For these reasons, cars are naturally very regulated.

Self-driving cars are just coming onto the market in significant numbers, so the regulatory framework will have to be changed at the state and federal levels.

Different industry and advocacy groups have been hashing out legislation to establish this framework. Lawmakers from both parties have been getting closer to a good compromise measure. The biggest opposition, according to all reports, is coming from the trial lawyers.

The American Association of Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) has been lobbying on this matter, and earlier this year opposed the bipartisan SELF DRIVE Act, arguing “It eliminates all legal accountability for AV failures and collisions” and “strips away victims’ fundamental rights, limiting their right to seek justice.”

In short, victims need to know whom to sue if they get injured by a self-driving car. This is a reasonable-sounding objection, and one you’d expect to hear from the folks who do the suing.

But Democratic and Republican lawmakers both say they’ve bent over backward to address the lawyers’ valid concern.

Check out this report from Government Technology magazine:

“Speaking during a hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., placed blame for the roadblock mostly on trial lawyers, who typically align with Democrats.

‘It should be clear from the history of this process that Republicans and Democrats on this panel worked very hard with your organization to get sign off and support when we first moved this bill,” Walden said. “So you might imagine my disappointment when you all asked for more changes in the Senate, despite the deal we had here in the House with your organization.’

‘But it was even more curious that when Senate Republicans and Democrats ceded to the provisions you were seeking, you still didn’t support the deal,’ Walden continued.”

In other words, the trial lawyers seem dead set on sinking the bill, rather than passing a better bill. This would suggest that the trial lawyers don’t just want to set up a good liability system for self-driving cars — they want to block wide adoption of self-driving cars.

Why would trial lawyers want to block self-driving cars?

Check out this post from Alex Tabarrok:

“Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries.… The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents–Annual U.S. auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220B.”

One doesn’t want to be too cynical, but it is striking that the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of safer cars is the industry that profits when people get injured or killed in car accidents.

This was hogwash — both parties were the parties of Big Business. Liberals toned down this line of attack a bit when President Donald Trump took over the GOP. But still, this self-conceit persists on the Left, even in the face of very clear facts to the contrary.

Consider this lengthy essay by liberal blogger Matt Yglesias about the “politics of ‘big tobacco.’” He’s mostly making a point not about lobbying (that when you win a legislative battle, sometimes it is over, and you don’t get political credit for it), but the whole context of this 2,300 is about special-interest power. After all, “big tobacco” is in the headline.

Yglesias casts the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (and its failed 2008 version) as one in a series of regulatory “blows against the tobacco industry”

“By 2009, the tobacco lobby had lost its grip on Congress,” Yglesias writes.

You would infer from this piece that “big tobacco” was against the bills to regulate their industry. You would be wrong.

If you have a Bloomberg subscription and can read the links Yglesias used to build his case, you will see that this piece from 2008 states the lobbying lay of the land:

“The House voted 326-102 today to approve the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, backed by public health groups and Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA, the nation’s biggest tobacco maker.… The Bush administration opposes the measure, saying it would undermine the credibility of the FDA.” (Emphasis added.)

In his 2,300 words on Big Tobacco and the 2009 law giving the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate the industry, he never once informs his reader that the biggest tobacco company — controlling 50% of the U.S. market — lobbied for and helped craft the bill.

Here are some details from a news story on the 2007 version of the bill:

“It is also supported by Altria Group unit Philip Morris USA, maker of top-selling Marlboro cigarettes.”

“Industry analysts have said Philip Morris backs the measure because it would help protect the company’s dominant market share by muting rivals’ advertising messages.”

“McConnell, whose state still has tobacco farmers and some small tobacco manufacturers, said some of the manufacturers call the bill the ‘Marlboro Monopoly Act.’”

TIM CARNEY: MORE REGULATION MEANS MORE PROFITS FOR LARGE FIRMS

More generally, regulation adds to overhead, which protects the dominant players from competition.

So no, Big Tobacco had not been defanged by 2009, as Yglesias claims. That’s the year the biggest of Big Tobacco won. Democrats and their friends in the media tried to paint it as a victory of Big Business, while it was nothing of the sort.

These days, the gods of Olympus are a lot less active, and nobody falls for the really large wooden horse as a gift thing. Fraud persists, though. The fraudsters just adapt to their time and place.

In America’s wealthy suburbs in A.D. 2026, it is fitting that the schemers would promise not victory in war, but travel soccer training.

Ahmed Mohamed was a top coach at the Alexandria Soccer Association in Northern Virginia. Alexandria, with a median household income over $120,000, is one of the wealthiest counties in America. It’s not as wealthy as neighboring Arlington, but it is close.

If you drive around the D.C. area, you’ve seen hundreds of parents proudly sporting the bumper stickers featuring a soccer ball and a wingless gryphon (sort of Germanic) on a red shield-shaped crest (sort of English), a prim hodgepodge of European heraldry.

The Alexandria Soccer Association is not the local rec league of your youth, and that European imagery hints towards its aspirations. The association runs soccer academies and elite teams for all ages with dozens of professional coaches. This summer, they even brought in German coaches.

In that Europhile context, Mohamed sold 13 families on a soccer trip to Italy.

Families paid between $2,000 and $12,000 for their families to travel to Italy, police say, with the price tag covering flights, lodging, and, of course, elite soccer training. Allegedly, there was no training session awaiting these kids over there, nor were there even flights.

Apparently, some parents started to sniff out something suspicious and called the Financial Crimes Unit’s hotline.

DUGOUT DAYS

Mohamed was, if the cops are right, monetizing the credibility lent to him by that Alexandria Soccer Association crest.

The most surprising thing is that this travel soccer coach didn’t plan his allegedly fictional training trip to a country that could qualify for the World Cup.

The House of Representatives on July 14 passed “The Sunshine Protection Act” to put the U.S. permanently on Daylight Saving Time. The bill would not protect any sunshine or save any daylight.

The bill would save Americans from changing their clocks twice a year. It would also result in fewer early sunsets. But as with every goodie Congress promises, we would pay a price for these two benefits: later sunrises, and for much of the country, darkness lasting well after 8 am all winter.

Notably, the sponsor of the Sunshine Protection Act is a Floridian, Rep. Vern Buchanan, whose Tampa Bay district sits farther south than 95% of the U.S. population.

Yes, latitude matters on this issue, because the places farther from the equator have far greater variation in sunrise and sunset times, and this variation is why DST and clock-shifting exist in the first place.

There is more at stake than a couple of nights of disrupted sleep. Very late sunrises could pose dangers for school children. On the other hand, some researchers say that early sunsets are more of a danger. And those twice-a-year clock changes also get blamed for death and illness.

Let’s start with why we change the clocks in the first place.

Daylight Saving Time Explained

The continental U.S. is divided into four time zones. Time zones in the U.S. are roughly set so that solar noon — when the sun is due south and at its highest point in the sky — is around 12:00 p.m., Standard Time.

For instance, in Washington, D.C., the average solar noon is about 12:05 during Standard Time. One hour later, the sun hits solar noon around Chicago, which is why Chicago is in the Central Time Zone. Then an hour later, the sun hits its zenith in Denver, and then an hour after that — at about 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time — Californians get solar noon.

Solar noon wanders a bit throughout the year, but in the middle of a time zone, it will average right around noon, Standard Time.

So why would we mess with Standard Time? Because in the summer, particularly in northern latitudes, we “waste” a lot of daylight due to very early sunrises. In New York City, for instance, the sun rises before 4:30 Standard Time every day in June.

We spend money and burn fossil fuels to keep lights on at night, and so for more than a hundred years, folks have argued we should shift the clock forward an hour in the Spring. That means less sunshine happens while we sleep in, and the evening darkness doesn’t descend until closer to bedtime — thus saving on light bulbs and the energy that powers them. Then in the Fall, we can shift back to Standard Time.

The first such clock shifts legislated by Congress came during World War I, specifically to conserve fuel during the war. The law was quickly repealed.

Franklin Roosevelt went further during World War II, creating permanent DST (he called it “War Time”). Basically, clocks everywhere were shifted an hour later, and they stayed that way until after VJ Day.

The current system was established by the Uniform Time Act in 1966. The darker half of the year was set to Standard Time, but the sunnier half was set to Daylight Saving Time. Over the years, Congress has amended the law, and now DST takes up most of the year, from March 8 to November 1 this year.

The debate

The biggest complaint about the status quo is the semiannual time change. Most adults lose an hour of sleep when the clocks “Spring forward.” Parents of small children suffer in a different way when the clocks “Fall back” (because little Madison and Connor do not care that it is now technically only 5:15 a.m., and they get to sleep in).

The time change is not merely unpleasant, argue the critics. It’s deadly: “Fatal car accidents in the United States spike by 6% during the workweek following the ‘spring forward’ to daylight saving time,” found a 2020 study from the University of Colorado, Boulder, “resulting in about 28 additional deaths each year.”

Other studies have come to similar conclusions: When drivers lose an hour of sleep and suddenly have to adjust to darker morning commutes, they drive worse and crash more.

Some studies even suggest that the annual “Spring forward” might cause heart attacks and strokes on the first Monday and Tuesday of Daylight Saving Time. Though some of that is made up for by fewer heart attacks and strokes when we get the extra hour of sleep at the end of DST.

So that’s the case against changing our clocks twice a year.

If we were to abolish the time changes, we would have to settle on which time to pick: Standard Time, where solar noon is about noon, or Daylight Saving Time, where the sun peaks around 1 pm. (Or we could choose some third option.)

Congress, in the Sunshine Protection Act, has chosen permanent DST, which, of course, doesn’t protect sunshine or save daylight — it merely shifts it later.

Later sunrise, later solar noon, later sunset

One of the best things about summertime is the late sunsets — little kids can play the streets until bedtime, pickup basketball games can start after dinner and last for hours, you can play a late round of golf.

Daylight Saving Time magnifies that benefit. Making it permanent would increase evening sunshine in the months when it’s most scarce: November through February.

Here’s the safety argument for this trade: People walk more at night. These days, as cars get safer for driver and passengers, a greater portion of car-involved deaths are pedestrian deaths. People walk around more in the evening than in the morning (it’s true), and so buying evening light at the expense of morning light is a net gain in pedestrian safety and thus a net reduction in car-caused deaths.

It’s not a large effect, though. During DST, “the net effect on overall fatal crashes is minimal,” concludes the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

So the safety argument for choosing DST over Standard Time is thin.

The argument against permanent DST is probably stronger: Daylight Saving Time in the winter means very late sunrises, which means kids walking to school in the dark.

More than 110,000 students attend public schools in Montgomery County, Texas, to pick a district at random. The school day for elementary school kids starts at 8:15 a.m. In mid-January, sunrise is currently 7:19 a.m. in Conroe, the county’s biggest city.

Were Conroe on permanent DST, sunrise would be 8:19, meaning most elementary school kids would be walking to and waiting for the school bus in the dark in the winter.

The middle schools and high schools in the county start their day at 7:15 am. Astronomical Twilight would be at 6:55 am under permanent DST, meaning children would be going to school in the pitch black.

And the further north you go, the worse it would be.

First, take Waverly, Nebraska, outside of Lincoln. By Thanksgiving, sunrise would be at 8:25 am, after the opening bell of their middle school and most of their elementary schools — and getting later every day. When the students return from Christmas, sunrise would be 8:49, meaning kids are getting to school before even a hint of daylight.

In the Seattle area, sunrise in January would be at 8:57 a.m.

Already too few kids walk to school in the U.S., harming childhood independence, neighborhood cohesion, and parental well-being. Pitch-black opening bells would make it worse.

Most of Florida has only a two-hour difference between its earliest sunrise in July and its latest sunrise (if you don’t count the clock change), while in Seattle, that difference is nearly four hours.

Conclusion

There are plusses and minuses to Daylight Saving Time and to Standard Time. The relative tradeoffs vary by geography: mostly by latitude, but also by longitude within a given time-zone.

It’s not obvious how to weigh these tradeoffs. But that difficulty seems a strong argument against the proposed change, which is all-Daylight Saving, all-year-long, everywhere.

Instead, this should be a matter of state and local control. If the people of Florida really want later sunsets, they could adopt permanent DST, and let the places with more extreme variations in daylight keep the current system.

IT’S TIME TO END DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME (UNTIL NEXT YEAR)

In fact, since Florida is currently split between two time zones (which creates problems on Election Day, among other times), maybe Florida should just shift entirely into the Central Time Zone and stay in permanent Standard Time.

The rest of the country won’t love switching the clocks twice a year, but they’ll enjoy languid summer evenings, and reasonably sunlit school mornings.

How did she get the job?

By being the sister of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who held the seat until his death on July 11.

This reeks of nepotism. Critics say it looks like a hereditary monarchy, and complain that Nordone is “completely unqualified.”

These criticisms are not untrue. But they don’t matter.

It’s fine that Nordone doesn’t have experience in government — that’s healthy in a democracy. It’s also fine that Nordone got the job because she’s Graham’s sister — appointing her might be the best way for Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) to honor voters’ wishes.

There’s a deeper point here, too: As a culture, we are too sensitive about nepotism and too confident in “meritocracy.”

For a hundred years, governors have been appointing widows to fill out the U.S. Senate terms of their departed husbands: Hattie Wyatt Caraway was appointed in 1931, and then voters elected her in her own right. After Huey Long was assassinated, his widow served until a special election could be held. Four other widows have since finished their husbands’ terms, thanks to appointments.

This pattern reflects a good and natural desire: Governors are trying to give the voters what they voted for.

A governor might think, “The guy the voters hired is gone. They don’t get to vote until the general election. So, let’s give the voters the closest thing we can to the guy they voted for.”

For many senators, the closest thing to a second self is his wife. I know this is a helplessly old-fashioned view of marriage, but yes, husband and wife often become something like one flesh over the decades. In many couples, nobody knows the decedent’s wishes better than the widow or widower.

Graham wasn’t married. He was very close to his sister Darline. She campaigned with him and always lived in South Carolina. She arguably knows better than anyone else what he would have wished or done in a given circumstance. She is, at least plausibly, the closest thing to having Graham in office, which is what the voters wanted.

For similar reasons, a longtime chief of staff has often stepped in to fill the seat of a fallen senator.

This grates on the sensibilities of the day.

“Why does Lindsey Graham’s sister get his Senate seat?” asked writer Alex Bronzini on social media. “We shouldn’t pass Senate seats to the next of kin as if they’re hereditary titles. Just select the most qualified ideologically-aligned person.”

Again, that sounds reasonable, especially to the meritocratic mind of 21st-century college-educated America.

Of course, we should have the most qualified person for every job. You should be hired for what you know, not whom you know.

But who determines who is the “most qualified” person to be a U.S. senator?

It’s the voters. There’s something radically egalitarian and un-meritocratic about politics. To be a U.S. senator, you need to be 30, a U.S. citizen, live in the state, and get more votes than the next guy. No Ph.D., no job history, and no recommendations are necessary beyond what John Q. Public demands.

Maybe you think the voters should have higher requirements for the office. Certainly, we need men and women of higher character in office than the ones we currently have, but also, commentators, academics, and all sorts of elites probably overvalue meritocracy in our world.

The main problem is that we’re not as good at measuring merit as we might think.

Imagine a small-business owner about to give up the reins of his company. It might seem nepotistic to hand them over to his son as opposed to the “most qualified person.” But human beings are ultimately mysteries to other human beings. We don’t know how someone will do in a new job.

So, if there’s a person you know intimately, then it’s actually rational to say, “I’m not certain who will be good at this job, but my uncertainty is lower for my son, because I’ve known him his entire life.”

FOUR BANNED BOOKS DUA LIPA SHOULD CARRY IN HER NEW LIBRARY

Now, I wouldn’t want this reasoning applied if my Delta pilot is out sick. The Mets are scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I don’t think they should sub in Devin Williams’ brother if the regular closer’s arm is tired.

But most jobs do not allow for the sort of objective measurement of ability that we can get for pitchers and pilots. And with all due respect to the dearly departed, being a U.S. senator is not brain surgery.

Lipa is marketing her library as a repository of “banned books,” which sounds transgressive and edgy until you see her list.

Out of these 100 books, about 15 of them were required reading for me in middle school and high school.

And Lipa is advertising her collection by holding up a copy of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.

Far from banned, this book and its cinematic adaptations have been almost impossible to avoid for the last decade, especially since Donald Trump rose to prominence and unhinged commentators decided that he was imposing a theocracy or something.

My brother John made a similar point on social media:

In what sense is this book, or any of Dua Lipa’s books, “banned”? One of my brother’s interlocutors provided the evidence.

Indeed, Atwood will tell you the same thing.

Madison County is a tiny rural county in Virginia, population of 14,000. The county, of course, did not ban A Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, the public library (again, in a county with only 14,000 people in it) carries A Handmaid’s Tale, along with nine other Atwood novels, plus her memoirs.

When the county government buys your book and lends it out to readers, your book is not banned there.

What Atwood and media dullards mean when they claim a book is “banned” is that someone, somewhere, has decided against carrying the book on his or her shelves. Specifically, Madison County Public Schools decided not to carry A Handmaid’s Tale in its public school libraries on the grounds it was too sexually explicit.

I don’t know if the book is too sexually explicit for teenagers (I’ve never read it), and maybe I would have made a different decision were I on the school board. Still, I appreciate this definition of a book ban.

If this is Dua Lipa’s criteria for a banned book, then I have some suggestions for other books she should carry. Here are words written on the wall of her library: “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed.”

I channel that spirit and use this criterion for “books that have disappeared”: Books not carried by her home public library system — the London Public Library.

The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray

This was one of the most controversial books of the late 20th century. You want courage? Murray was turned into a pariah for writing this book, which laid out the correlation between IQ and outcomes in modern life. The book argued that a “cognitive elite” was rising to power in the U.S. and the rest of the West. Talk about conversations that make the powerful uncomfortable! And the London Public Library refuses to carry this book.

Irreversible Damage, By Abigail Shrier

Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, which spurred a campaign to kick his podcast from the Spotify platform.

Amazon banned advertising for the book. Amazon employees demanded the bookseller simply stop selling the book, some quit in protest. At least one professor called for a book burning. A top attorney at the ACLU called for banning books.

Far more than any book on Dua Lipa’s list, this is a book that folks tried to keep you from reading, and it’s on one of the most important topics of our day.

When Harry Became Sally, by Ryan T. Anderson

Why two books about transgenderism? Because the transgender activists are the most censorious people in the U.S. these days. The censors actually succeeded in getting Amazon to drop Anderson’s book! Amazon refused to sell it for four entire years.

The London Public Library still doesn’t carry it.

PELOSI’S DEMOCRATS AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than it Needs to Be, by me.

Family Unfriendly was published by Harper Collins, a major New York publisher, with a very positive review in the premier literary reviewer Kirkus. Yet the book never got reviewed by major newspapers or prestige magazines, my own local library initially refused to carry it, and the London Public Library, despite carrying my earlier book, doesn’t carry Family Unfriendly. Maybe it’s because it’s unpopular to say that marriage and baby-making are good, and we’d be better off if people did more of it. Heck, I even defend stay-at-home moms in the book.

Anyone who wants to challenge the powerful and the status quo should read my book.

Airlines also give you a special little button with which you can increase your cubic footage by a tiny bit and gain some comfort. It doesn’t cost you anything to press the button, but your additional square footage comes at the expense of the person behind you — and if he or she is working on a laptop, it might make typing hard.

The debate over reclining is fraught because it is tied up with many questions our culture too often leaves unasked and values we have forgotten. The New Yorker waded into this tricky question with a lengthy article.

“Seat reclination raised issues of responsibility, complicity, and determinism,” the author, Joshua Rothman, states. “It exposed the gap between what’s permitted and what’s good; it suggested the inevitable challenges created by the exercise of individual rights.”

“I NEVER recline my seat. You shouldn’t either,” orders political commentator Chris Cillizza.

“If the airline gives me the ability to recline, it’s my right to do so,” retorts political scientist Adam Ramey.

Of course, just because something is a right doesn’t mean you should do it, everyone on X replies.

A core problem here is our tendency to speak in absolutes. We speak in absolutes too much in part because we think like lawyers — that clear and universal rules ought to govern our interactions.

The right answer to the question, “Ought you feel free to recline?” is “It depends.”

It depends mostly on the nature of the flight. If you are flying across the Atlantic overnight, there is a point where the airline turns off the lights. This is sleepy time. Reclining now is normal. You should feel free to recline, and you should expect the person in front of you to recline.

If you are flying from New York to Chicago at 8 a.m. on a Monday, this is a businessman’s special. Napping is not terribly normal, and working on your laptop is normal. Ordinarily, reclining on this flight is a bit rude.

If you really want to recline on this flight, then there’s an option almost totally ignored by that New Yorker piece and the online discussion: checking with the person behind you.

And some situations are ambiguous. I was once on a three-hour flight that took off at 7 p.m. Central, flying home to D.C. Halfway through the flight, it was 8:30 Central, but 9:30 Eastern, which is my normal bedtime because I go to bed early.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: FROM UPGRADES TO UPSELLS

I checked behind me. If I saw a lady with her laptop on the tray, or some really massive dude, I just wouldn’t have reclined. If I saw someone already reclining or some little kid curled up with an iPad in his lap, I would recline. If I saw an adult with his tray up, reading, I would ask if he minded if I reclined. (Imagine talking to a stranger!)

If you want a general rule, it’s this: Avoiding the recline is always polite, but often reclining is normal and fine — depending on the circumstance.

It should be unnerving that it took so long for Democrats and the major media to admit this. It was obvious to any close observer what sort of man Platner was. A serial philanderer, s***poster, abuser, drunk with a Nazi tattoo, he was obviously a narcissistic dirtbag. We all know men like this. We try to keep our friends from dating them, and we try to avoid getting entangled with them.

So, we could ask why it took so long. (Here are two reasons to start: [1] One accuser was a conservative woman, and [2] this is possibly a winnable seat for Democrats). But more importantly, going forward, we should ask what else they are BSing us about, covering up, or lying about.

This is about the 10th big story in recent years in which attentive conservatives knew something that the media denied until it became impossible to deny.

Consider Biden’s sorry mental state in 2024 was covered up, and the reports on it were called lies until the June debate. Remember that the material on Hunter Biden’s laptop was called Russian misinformation, and Big Tech and the major media blacked it out. Remember that the official line at CNN was that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong, until that couldn’t be maintained. Remember, it was a crazy conspiracy theory that the virus that was first found in Wuhan might have come out of the Wuhan virology lab.

PLATNER PROVES DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT IS ALIVE AND WELL

The major media spent years trying to gaslight the public into believing men were women and women were men before that all fell apart. The media ignored the baby bust and branded pro-family, pro-natalist writers and researchers as white supremacists for worrying about the collapse in birth rates — until the problem became impossible to ignore.

So, what are the stories that are being covered up today? Where do they insist that there is “no evidence,” and what accusations do they say lack “corroboration,” which they basically know are true? Which Democratic Senate candidate has skeletons in his closet — a closet reporters have seen the inside of — that you don’t know about yet?

Every American who partakes heavily of political and cultural news should always ask himself this.

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is retiring after nearly 40 years in Congress, and instead of becoming a lobbyist like most of her predecessors, she will be going to academia. Specifically, she’ll be co-teaching a course on Congress at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of a new program on U.S. government.

That sounds perfectly fitting, until you hear how Berkeley is pitching it:

“UC Berkeley will launch new Nancy Pelosi Institute focused on strengthening democracy,” the school announced in a press release. “The nonpartisan academic institute in the political science department will become a hub for research, teaching and civic engagement.”

“We intend to do more than simply study democracy,” said Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons. “We are building this institute to strengthen it.”

You can be forgiven if you don’t think of “nonpartisan” when you think of Pelosi. And if you study Pelosi’s record in Washington, it’s hard to see her as a champion of defending and strengthening democracy.

Pelosi has consistently worked to undermine or abridge democracy for her own gain or her party’s gain. Along the way, she has contorted the definition of “democracy” to mean her own ideological projects and partisan interests, thus branding everyone who disagrees with her as an enemy of democracy — perversely undermining democratic debate in the process.

Pelosi against democracy

Pelosi, as a rule, has favored the smoke-filled back room over the democratic process — even when it came to choosing her party’s nominee for president.

Nobody was more important than Pelosi in forcing out President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee after he had won the 2024 primaries. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the initial push to knock Biden off the ballot started to lose steam, and that’s when Pelosi stepped in: “Pelosi [was] the one fanning the flames,” NBC News reported, citing Democratic insiders.

“Pelosi worked quietly and methodically” to replace Biden on the ballot, NBC reported, “speaking to scores of rank-and-file lawmakers, members of her old leadership team and her large network of Democratic donors who had once made her the party’s most prolific fundraiser.”

Nothing says “strengthening democracy” like rallying donors to overturn the primary elections.

Undoing primaries is now becoming a pattern in the Democratic Party, which last week pushed out the democratically nominated Graham Platner in Maine’s Senate race.

On gerrymandering, Pelosi has been the most powerful anti-democratic force in California for more than a decade. Sacramento lawmakers after the 2000 census drew an extreme incumbent-protection map, angering voters and activists who thought competitive elections and sensible districts were important to democracy.

Good-government activists organized and passed a ballot initiative in 2008 to create an independent redistricting commission for the state legislature. They decided to leave congressional redistricting for another day because they knew Pelosi, by then speaker of the House, would oppose them, backed by her many millions in donor dollars.

In 2010, when the gerrymandering opponents tried to prevent congressional gerrymandering, Pelosi predictably led the opposition. The left-wing outlet ProPublica reported: “No fewer than 35 Democratic politicians — including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — and their allies spent a total of $7 million to campaign against the proposition.”

After she lost, Pelosi, aided by a labor union-funded foundation, worked successfully to subvert the ballot measure and corrupt the independent commission in order to protect Democratic incumbents, according to ProPublica.

Whenever the voters of California, through direct democracy, took actions Pelosi disliked, she resorted to undemocratic means to overturn them.

California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 8 by a 52% to 48% margin, codifying that marriage is between one man and one woman. Pelosi helped lead the crusade to overturn this law in the courts. She went so far as to oppose the right of the proposition’s authors to even defend the people-passed law in court.

That is, Pelosi not only tried to strike down democratically passed laws. She opposed letting the majority even defend their vote.

And of course there is abortion. Pelosi was a lifelong supporter of Roe v. Wade, which struck down all state abortion laws. Regardless of what one thinks about abortion, Roe was undeniably undemocratic.

When state legislators in Mississippi voted to ban abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, Pelosi railed against their efforts in court. She went so far as to say that striking down Roe “would seriously erode the legitimacy of the Court.”

Trying to delegitimize the court in order to prevent democracy on abortion hardly seems like bipartisan defense of democracy.

What Pelosi means by ‘democracy’

So how does Pelosi, after masterminding gerrymanders, striking down ballot measures, fighting to save abortion from democracy, and overturning her own party’s primary claim the mantle of Democracy Defender?

She defines “democracy” as the partisan and ideological outcomes she favors.

Long before President Donald Trump sparked a violent riot while trying to overturn his 2020 loss, Pelosi was declaring that any Republican win was anti-democratic.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” was her motto in the 2012 election when Mitt Romney was challenging Barack Obama.

If you think Mitt Romney winning meant the end of democracy, then you don’t mean “democracy” when you say “democracy.”

But this happens every two years in Pelosi’s Democratic Party. For instance, former California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Pelosi lieutenant, made the same argument in 2022, when Trump was not on the ballot: If Republicans win, democracy is over.

So why would UC Berkeley name a democracy-defending center after a woman whose idea of democracy is delegitimizing opposing views?

Well, this also appears to be what some at UC Berkeley mean by “democracy.”

Just ahead of the 2024 election, the Berkeley Center for American Democracy, a precursor of sorts to the Nancy Pelosi Institute, promoted an article co-authored by one of its scholars, Paul Pierson. The article declared “democracy is at risk” because Republicans might preserve the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act.

“The struggle over taxes that will take place in 2025 won’t just be about creating a fairer tax code,” the authors wrote. “It will also be about democracy — whether our elected officials will pursue an agenda that is responsive to what Americans desire.”

That is, anything other than a corporate tax hike would be an attack on democracy.

DEMOCRATS’ UNDEMOCRATIC HARRIS MISTAKE

Of course, universities are large and contain multitudes, and so the Nancy Pelosi Institute may have a bigger-tent definition of democracy — one that includes opposing views. And maybe now that Pelosi is out of power, she will become less partisan and more interested in democracy, rather than just her partisan and ideological goals.

But if she sticks to her old ways, you can guess that her efforts at UC Berkeley to “strengthen democracy” will just be more efforts to strengthen Democrats.

Nearly 50.8 million students attended a K-12 public school in the fall of 2019, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. Five years later, after some COVID-19 ups and downs, the number was below 49.4 million and is still falling.

This collapse is concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. It’s also concentrated in lower grades: Kindergarten through eighth-grade enrollment fell by 5% between 2019 and 2024. First-grade enrollment across the country has shrunk by nearly 12% in a decade.

Official forecasts call for another 5% decline nationwide by 2030.

It’s no mystery why this is happening: The school closures kick-started an exodus from public schools, many of which barred their doors for a year while teachers protested returning to work, even in the spring of 2021. Parents were prohibited from entering the building until 2022 or 2023.

Meanwhile, the teachers were flying transgender flags in the classroom and forcing white boys and heterosexual cisgendered girls to do privilege walks.

So, some of this is the fault of the public schools. The tougher problem: We forgot to have babies for a couple of decades.

The birth rate has fallen from 2.1 babies per woman in 2007 to below 1.6 in the U.S. today. The last year of our pre-iPhone, pre-financial crisis, pre-Millennials-as-adults mini baby boom was more than 18 years ago. Suri Cruise, born in 2006, is now an adult.

We had more than 74 million children in the U.S. in 2020. Now, there are fewer than 71 million, and falling.

The baby bust has a million massive consequences, and one of them is the collapse in school enrollment. How will we handle this?

Schools will need to make a choice: Consolidate, or get good at being small. Both have their drawbacks, so get ready for some raucous town hall and school board meetings.

Consolidation means that a kid who could walk to school in second grade has to get driven a town over in third grade. In high school, it means the death of old rivalries, as you become teammates with your arch-enemies. It also means longer drives to find another high school to play.

Getting small means killing electives, killing football, and getting less ambitious in school plays.

DEBATING IMMIGRATION LAW IS GOOD

Both of these options mean laying off teachers, which the unions won’t tolerate.

In short, it will be ugly. Welcome to decline.