At New York magazine, Ed Kilgore has penned a confession: He has no principles, and he doesn’t understand people who do.
Kilgore is absolutely baffled that, in his words, “conservatives are freaking out about the eviction moratorium,” and he can’t comprehend why I, for example, would think that Joe Biden announcing on live television that he is going to take an action that he knows is illegal “calls into question Biden’s oath of office.”
Kilgore writes:
Charles C. Cooke greeted Biden’s presser by claiming the president had violated his oath of office. Cooke subsequently called, and I am not making this up, for civil disobedience against the moratorium. Not to be outdone, David Harsanyi called the moratorium extension an “unprecedented attack on the Constitution” and Phillip Klein urged Republicans to “shut down the Senate” to protest the outrage. Ryan Mills chipped in with a human-interest story about “small landlords” being unable to make ends meet by evicting impecunious tenants and getting some new ones into their properties. And Kevin Williamson rounded things out with a broader piece on abuse of “emergency” powers by presidents past and present. Several other cries of anguish and fist-shaking vows of defiance may have appeared at NR as I write this piece; I’ve hit the publication’s paywall from every available direction.
Other than the hysterical use of “civil disobedience” — in fact, I suggested that the courts, the states, and the American people should follow the law as determined by the Sixth Circuit and the Supreme Court, rather than the law as illegitimately invented by the CDC — this is a correct summary of NR’s position. And Kilgore just cannot grasp why. At one point, he shares a reader’s suggestion that it is because there are “lots of landlords among NR subscribers/contributors.” At another, he wonders whether opposition to the policy itself is “a matter of deep conviction at NR,” but proposes that if it is, it’s a mistake, given that it might contribute to the Republican Party’s “optics problem.” At no point does it seem to cross his mind that we believe that what Joe Biden has done is deeply destructive to our constitutional order, and that it is our obligation to say it. That tells us a lot about him, and nothing about us.
Story continues at: No Law
