Taking Bidens cuffs off cops, voter turnout is rising and other commentary

Using “dubious legal theories of disparate impact,” the Biden Justice Department “rushed to subject local police to federal control,” Harmeet K.Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, charges in The Wall Street Journal.That rash of lawsuits sought to subject at least 10 cities to “sweeping, minutely detailed consent decrees that would inhibit local policing for years, make area residents less safe, and cost local taxpayers millions.”But after a review ordered by President Trump, Dhillon now “lacks confidence in the data and methods used by the Biden team” — and is rolling the cases back.She’s moved to dismiss “last-minute Biden-administration lawsuits” against Louisville, Ky.

and Minneapolis, Minn., and has closed Biden-era investigations into six other police departments.Under Trump, the Justice Department “will work with, not against, our brave police.”Election data analysis shows US voter turnout is “at historically high levels,” reports New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore.Why? 1) widely available “voting by mail and/or in-person early voting”; 2) “competitive elections tend to produce higher voter turnout”; 3) higher spending on “voter mobilization and persuasion in national election cycles.”Even without Trump’s name on the ballot, midterm election turnout jumped nationwide from 37% in 2014 to 50% in 2018 (“dropping only a bit” to 46% in 2022) for “one of the largest and most astonishing jumps in voter engagement” in years.The “impression that Americans have grown tired of politics, and even government, during the Trump years hasn’t translated into [an] unwillingness to vote.”The National Institutes of Health “commands an annual budget of nearly $50 billion” but “our nation’s health and biotech outcomes are faltering” because the NIH functions “as welfare for underperforming labs and scientists,” fumes Joe Lonsdale at Substack.To fix it, “all political and ideological manda...