting challenges to home ownership.” But the cure may be worse than the disease: “The Democratic-leaning Millennials are more likely to embrace limits on free speech and are far less committed to constitutional democracy than their elders.”— Compiled by Seth Mandel
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