When a court ordered the federal government to release an unindicted U.S. citizen, Lincoln simply ignored the order. The Bill of Rights and the courts were now null and void. Such niceties could not be indulged when the very existence of the Republic was at stake.

Democrats today think they are the Republicans of 1861. They may not be fighting a literal war against secessionist slave states, but they have been delayed in their efforts to draw a mid-decade partisan gerrymander. In their mind, they are now justified in using any means necessary to gain and keep power — anything less is bowing to autocracy.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) won last year after saying she opposed mid-decade gerrymandering. She and her party promptly voted to replace the sensible, balanced, non-partisan congressional map with a shameless gerrymander.

Virginia Democrats pointed to similar Republican mid-decade gerrymanders to justify their act of vandalism. To this point, they could argue that turnabout is fair play, even if it means effectively disenfranchising your own people for partisan gain.

But Virginia Democrats didn’t follow the state constitution in their gerrymander. The proper procedure would have been (1) to vote in the legislature to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, (2) to vote again after the next election, and then (3) to hold a popular vote on the ballot measure.

But the Democrats held their first vote during the 2025 election (after early voting had started), rather than before it. Nevertheless, state officials placed the proposed amendment on the ballot in April.

When Republicans sued, Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones (who is most famous for repeatedly wishing death on Republicans for the crime of being Republicans), argued that the state Supreme Court should not rule until after the public voted on the measure.

The court obeyed Jones. After the ballot measure passed, the court ruled, with a Democrat-appointed justice writing the opinion, that it was invalid.

That’s when Democrats went wild. They decided to not only assail the state Supreme Court’s ruling, but to disregard it.

Members of Congress started planning to remove the entire Virginia Supreme Court, not through impeachment but by legislating a new mandatory retirement age of 54 with no grandfather clause. Democrats could then pack the court with only partisan Democrats who would then overturn the recent decision and reinstate the Democrats’ illegal gerrymander.

Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias, presumably aware that liberals in recent years have tried to assassinate Republicans (including justices) in order to secure favorable policy, nevertheless posted on X that the justices “need to go.”

Marc Elias is the Democratic Party’s premier elections attorney. He was the top lawyer for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and he worked for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Elias proposed that Democrats simply abolish the government of Virginia.

None of these Democrats had a substantive critique of the Virginia Supreme Court. They just thought the court should have allowed the Democratic power grab because Republicans are really bad.

The Democrats in charge of Virginia are now filing a laughable appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The only reason to do this, when their defeat is guaranteed, is to give them grist for attacking the Supreme Court.

If you spent the last decade listening to Democrats call themselves the defenders of democracy and the Constitution, and watching the legacy media nod in agreement, you might be surprised to see their behavior these days. But there’s no inconsistency. The Democrats have been pretty clear.

President Joe Biden made it clear that “MAGA Republicans” were a threat to democracy, and that by “MAGA Republicans,” he basically meant Donald Trump voters and conservatives. Thus, “saving democracy” was never about preserving norms or democratic procedures. It was always about defeating the threats to democracy: the Republicans.

Trump is, in fact, extraordinarily corrosive of our politics and government. He’s as bad as Joe Biden and Barack Obama in arrogating power to the executive. He’s worse than any previous president in loudly demanding loyalty from the justices he appointed. And to his eternal shame, he refuses to accept his loss in the 2020 election, and in his temper tantrum, he spurred a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Democrats clearly have decided that they will respond to Trump’s power grabs and norm-breaking by grabbing power and breaking norms. They justify their attacks on the rule of law by claiming such attacks are necessary to save the rule of law.

But nobody who has been paying attention should assume this Democratic fervor will die off when Trump is gone. Every single Republican will be dubbed worse than Trump. We know this because they already said it.

Biden declared in 2012 that Republicans would reinstitute slavery. That same election, once-and-future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared “democracy is on the ballot,” and adopted that as the central slogan in the final weeks of the election. If Romney wins, she was clearly asserting, democracy is done.

In 2016, the liberal commentariat argued that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were worse than Trump. Later, they argued that former Vice President Mike Pence was worse than Trump. They’re already arguing that Vice President JD Vance is worse than Trump.

Republicans could nominate Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for president, and MSNow would spend three months convincing viewers she is Mussolini in heels.

Democrats speak as if they must gain power by any means necessary.

VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED

Republicans spoke this way very recently. In 2016, many conservatives, including most conservative intellectuals, were wary about voting for Trump, even in the general election, because he was so clearly unfit for the job and unconcerned with the Constitution.

Writer Michael Anton penned a famous essay urging conservatives to discard all considerations besides power, because we conservatives were in the same position as the passengers in the back of the hijacked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.

Anton was wrong in 2016. Liberals are wrong today to emulate his desperate disregard for norms and standards. This won’t end well.

Consider the Salon.com classic, “Why I Hate Mother’s Day.” Why? “It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.”

We’ve turned a corner, it seems. On Mother’s Day this year, not only were husbands and sons fawning over mothers, but also Uncle Sam. Specifically, Republicans and conservatives, who traditionally would laud motherhood but fastidiously keep government out of it, tripped over one another to offer policy solutions for Mom.

Moms.gov launched on Mother’s Day this year, promising “Resources, Information, and Help for New and Expecting Mothers.” The website, published by the Trump White House, focused on those mothers in the most distress.

Pregnancy centers, not abortion providers, got top billing on Moms.gov. The website also provided sound nutrition information for expectant mothers and, of course, a link to create a Trump Account — a tax-privileged savings account for children to which the federal government will contribute $1,000 for every newborn.

President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle held a Mother’s Day Oval Office press conference to announce the website and a handful of policy changes, tweaking various maternal benefits.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is divorced from the mothers of his six children and who once allegedly told a paramour by text that he wanted to “impregnate” her, put a modern twist on the Oval Office event, calling Moms.gov “a one-stop shop for IVF.”

Mother’s Day affected both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, as some pro-Mom legislation was conceived on Capitol Hill.

A bipartisan group of congressmen proposed a $2,000 “newborn credit.” This is a partially refundable tax credit delivered to parents around the time their baby is born. Unlike the standard childcare subsidies, parents could use this cash however they want: an au pair, a plane ticket for grandma, or to offset lost wages for staying at home.

THE PRO-FAMILY CASE FOR WALKABILITY

And because some moms on Mother’s Day just want their alone time, Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT), one of the sponsors of that newborn credit, also introduced a bill to get the kids out of the house: The “Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act,” would try to establish a nationwide norm that setting your children free to roam the neighborhood is not criminal neglect.

Sure, Mother’s Day 2026 included an unusual amount of content for “dog moms,” but it should be cheering that more and more folks are deciding that moms matter.

If you hear a politician or commentator mention “walkability,” that person is probably a Democrat or a liberal.

That’s a shame, because walkability should be a conservative concern. Specifically, conservatives ought to help parents have more kids and help kids have lower-tech childhoods with more freedom. Neighborhoods where kids can walk around are neighborhoods where families will flourish and civil society will blossom.

On the flipside, those who work on walkability ought to think more about children and parents. You could spend all day reading urbanism and walkability literature and come across a hundred mentions of commuting to work or walking to a cocktail bar without ever seeing the word “child.”

We need to fix these problems.

America has an epidemic of childhood anxiety rooted in a lack of freedom. Birth rates are collapsing, and parenthood seems more daunting. We desperately need a world where kids can be let loose in a neighborhood and told to come home for dinner. That requires more walkable places, which in turn requires a fuller and smarter discussion about walkability.

Freedom for kids, relief for parents

American children walk far less than they used to, largely because American parents give them far less freedom to roam. Less freedom and less walking means more scrolling, less exercise, and less socialization, leading to more anxiety and probably fewer babies.

Most American 11-year-olds are not allowed to leave their property without supervision, according to a recent poll by the Institute for Family Studies. Most 14-year-olds may not leave their street. Most 17-year-olds may not leave their neighborhood.

Forty percent of American high schoolers walked to school in 1969. By 2016, only about 10% walked, according to the Transportation Department.

These trends harm parents and children both.

When kids walk less, that often means parents drive more. Modern suburban parenting means hours and hours stuck in car hell: buckling and unbuckling the baby so you can pick up the toddler on the way to dropping off the oldest at her friend’s house.

Also, when every get-together needs to be scheduled, and when free-time isn’t spent wandering, kids end up less well-adjusted.

“A primary cause of the rise in mental disorders,” concluded a 2023 paper in the Journal of Pediatrics, “is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”

Parental fear is a major cause of decreased childhood mobility, but the built environment is surely a factor. At the very least, a more walkable neighborhood can be part of the solution.

The ‘official’ measure is dumb

“Want Fecundity in the Sheets? Give Us Walkability in the Streets.”

That was the title of one chapter in my 2024 book, Family Unfriendly, on the cultural forces arrayed against parents and kids. My argument: Parents will have more kids if they’re not forced to drive them around as much. More broadly, when childhood is more fun parents will enjoy it more — and maybe have more kids.

I haven’t proven that walkability yields fecundity, or even childhood flourishing. Admittedly, the famously walkable cities of Mediterranean Europe have shockingly low birthrates, and U.S. birthrates are higher in rural areas, where a car or truck is mandatory.

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies denies that walkability even affects children’s freedom to roam.

Stone relies on the “Walkability Index” published by the federal government. That’s an official measure, but it’s also an awful measure.

The index comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, which measures some concepts of “urbanism,” but doesn’t even try to measure the ease of walking.

The EPA lays out its methodology in a brief paper whose cover is illustrated with a photo of a D.C. intersection. The photo has almost everything: A Metro stop, a car, crosswalks, racial minorities, a woman with a cane, a man in a wheelchair. What you don’t see is any children or even one parent pushing a stroller.

Inside this paper, the words “child” and “parent” appear only once each, in a quotation from the AARP.

More importantly, playgrounds and parks go totally unmentioned.

These omissions reflect the poor methodology. The EPA calculates the walkability of every “block group” in America (which, in the suburbs and cities, is a handful of blocks) with four measures:

1. “Intersection density”
2. “Proximity to transit stops”
3. “Employment Mix”
4. “Employment and household mix”

In other words, smaller blocks and a grid design are rewarded along with bus stops and subway stations. Also, the EPA calls a neighborhood more walkable if homes are near businesses, and especially near a bunch of different kinds of businesses.

These factors are not uncorrelated with actual walkability, but they shouldn’t define walkability.

The EPA doesn’t care if there are sidewalks or walking trails in a neighborhood. Crossing a six-lane road with a 50-mph speed limit is just as “walkable” in the EPA’s methodology as crossing a small, 20-mph street with bumped-out curbs.

When talking about walkability, one needs to ask “walkable to what?” The EPA measures walkability to places of employment, ideally, places of many different types of employment. This isn’t merely a measure of can you walk to work? It also indirectly measures can you walk to the store, the restaurant, and the concert hall?

These are fine considerations, but they are too adult-centric. Kids mostly need to walk to school and the basketball court. A playground or park counts for nothing in the EPA’s measure. In fact, a park is a negative in the EPA’s calculus because it offers neither employment nor road intersections.

Also, kids mostly need to walk safely to their friends’ houses.

Studies have consistently found two factors affect safety for children walking: The volume of car traffic and the speed of car traffic. As one recent meta-study put it: “The two most common traffic variables that have a negative relationship with traffic safety for children, and thus a positive relationship with collisions involving children were high traffic speed and high traffic volume.”

When kids are less at risk from getting run over, parents give them more freedom, and they walk more: Slower and fewer cars yields more children walking.

Nevertheless, these factors are totally absent from the EPA’s Walkability Index

Trump should fix it

The Trump administration can fix this, and can make walkability great again.

The first step is moving this index from the EPA to Department of Transportation (currently headed by father of nine, Sean Duffy).

The second step is putting children and families first rather than last. The volume and speed of traffic should be the most heavily weighted factors, along with the presence of sidewalks and trails. Proximity and accessibility of schools and parks should be next. Finally, commerce and short blocks matter, so they should be included.

Also, the Transportation Department should actively work to make more places kid-walkable. DOT should steer state walkability initiatives towards considering families and kids first.

Any federal road spending should be made in the light of whether it makes a walkable place less walkable, especially for kids. Any federal spending for bike and pedestrian trails should also explicitly aim for kids’ safe passage around neighborhoods.

Two shifts of mindset are needed here: First, the people who think about walkability need to think about family and children before they think about workers or shoppers.

Second (and this may be a more difficult shift) conservatives need to start thinking about walkability, even when that means inconvenience for drivers.

WALKABLE TO WHAT?

Where people, especially children, would want to walk, cars should go slower and roads should have fewer lanes. This is a sacrifice for drivers.

Don’t think of this as a sacrifice for the sake of lycra-clad bicyclists. Instead, it’s for the sake of an 8-year-old walking to her friend’s house, a 12-year-old walking to Little League practice, and a few 14-year-olds wandering the neighborhood until the street lights come on.

The less you trust and depend on your fellow man, including your family, the more you rely on the government. And the more intrusive the government, the less room there is for family and community.

These days, the individualistic collectivists are targeting marriage. Economists in two recent studies make the case for individualizing families and diminishing marriage.

A husband and wife shouldn’t be considered a unit, argue economists from the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. In 2023, the trio argued that everyone would be better off if the IRS treated a married couple as two different adults.

The economists think they are just being clear-eyed analysts, but they are unwittingly preaching a particular notion of marriage and even a hidden anthropology.

It’s easy for them to miss, because these are the dominant assumptions among today’s elite. They see humans as fundamentally atomized individuals and marriage as a bilateral contract for the advantage of each individual.

A “family” is just an accounting fiction in this mindset.

Their reason for the IRS to pretend marriage doesn’t exist is almost as perverse: “When married couples are taxed individually, a more progressive tax system leads to higher labor force participation and thus more labor market experience (higher human capital) in the economy.”

That is, the economists think that too many parents are spending too much time with their children, and changing the tax code will push more couples to adopt the dual-income model (and probably have smaller families).

The secondary benefit, to the economists, is that this will make it easier for the government to increase tax rates and thus increase the size of government.

More time in the office, less time with children, bigger government: win, win, win!

But that’s not the weirdest recent study along these lines. Cambridge University Press’s journal Politics and the Life Sciences published “Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men.”

The three psychiatrists behind this paper urged governments to launch “large resource transfers … to motivate sufficient individualistic reproduction.” That is, get rid of sex and marriage, and subsidize in vitro fertilization and single-motherhood-by-choice.

MAGAZINE — MEDIA BUBBLE-THINK: SEX IS ANTIQUATED

The common theme between these papers: have the government intervene to break up the natural bond between men and women (and baby-making) so as to make us all more autonomous individuals, disconnected from one another.

That doesn’t sound great, unless you think the problem is too much family and cohesion, and not enough government and individualism.

The new sod needs watering. If the various experts on the internet, and YouTube, and the gardening store, and the cabal of professional garden experts, and the capitalists of “Big Sod” are all to be believed, that watering must be done first thing in the morning. Like the HomeGoods mother whose painted wooden sign reads, “But, first, coffee,” my sod demands its morning beverage with the impatience of a suckling.

The mourning doves and their eggs also must come before me. When I come back a bit drenched from my battle with the sprinklers, I hit the brew button on my Keurig and then go to the doves and their eggs.

You may wonder why mourning doves need human assistance in incubating their eggs. After all, birds, along with bees, are the poster-creatures for animal reproduction. These lovebirds were no exception, but they needed me to do one specific task: open the garage door to let them out in the morning.

You see, for the second year in a row, mourning doves have built a nest in my garage and laid their eggs there. Last year, we doomed three tiny doves to die in ovo. The parents had nested on top of our garage-door opener, and my wife — fearing that the bird dropping would gum up the works of this contraption — tried to slide some cardboard under the nest. This proved deadly.

This year’s dove nest sits on a brick pillar in our garage, and so Katie thinks everything might work, as long as each morning we open the garage to let the parents in and out. Each night, to assuage her guilt from last year, we are to shut the garage doors to keep out the raccoons.

I do not know whether eggs are a raccoon’s preferred breakfast, but Katie is right to expect these furry carnivores in our garage. One raccoon took up lodging on this same brick pillar during our first winter here.

That particular raccoon, I should be clear, is no longer a threat, having been extinguished by my two dogs in a memorable and bloody Christmas morning. Those same dogs, on this self-same morning in fact, had already exterminated another raccoon, wetting my dirt with blood while I wet the sod with water.

In this column, someday soon, I hope to give proper attention to these raccoons with which we share our property. But for now, I tell of the recent April morning when I helped my dogs dispose of a raccoon before letting out the mourning doves, to illustrate how unexpectedly full my tidy suburban life in Fairfax County is of wildlife — birth and death, feather and fur, predator and prey.

Your columnist spends his 9-to-5 hours interviewing members of Congress and voters, poring over campaign finance records, and opining on politics in these pages — quite the contrast to the more elemental concerns of his early mornings and his weekends. It’s reminiscent of the shock felt by the fictional columnist William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Boot is a gardening columnist sent off to cover an African coup. As a political columnist who is now asked to cover gardening, I’ve named this space after Boot’s column, “Lush Places.”

Just this spring, we have had a fox on our back porch, white-tail deer families in our yard, a mockingbird trapped in our screened porch, and a nightly show of circling bats. Last year, we were visited by an extended family of mice and a colony of kudzu bugs. I have been stung by yellow jackets in my yard and a European hornet in my kitchen. In our first days here, we had approximately 44 goats and one llama in our backyard — a moment that has led the locals to call ours Goat Hill.

DC JUDGE WARNS OF ‘SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES’ IF EAST POTOMAC GOLF LINKS CLOSED WITHOUT PROPER NOTICE

On this dawn, as I finally grabbed my coffee once the raccoon was discarded and the doves liberated, I joked to Katie that we were operating “a wildlife refuge up here on Goat Hill.”

Reflecting on the fate of the raccoons, the grim conditions of the dove nests two straight springs, and the discourtesy of the uninvited mice and hornets, Katie offered her concurring opinion: “The worst wildlife refuge ever.”

Tim Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Legalizing, subsidizing, and spreading abortion is a cause inextricable from the Democratic Party. At times, the Democratic Party looks like an arm of the abortion lobby.

I wrote an article this past weekend on how the Biden Justice Department became the prosecutorial arm of the National Abortion Federation. I wrote, “There may be no relationship more intimate in all of Washington than the affair between the Democratic Party and the abortion lobby. Democrats’ one non-negotiable stance is their defense of abortion.”

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE DEMOCRAT-ABORTION AXIS

My article focused on the prosecution of pro-lifers at the request of the abortion lobby, but I wanted to flesh out how broad the connection is between the lobby and Democrats.

Here are some points:

• Democrats are absolutists on abortion. You will not find a Democratic presidential or Senate candidate, or a House leader, who is willing to tolerate any limits on abortion in any case.
• There are no pro-life Democrats in Washington at all. The last one, former Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, was knocked out in the 2020 primary.
• When Democratic governors get to fill Senate vacancies, they have twice in recent years chosen abortion lobbyists.
• Abortion groups make up a huge portion of the Democratic fundraising base. For instance, EMILYs List PAC has averaged about $70 million over the past three election cycles. For comparison, that’s quadruple the spending by the National Rifle Association’s PAC.
• Subsidizing Planned Parenthood with taxpayer money is one of the Democrats’ chief crusades. In the 2011 budget showdown, it was Barack Obama’s one non-negotiable item.
• To keep abortion legal is the main reason they want to expand the court.

It’s possible to be a tax-cutting Democrat, a pro-war Democrat, an immigration-restrictionist Democrat, and these days, Democrats are allowed to oppose boys in girls’ sports. But a pro-life Democrat, in Washington, would be a contradiction in terms.

It’s quite the story: The University refuses to allow open debate about Israel, and resorts to violence to silence dissent!

AMERICA’S LEFT-WING POLITICAL VIOLENCE PROBLEM CANNOT BE MET WITH DENIAL

But video released by Cornell shows a different story: Students tried to stop Kotlikoff from leaving, and he tried, as slowly as possible, to exit.

Because he was in a car, that slow retreat was inherently dangerous to those trying to detain him, but Kotlikoff was still totally in the right.

There’s a legal principle in self-defense called the “duty to retreat.” If someone is 100 feet away from me and shouts, “I’m going to stab you,” I still probably shouldn’t shoot him. I should try to get away instead. In New York State, where Cornell is, that duty to retreat is actually written into law.

Notably, Kotlikoff was literally trying to retreat. The anti-Israel activists were following him, and he was trying to go home. They attempted to stop his departure by blocking his car. First, they stood behind his car as he was trying to reverse. (There was a brick wall in front of him.) Then one student jumped in front of the car when Kotlikoff was trying to pull forward.

Never did Kotlikoff drive fast. At all times, he drove excruciatingly slow. Did he bump one of the activists or run over a foot? Maybe. That’s a risk that comes with operating an automobile. It’s a risk that is justified in this case.

When someone is physically blocking your retreat, you are right to consider yourself at risk. (Men of a certain age very clearly remember Reginald Denny, who was surrounded by protesters and beaten nearly to death.)

TEACH YOUNG PEOPLE THE GRAMMAR OF SELF-GOVERNANCE

When your life and limb are at risk, you are justified in using force that would normally be unjustified. Likewise, you are justified in taking actions that, while not violent, run the risk of injuring the folks who detain you, such as trying to navigate your car to safety.

Stopping cars is an increasingly popular protest tactic on the Left. Nobody should run someone over just because that person is intentionally delaying them. But at some point, delaying a person becomes detaining a person. Then the rules change.

He is worried that a very black city will be represented by a white Republican if Republicans redistrict Tennessee. He says that this outcome, a white Republican representing Memphis, is “exactly the thing Congress was trying to address with the Voting Rights Act.”

Felton certainly knows that Memphis is currently represented in Congress by Steve Cohen, a white man. In fact, Cohen has represented Memphis in Congress for almost 20 years.

THE DEMOCRAT-ABORTION AXIS

Of course, that doesn’t bother the reporter. He’s specifically worried about a “white Republican” representing Memphis. (Interestingly, the current Republican candidate there is a black man.)

So if a white Democrat representing Memphis is fine, but a white Republican representing Memphis is not fine, then what’s problematic is a Republican winning a congressional seat.

It turns out that sometimes when liberal reporters and politicians claim to be talking about race, they’re just talking about party. What they call racist is really just anything they disagree with. When they say “diversity” is good, they mean their side winning is good.

Democrats and reporters prove this every day.

When Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was running for Speaker of the House, you would have expected at least some acknowledgment that he could become the first black Speaker. But Donalds’s Democratic colleague, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, rejected that idea.

“Byron Donalds is not a historic candidate for Speaker,” Bush wrote. “He is a prop. Despite being Black, he supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy. His name being in the mix is not progress — it’s pathetic.”

Now, of course, Donalds never expressed support for “upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.” Instead, he just supported Republican and conservative ideas. So Donalds, by Bush’s standards, didn’t count as black because he was a conservative Republican.

When Virginia elected Winsome Earle-Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor, liberal journalists said she wasn’t really black because she wasn’t liberal.

Over in the United Kingdom, it’s the same thing. Here’s a liberal reporter saying that an Indian prime minister doesn’t count as diversity, because of “his politics.”

UCLA THREATENS CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS, PROVING ‘WOKE’ IS NOT DEAD

Think through this reasoning. Being “black” or a “minority,” according to the media and Democrat definition, requires being liberal or a Democrat. That means that when they say something is bad for black people, or racist, they are really just saying something is bad for Democrats, which is not a very interesting objection.

It’s too bad. Racism is bad, and it should be denounced. Violating civil rights is bad, and it should be prevented. But the folks calling out supposed racism and civil rights violations are just upset that conservatives and Republicans sometimes win.

There may be no relationship more intimate in all of Washington than the affair between the Democratic Party and the abortion lobby. Democrats’ one non-negotiable stance is their defense of abortion — not merely keeping it legal, but using taxpayer money to subsidize the industry and using law enforcement to persecute its enemies.

The Trump Justice Department just shone a light on one corner of this abortion-Democrat combine, as part of its 880-page report on the Biden administration’s persecution of pro-lifers.

The report documents how Biden officials, in their effort to prosecute every pro-lifer they could, relied on the abortion lobby to find targets. But one newly unearthed detail, not directly related to persecution or prosecution, highlights the coziness.

When an abortion group was seeking a foundation grant, officials seeking a reference turned to Biden’s prosecutors — and the prosecutors assented, in essence becoming fundraisers for abortion.

The reference

The National Abortion Federation is the trade association for the abortion industry. Abortionists and abortion lobbyists are NAF’s members.

Planned Parenthood clinics, which combined perform about 1,200 abortions a day, make up the bulk of the NAF. Individual abortionists and independent abortion clinics are also members. Groups that lobby and campaign for abortion are also members of NAF, which spends about $11 million a year.

NAF, as a core pillar in the abortion lobby, is not merely an ally of Democrats, but effectively part of the Democratic Party. It was effectively a part of the Biden administration. The new DOJ memo demonstrates that NAF worked hand-in-hand with the Biden DOJ.

This itself is noteworthy, but NAF’s cozy ties to the Biden administration may be best demonstrated by a pair of email exchanges.

Michelle Davidson, a top official at NAF, and Sanjay Patel, the chief of the DOJ’s task force on prosecuting pro-lifers, had a long-running professional relationship. In late 2023, Davidson wrote with a special “request that I hope you could squeeze into your very busy schedule.”

Davidson explained: “We have the opportunity to submit a proposal for grant funds that would support the already existing security work I do in the” Washington, D.C. area, “for [abortion] providers.”

Davidson then made the ask: “I’m hoping you could write a short impact statement, on DOJ letterhead, and in your own words, on the importance of the NAF Security Departments work and the impact on provider safety in the greater D.C. area.”

“You could also talk about how we work together and some of the outcomes of our efforts if you feel inclined,” Davidson suggested. “I know you have a lot going on, but a statement from you would have a big impact on the proposal. … Looking forward to any updates on the next trial you may have. Let’s chat soon!”

That is, an activist for the abortion-industry lobby was friendly enough with the Biden DOJ to ask the DOJ to fundraise for the group.

Where did Davidson get the idea that the DOJ would do this? Well, they already had.

Back in November 2020, after Biden had defeated Trump (but while Trump was still president), Davidson’s predecessor at NAF, Tara Gannon, wrote Patel with a similar request: “The NAF Security team is working with a funder, the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, to help cover the cost of security activities within our department…. We need to provide five references to the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund for our proposal. We previously listed Julie Abbate when she was at DOJ. Can you ask Paige [Fitzgerald] if she would be ok being a reference for us?”

Patel forwarded the email to Fitzgerald, offering to let NAF use him as the reference instead. Patel then replied to Ganon, “Feel free to use me as a reference. If you all would rather use Paige, let me know so that I can get her approval.”

Fitzgerald later told Patel that they “should probably ask our ethics person” if this was okay.

The Justice Department found no evidence that “Patel contacted his ethics officer on this matter or retracted his offer to NAF.”

This shows the intimacy of NAF and the Biden DOJ, a relationship built mostly on NAF giving the DOJ names of pro-lifers to prosecute.

The relationship

In 2021, Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland created the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers. The task of this force, it soon became clear, was finding any pro-life activist or protester who could plausibly be charged with violating the FACE Act, a law that makes it a federal crime to obstruct entrance into an abortion facility.

Patel, who was already cozy with NAF, as shown by the November 2020 emails, was put in charge of the task force.

Patel and his colleagues basically asked NAF who it should prosecute. Patel one year was a speaker at NAF’s annual conference.

Emails show Patel called Davidson the “MVP” in bringing pro-life protesters to his “attention, often in real-time, which usually result in an investigation/prosecution.” He called NAF a “great resource for any investigation we have that involves clinic violence.”

Trump’s DOJ, in the April report ,explained that NAF was also a spy for the DOJ:

“NAF, Planned Parenthood, and [the Feminist Majority Foundation] not only flagged concerns about possible violations of the FACE Act, but also monitored the activities and locations of pro-life activists and shared updates about their First Amendment activities with the Biden DOJ and FBI in case chargeable conduct occurred.”

Fitzgerald, in seeking permission to provide the 2023 referral for NAF, wrote to her ethics colleague:

“We have worked with NAF for decades,” Fitzgerald wrote. “NAF regularly refers potential FACE Act violations and other threats to RHCPs, helps us liaise with clinics and staff, lets us know about upcoming events that might result in security concerns so we can notify FBI and [U.S. Marshals Service], etc. Because they are NGOs, they can poke around on the internet in ways that we can’t, and they have shared leads with us etc. The information flow has always been a one-way street, and they have always been respectful, cooperative, and are frequently quite helpful.”

One of Patel’s cases targeted a handful of pro-lifers who blocked the doors to a Tennessee abortion clinic before it opened in the morning. The defense attorney asked the DOJ for relevant information on “how many FACE Act criminal prosecutions there have been in the last ten years, including both reproductive right clinics, churches etc.”

The defense would be evidence that the Biden DOJ was selectively prosecuting its political enemies (on behalf of its political friends).

Patel refused. “As the national clinic violence coordinator,” he wrote back, weeks later, “I do not keep the kind of records you requested and, as a result, I do not believe that we will provide them to you.”

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This was false, Patel’s emails show. Months before, Patel had apparently requested, and had received, a spreadsheet listing all FACE Act prosecution. Withholding requested evidence is prosecutorial misconduct, of course. But making matters worse, Trump’s DOJ says Patel’s team happily provided basically the same information to NAF on a separate occasion.

Many interest groups ally with the Democratic Party. But probably none is as intimate as the abortion lobby.

Behold the Baby Bonus, the policy that will soon take center stage in Washington and in state capitals.

A Baby Bonus is a cash payment to parents right before or after the birth of a new child. It is pretty well proven to improve babies’ health, and new research bolsters the suspicion that it can actually encourage people to have more babies — and we desperately need more babies.

Launched in 2024, “Rx Kids” is a public-private program that gives mothers $1,500 when they are halfway through their pregnancy, and then pays out $500 a month for 12 months. This isn’t a tax credit or a childcare subsidy. It’s straight cash to the parents right when they have a baby, for a total of $7,500 by the baby’s first birthday.

The money comes from a consortium of foundations, universities, the state’s welfare budget, and a children’s hospital.

Flint, Michigan, still infamous for having toxic drinking water a decade ago, was the setting for the first experiment in this Baby Bonus. After Flint, the program spread to Kalamazoo and Pontiac.

Because this program rolled out in only a few places, it created something of an experiment: Did this money make a difference?

Yes. It was a small difference, but it was real. Researchers Jonathan Hartley and Benjamin Jaros found that births were 7.5% higher than they would have been absent the subsidy.

Maybe people are just moving to Flint or Kalamazoo to get the bonus, but the authors found data to undermine that explanation. They looked at surrounding counties and found no decrease in the birth rates there, which you would have found had expectant parents flocked to the Baby Bonus counties.

Now, the increase was pretty small by some measures. For every 14 mothers, babies whose parents got the Baby Bonus, 13 of them would have been born anyway. That is, about 1,000 babies were born in Flint in 2024, and about 925 of those births would have happened anyway.

The program sent $8 million to new mothers in Flint, with most of that going to mothers who would have had babies. So as a pro-natal subsidy, this was pretty expensive: about $107,000 for each extra baby.

Pronatalists have a few reactions to this.

First: It’s amazing if one policy can increase the number of births by 7%! Let’s find two more policies like that, and we’ve reversed 15 years of falling birthrates!

Also, just as falling birthrates are a self-reinforcing problem, rising birthrates might be a self-reinforcing solution. If so, anything that can nudge the birthrate up is good. The question is whether this is an affordable or cost-effective way to get more babies.

It’s true that the Baby Bust wasn’t mostly caused by economics, but by culture. Thus, the solutions will be found more in cultural shifts than in policies or economic changes.

But if we’re going to spend money to help young adults have children, the Baby Bonus seems the most promising approach, for a few reasons.

First, it’s immediate. Parents get the first check right before the baby is born, and then the rest of the money comes in the child’s first months. This has a bigger psychological effect on parents than a child tax credit, which doesn’t show up until the child’s second tax year, and which is dribbled in over 17 years.

More importantly, the baby’s first years and months are when parents most need the money. That’s when Mom is mostly likely to take time off from work. That’s when daycare costs might be highest.

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On that note, a Baby Bonus is much more flexible than other spending proposals, such as subsidized childcare. A parent can use the Baby Bonus for childcare to go back to work, a babysitter for the older kids, or to cover income loss from time off work. A couple could also use a Baby Bonus to offset some of the cost of moving, building a granny flat, or adding a wall to build a nursery.

The Michigan study gives us a small sample size, and so maybe a Baby Bonus won’t be the winner it looks like. But so far, it seems that if you give people money for having a baby, some people will have more babies.