From The Wall Street Journal. Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.
President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.
Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.
These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.
The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”
Days later this newspaper ran a story beneath the headline: “EPA’s $100 Billion Climate-Aid Windfall Spurs Turmoil.” It quoted an unhappy community organizer in New Orleans: “They passed all this stuff, and they committed funding for all this stuff, but then they didn’t actually write out how it’s going to work.” Even the supposed beneficiaries don’t know how to navigate through Mr. Biden’s green Swamp. …
About that $102 billion the Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend on climate by year’s end—10 times the agency’s annual budget—the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee Rep. Bruce Westerman says plaintively, “Any time Congress channels billions of dollars toward undefined goals, it’s going to need rigorous oversight.” That’s what he thinks.
Democrats subdivided the $102 billion for every conceivable green goal—from iterations of environmental justice to low-carbon labeling on construction materials to such undefinable murk as corporate greenhouse-gas reporting—all of it distributed through a Swamp tributary system of nonprofits, community groups and local officials.
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(Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal. Photo Credit: Canva)