Pun Salad

If you make less than $400,000 a year, you won’t pay a penny more in taxes. But we’ll ask the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations — the 91 of the top companies that paid zero in federal income taxes — to pay their fair share.

The Trump presidential campaign is the master of the mischievous clip job. Time after time, the president’s campaign has released ads that snip and clip Biden’s speeches and remarks to make the former vice president appear to say the opposite of what he was saying.

If Facebook and Twitter intended to make the Biden laptop story go away, however, their intervention had the opposite effect. Questions about a political family’s corruption became part of a larger debate about the power of social media platforms. Do the proprietors of our digital public squares censor and curate our discourse there? Are the rules for what can and can’t be said clear and universally applicable, or arbitrary and selectively enforced?

Other media platforms, too, have moved on from disinterested presentation and examination of the facts to explicitly supporting particular political causes. National Public Radio, for example, announced that it would have nothing to do with the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” a managing editor explained, “and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” (In August, NPR felt that an excellent use of its journalists and listeners’ time was a long, sympathetic interview with Vicky Osterweil, who had written the book In Defense of Looting.) Similarly, Glenn Reynolds devoted one of his weekly USA Today columns to Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to halt the spread of the Post’s story on the Bidens. USA Today spiked the column without explanation; it was available only to readers of Reynolds’s blog.

So, how do we fix it? Sometimes, it is better to think small. Health care is too complex to be “fixed” once and for all by a single piece of legislation, no matter how well-crafted the legislation or generously funded the program. Instead of a sweeping but ultimately futile grand legislative gesture, the GOP should focus on discrete, narrow reforms that link conservatives’ market-oriented model with Americans’ workaday anxieties regarding health care. Work to make prices lower, work to make coverage more predictable, work to make health insurance work more like any other product — but don’t try to do everything at once.

Congress could give families more control over their health spending by passing Sen. Ben Sasse’s Health Savings Account Expansion Act and Qualified Health Savings Account Distribution Act, which together would make HSAs available to more families, allow them to put more pre-tax money into them, and keep them from losing their saved funds at the end of the year or when changing jobs. HSAs are a great benefit for those in high-deductible plans. Sasse’s proposals may not satisfy the crusading zealots, but they represent real reforms that would make life better for real people. Surely that would count for something.

Nothing threatens the progressive project more than the existence of a Supreme Court that adheres to the Constitution. It’s really that simple.

That’s what the tantrum over Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is all about. The notion that the same Democrats who shelved the judicial filibuster and now threaten to destroy the separation of powers with a Court-packing revenge scheme — the same people, incidentally, so fond of smear-drenched confirmation hearings — are sticklers for process or decorum is simply ludicrous.

For one thing, no norms have been undone by the confirmation of Barrett. If Democrats won a Senate majority in 2016, Merrick Garland would already be ensconced in the Supreme Court, election or no election. Many of the same Democrats now feigning outrage over Barrett’s confirmation, including Joe Biden, argued back then that it was the constitutional duty of the Senate to take up a vote. Our living constitution apparently offers contradicting directions from one election to the next.