Gerrymander wars: Advantage GOP, Dems AWOL on Fauci reveal and other commentary

Gerrymander wars: Advantage GOP — But

The court’s reversal of Virginia’s gerrymander infuriated Democrats, notes Henry Olsen at The Washington Post. But they’ll be “even angrier” if — “as now appears possible — they win the national popular vote by a large margin but don’t capture the House.” The RealClearPolitics “generic congressional ballot had Democrats ahead by 6.6 percentage points.” But redistricting wars could give Republicans 14 more seats; to win the House, Dems “would need to carry every seat that Kamala Harris won plus just about every seat that Trump won by 5.5 points or less.” Yes, that’s a tall order. And it “raises a frightening possibility: Democrats could win the popular vote by about four percentage points but nonetheless lose the House.” The donkeys “want to make history, but not like that.”

From the right: Dems AWOL on Fauci Reveal

At an “explosive” Senate hearing Wednesday, “high-ranking” CIA whistleblower James Erdman charged that Anthony Fauci significantly helped suppress the COVID lab-leak theory, reports David Marcus at Fox News. Erdman described how Fauci empowered scientists who backed his wet-market theory and in some cases were arguably complicit in the creation of COVID and the subsequent coverup. Why? Per Sen. Josh Hawley, Fauci “helped fund the Wuhan lab,” “supported gain-of-function research” and sought to hide that. Yet even though “COVID impacted, in generally harmful ways, every single American citizen,” fumes Marcus, “not one Democratic senator” even bothered to show up at the hearing: “Utterly unacceptable.” 

Conservative: Hiding the Walgreens-Killer’s ID

“Walgreens is shuttering a location in Chicago, upsetting residents, and stirring fury among exploitative and complicit politicians” who claim “the drugstore chain is acting greedily, selfishly, or even criminally,” thunders the Washington Examiner’s Guy Benson. No: The company “was losing more than $1 million annually at that location, driven by stunning levels of theft and exorbitant security costs.” “A 16% theft rate,” “frequent physical attacks,” plus a “$400,000-per-year security expenditure” made the business “unsustainable.” “But in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago,” Walgreens is the villain for “declining” to continue “with this dangerous madness indefinitely.” Politicians who are concerned with their community “should worry first and foremost about maintaining the rule of law in said community.”

Budget hawk: Stealth Medicaid Spendapalooza

“The Biden administration may have failed to convince Congress to double Medicaid spending on home health care in 2021, but the funding increase occurred anyway,” blasts Walter Curt at RealClearInvestigations. An RCI analysis “found that spending on the program” nearly doubled from 2019 to 2024, “to $46.4 billion a year.” That’s just under the $50 billion President Joe Biden sought. “Policymakers simply moved the initiative out of Washington and down to the state Medicaid agencies.” And “the sprawling home care program has become the subject of a growing set of fraud probes.” “Budget hawks say fraud must be addressed, but even that does not address the underlying mechanisms — massive funding with relatively little oversight — that invite runaway spending and abuse.” 

Foreign desk: The ‘Trap’ of Accommodating China

It must “be bliss for Graham Allison, who has popularized the idea of the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ to hear Xi Jinping cite the notion during this week’s summit in Beijing,” muses The Free Press’ Aaron Maclean — even though Xi cited the “trap” not as any “friendly expression of a shared desire for peace,” but as an “unsubtle warning, and even a threat.” Allison’s conceit is that “when a status-quo power is challenged by an upstart, war is the result most of the time” and that avoiding war requires the established power to avoid “a policy of confrontation.” Yet missing from Allison’s “notion of the Thucydides Trap are the risks of accommodation.” “China under the Communist Party” aims at “utterly repressive and wildly effective totalitarian control — the increasingly complete dominance of the state over the individual.” Resisting China’s rise “does indeed risk war . . . but accepting it risks slavery.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board