Nobel-winning hack attack, SCOTUS defies extremism tag and other commentary

"Of the 18 rulings released from December to April this term, 15 of them were unanimous," Reason's Billy Binion said. AP

Conservative: Nobel-Winning Hack Attack

In an echo of the 51 intel “experts” who stomped on The Post’s laptop scoops in 2020, marvels National Review’s Noah Rothman, comes a letter from 16 Nobel-winning economists who “insist that Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies risk exacerbating inflation” and “assured Americans that Joe Biden’s economic-policy preferences are entirely unimpeachable.” Huh? “Dumping unprecedented sums of taxpayer dollars into the private economy at a time when too much money was already chasing after too few goods” wasn’t inflationary? And “these experts further maintain that inflation shouldn’t even persist as a going concern for most voters.” The economists “rely on their credentials,” not any “cogent argument”: “That reckless, self-indulgent impulse is why American institutions across the board are suffering from a credibility crisis.”

Libertarian: SCOTUS Defies Extremism Tag

The “panic associated with the current makeup of the Supreme Court” has “has crescendoed more dramatically than the most tortured Tchaikovsky symphony,” fumes Reason’s Billy Binion. But for all the claims that the “conservative majority is both extreme and radical,” the truth is that “the justices agree a lot of the time.” I.e., “of the 18 rulings released from December to April this term, 15 of them were unanimous.” And most of the “infamous 6-3 splits” this term “have not fallen on the standard party-line divide.” All the “fearmongering” even “when basic reality” shows the opposite “reminds us of how manufactured this panic can be.”

From the left: We Must Re-Embrace Free Speech

“Academic freedom” was once embraced “as a core principle” among progressives, “but in recent years, we changed tack and encouraged the suppression of conservative voices on our campuses. Now, the same justifications” are “being used to silence us,” warns Tascha Shahriari-Parsa at The Nation. In October, the Harvard Law Review’s editors blocked a piece concluding “that Israel is committing genocide” — partly because of an idea “progressive students have popularized: that we must protect ourselves, and each other, from harmful speech.” “Progressive students have broadened the meaning of student ‘safety’: from the absence of physical violence to the absence of emotional distress.” But “if we continue silencing speech that offends us,” there will be “no one left to challenge the status quo of ideas.”

Spy watch: How James Clapper Rigs Elections

“Two days before the presidential debate between Trump and Clinton,” observes RealClearInvestigations’ Paul Sperry, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper issued an “unprecedented intelligence advisory” with then-President Barack Obama’s blessing that lent “credence to what the Clinton camp was telling the media — that Trump was working with Russian President Vladimir Putin through a secret back channel to steal the election.” “In 2020, he was the lead signatory on the ‘intelligence’ statement that discredited the New York Post’s October bombshell exposing emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop.” “In effect, the Intelligence Community conspired” first with the Clinton and then with the Biden campaign — and “Clapper’s well-timed pseudo-intelligence in 2016 and 2020” crippled the Trump presidency and “arguably denied him reelection.”

From the right: Joe’s Student-Loan Bait & Switch

President Biden claimed the Supreme Court hadn’t stopped him last summer when it ruled against his “sweeping” $400 billion student-loan cancellation, as he quickly rolled out his similar $475 billion SAVE forgiveness plan, recall The Wall Street Journal’s editors. Yet on Monday, federal judges tapped by President Barack Obama blocked most of that plan, too — with one blasting it as “an enormous and transformative expansion in statutory authority without clear congressional authorization.” The SAVE plan was yet “another cynical exercise to buy votes, and Biden officials had to know they were stretching the law. As a result, millions of borrowers who were counting on lower payments and forgiveness are in limbo. Don’t young people get tired of being played as pawns by this President?”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board