Tag: Presidency of George W. Bush

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Because this type of discrimination is the gateway drug of the identity politics balkanizing America, Tuesday’s decision is a boost for unity and a setback for those who want to divide Americans. But the administration should go even further. Just last Friday, the two of us published a Heritage Foundation paper calling on the administration to stop giving preferential treatment on the basis of “race, color, national origin or ethnicity in any of its programs and activities.” Indeed, we think that the administration should stop collecting data, including in the Census, on artificially created ethnic groups, such as “Hispanics” or “Asians,” which bring together under large umbrellas disparate cultures and races. That would really cut identity politics off life support. Yes, since the first one in our history in 1790, the U.S. Census has asked a question about race—but that has always been something quite incidental to apportionment and taxation. The question on citizenship, which the administration now wants to bring back, has been asked for much of America’s history, and until recently was uncontroversial. Reinstating a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census is a small but salubrious step. Even the New York Times said the Obama-era “guidance was controversial at the time that it was issued, for its far-reaching interpretation of the law. As U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” >>> Read the new paper, “Eliminating Identity Politics from the U.S. Census,” by Gonzalez and von Spakovsky, here.

The Washington Post scoop in yesterday's paper said Haspel "sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. Sanders took note in tweeting the following: "There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Well, she is to some extent—just like politicians of both parties have regularly played gender and racial cards for decades when it's in their interest. When Bill Clinton named Janet Reno as first female attorney general and Madeleine Albright as the first female secretary of State, that status was touted, implicitly or otherwise, as an extra reason for supporting her. It's not that they weren't qualified, but the politics of opposing them became a little more complicated. Too tough on terror is a loaded formulation, since the obstacle to her confirmation is her involvement in the CIA's interrogation program, which included such techniques as waterboarding, which critics view as torture. It was, of course, the Bush administration that launched the controversial program after 9/11, when terror topped the nation's agenda. Haspel made the comment about Ronny Jackson—who was forced to withdraw as the VA nominee and then lost his job as White House physician—because she doesn't want to be a distraction, according to the Post. She is, by the way, supported by a number of national security officials from the Obama administration. Senators should ask tough questions of every high-level nominee.

For liberals who have been around long enough to have spent a healthy chunk of their lives writing about the misdeeds of the George W. Bush administration and thought we’d never see a more destructive presidency in our lifetimes, Dubya’s emergence as a voice of GOP moderation has been more than a little disorienting. Yet at the same time, Ed Gillespie, an old aide of Bush’s, is waging a positively Trumpian campaign to be governor of Virginia — and Bush is raising money for him. … This means that people of every race, religion and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It should be said that as president, Bush did advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Interestingly enough, Gillespie is taking pains to distance himself from Trump, no doubt because Trump’s approval is low in the increasingly liberal Virginia, even as he pins his electoral hopes on the same sentiments that helped get Trump elected. “I’ve not met him.” The White House sends Vice President Pence to stump for Gillespie, no doubt reading the same poll numbers as the campaign. The trouble is that every time they run a race like Gillespie’s — or Trump’s — they make it harder to break out of their own pattern. If Gillespie loses (as the polls suggest he will), some Republicans will probably say that it proves that the kind of campaign he’s running just doesn’t work anymore. In many of those races, they’ll be right, at least in the primary.