Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Visitors at the base of Silent Sam before its removal (Shutterstock image) Silent Sam still isn’t talking. And even though the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the student Daily Tar Heel newspaper and the University of North Carolina System was announced this week, officials at the system office and the Chapel Hill campus won’t say where the century-old Confederate Monument is hiding. And whether he’ll ever stand publicly again. The DTH settlement documents show a series of posterior-covering moves by UNC Chapel Hill officials and UNC Board of Governors members, along with senior UNC System policymakers and lawyers. They shared one goal: Make this sh*tshow disappear. And burn off our fingerprints in the process. The Confederate Monument, aka Silent Sam , has been a flashpoint for protesters for decades . It was often in the news not long ago: from August 2017, as demonstrators at UNC reacted to the white supremacist-led Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; through 2...

Map from CNN I’m a fan of democratic processes within republican governance. The civics nerd in me gets way too excited about debates over separation of powers and subsidiarity and the like. If my attention span weren’t so short, I probably would have become an academic. There’s concern bordering on alarm on the political right about the future of the Electoral College, how people on the progressive left are trying to undermine or eliminate it, and how big a deal that may be. For starters, Joe Biden saved the Electoral College. Temporarily. He got 7 million more votes than Donald Trump and won a majority in the Electoral College. The 46th president averted (or perhaps only postponed) another crisis in the public’s confidence in American institutions. It’s unclear, though, whether Biden’s win will slow growing calls to undermine the Electoral College’s legitimacy. And how much longer the Electoral College, as now constituted, should remain legitimate. A Trump Electoral College win pair...

 Shutterstock image House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has some problem children on his hands.  Three House freshmen are giving the California Republican special headaches:  • Lauren Boebert of Colorado has a bit of a rap sheet and refused to walk through metal detectors installed outside the House chambers in response to the Jan. 6 insurrection, calling the move a “political stunt by Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi.”  • Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a one-person headline generator. Politico’s Jack Shafer dedicated a column to her outrageous utterances (including, yes, a suggestion that the 2018 California wildfires were deliberately set by Jewish space lasers) and the House’s possible responses. • North Carolina’s own Madison Cawthorn (11th District) spoke at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. before the treasonous mob invaded the Capitol. Cawthorn later said he was trying to calm the crowd rather than incite it. OK. But he voted against certifying the...