jcohen-doron

November 17th, 2023

The American people were told the effort to oust former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) was about setting the country on a more sustainable fiscal path and securing much-needed funding for our border. It was about oversight for funds sent to overseas conflicts and about prioritizing who America’s allies are and are not. And it was about defunding the “weaponized” government.

In reality, none of that has materialized.

In fact, the continuing resolution (CR) that passed the House this week, and now the Senate, spends $60 billion more than the one negotiated by McCarthy in September. It also fails to fund our greatest ally, Israel, or address China, Russia, and Iran’s unholy alliance supporting anti-American conflicts on multiple fronts.

This is not the fault of the new speaker, Mike Johnson (R., La.). Johnson is a consistent conservative who has the makings to be a great speaker. The problem is the job itself is nearly impossible because of the unhealthy underlying dynamics within the GOP and the broader conservative movement.

A social-media echo chamber that encourages monetization schemes online and in the mail and individual attention-seeking over the hard work of building coalitions has created a cadre of performance artists rather than legislators advancing conservative principles.

In January, it took Kevin McCarthy 15 votes to win the speakership. The vote series and internal dealmaking resulted in three seats being given to the conservative bloc on the powerful House Rules Committee and the creation of a motion to vacate the chair with just one person.

This new power-sharing arrangement was tested early on this year when the House had to deal with the debt limit in May. Conservative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) broke with the broader House Freedom Caucus and backed the McCarthy plan to raise the debt limit. For this apostasy, he was written out of conservative good graces by many external actors who were itching to push the limits of their new power-sharing agreement. The debt-limit deal ultimately passed and included some conservative victories like the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. But even those wins were derided on the right because their passage had the backing of Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and GOP leadership.

“McCarthy has got to go. There’s just no doubt,” said Steve Bannon, who would likely be in jail for mail fraud against the elderly without a last-minute pardon from Trump, in reaction to the May debt-limit deal. But the skirmish foreshadowed the ominous future for the House GOP.

That future arrived as the summer months dwindled. Florida representative Matt Gaetz — who held a long-standing personal grudge against Kevin McCarthy for the latter’s supposed failure to intervene in the House Ethics Committee probe into the former’s sexual misconduct — had been biding his time and waiting for the opportunity to vacate the chair.

The debt-limit deal was the first chance to vacate, but most in Washington knew that the likelier moment for that would come when government funding ran out and Congress had to pass another CR. The terrain of this fight was more well suited for the confrontation, as it would entail the specter of a government shutdown rather than jeopardizing the full faith and credit of the United States.

The telling moment was when one conservative leader, Chip Roy (R., Texas), brokered a deal with House moderates that would have funded the government and won modest spending cuts while securing the border. This proposal was immediately trashed by Gaetz and outside groups who had little interest in helping McCarthy. They attacked the proposal as “malpractice” by making the fight about Donald Trump’s legal battles rather than spending cuts and border security. It was an impressive sleight of hand to shift the goalposts so quickly and in real time, but a sleight of hand nonetheless. The fight was not about winning policy but about laying a predicate for a motion to vacate at any cost. The damage was done and any effort to find a Republican solution that avoided a shutdown was dead.

The problem, of course, is that this strategy not only created chaos and embarrassment for the Republican Party but that it also resulted in no policy victories and only increased spending. If this is saving America, then we’re all in real trouble.

The last six weeks have shown that America needs a conservative movement which returns to its time-honored principles rather than “leaders” following the siren song of populist performance artists. It’s easier — and, for some in our politics, more lucrative — to destroy than to build. So until we get better leaders, we can expect more selfishness, more destruction — and more of the same.

Read more at NationalReview.com.

October 24th, 2023

Tucker Carlson recently claimed that Zelensky has “banned the Christian faith in his country and arrested nuns and priests.” Though purporting to speak on behalf of religious liberty, in reality Carlson is playing fast and loose with the truth and endangering the lives of Ukrainian believers.

The Moscow-backed clergy being arrested in Ukraine are not neutral, but actively working for the Kremlin, some contributing directly to the deaths of hundreds of Ukrainian women and children. These arrests are not merely a whim of President Zelensky either: Eighty-five percent of Ukrainians polled favor the government taking action against these representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church who are causing mayhem in Ukraine—66 percent of Ukrainians want the Russian Orthodox Church banned completely in Ukraine.

Seventy percent of Ukrainians identify as Christians, primarily in one of two denominations of the Orthodox faith – the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP). The latter, as the name implies, answers to Patriarch Kirill, the church leader of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.

The Russian Orthodox Church is not a church in the sense that most American Christians think about churches. It directly serves the Russian government’s purposes, including Russia’s imperialist ambitions. For one example, Russian tank manufacturer Uralvagonzavod recently released a promotional video of priests splashing holy water on Russian T-90 tanks coming off the assembly line headed for Ukraine.

This isn’t just a blip in the Russian Orthodox Church’s record. Whether under imperial, soviet, or federated Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church has worked hand in glove with the Russian state for centuries. In 2000, Russia’s official state church put out a document, The Basis of the Social Concept, which defended “the medieval conception of symphonia to describe the church’s ideal relationship with the Russian state in terms of ‘body’ (state) and ‘soul’ (church). The document argues that “it is in their linkage and harmony that the well-being of a state lies.”

It is no surprise, then, that Patriarch Kirill, who led the committee that wrote The Basis of the Social Concept, calls Putin’s presidency “a miracle from God.” Soviet archives show that both Kirill and his predecessor Patriarch Alexy were KGB agents during Soviet times.

In 2015, the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate was the second largest denomination in Ukraine, behind the homegrown Orthodox Church of Ukraine. 24 percent of Ukrainians identified as parishioners in the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate, versus 33 percent for the OCU.

After the 2014 invasion of Donbas, where Ukrainians saw reports of UOC-Moscow Patriarchate priests sheltering Russian officers in their monastery and blessing the leaders of the breakaway Luhansk Republic, membership in the Moscow-backed church dropped. In 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople—who holds a unique, historic role within global Eastern Orthodoxy—dealt a further blow to public support for the Moscow Patriarchate when he formally recognized the Ukrainian church’s independence from Russia. As Matt Gobush has written, this pronouncement caused Putin to threaten possible bloodshed and purportedly order “a cyberattack on the patriarch’s palace.” An irate Russian Orthodox Church also broke its centuries-long fellowship with Constantinople over this.

As a result, a December 2021 survey, two months prior to the full-scale war, showed only 14 percent of Ukrainians with the UOC-Moscow Patriarchate. And as the Russian Orthodox Church continued to erode away its credibility with its barbaric military tactics, only 4 percent of Ukrainians identified with the Russia-backed church after the atrocities of the full-scale invasion.

For example: In Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where Russians executed 560 civilians ranging in age from 2 to 92 and raped girls as young as 14, a UOC-Moscow Patriarchate clergyman reportedly told invading Russian soldiers who there would be most likely to oppose them.

While Carlson would have you believe these agents of the Kremlin are being persecuted, the truth is that Russians target Christians in Ukraine, having murdered at least 26 religious leaders and tortured many more believers.

Viktor Cherniivaskyi, an evangelical Christian who works with Steven, was evacuating a refugee group from occupied Luhansk that included a pregnant woman and a newborn baby when pro-Russian forces took him captive. He was tortured with electricity and beaten with a baseball bat for 25 days until his wife miraculously found him and convinced a pro-Russian official to free him. Despite enduring these horrors, he has returned to the front as a part-time chaplain, alternating with his work as a software engineer.

Ukraine is not ‘cracking down on Christianity’. In fact, the opposite is true. Even with the backing of Putin’s government, only seven percent of Russians even bother to attend church regularly. Ukrainians, by contrast, are more than twice as likely to attend church, a number that has increased the longer Ukraine has been independent of Russia’s influence.

Tucker Carlson’s willingness to parrot Putin’s talking points is why he is a favorite on Kremlin propaganda TV shows. But make no mistake, what he is saying is perpetuating the persecution of both Orthodox and Protestant Christians in Ukraine.

Read more at Providencemag.com.