The Washington Times

It was, in point of fact, odd that national elections ending essentially in a tie should yield a White House, Senate and House of Representatives all under the control of the same party. That outward appearance of one-party dominance masked, it’s now clear, a substantial amount of instability underneath. Al Gore’s challenge to George W. Bush’s victory in Florida was probably a product of, more than anything else, the instability produced by the evenly divided electorate. Mr. Gore failed. But so, too, was GOP control of the Senate highly unstable, and Tom Daschle succeeded.

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The Washington Times

Democrats have been taking a lot of heat from “friendly” critics for the supposed ineffectiveness of the opposition they are mounting to the Bush administration and the (narrowly) GOP-controlled Congress. This is fair in some areas but unfair in others, and the combination is illuminating.

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The Washington Times

A grand total of six Republicans voted “no” in the House Education Committee on the school reform legislation the White House wants and has been working with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy to get through in bipartisan fashion. The vote tells us a thing or two about the state of the organized conservative movement and about the relationship of conservatives and the Republican Party.

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The McVeigh case and the triumph of victims’ rights.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a federal prison in Indiana, the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty law. Another first: Families of McVeigh’s victims and survivors of the attack received an invitation from federal authorities led by Attorney General John Ashcroft to watch a live closed-circuit broadcast of the execution. As of the May 1 deadline, some 285 (of about 3,000 eligible) had indicated they would turn out.

Everything about the Oklahoma City bombing resists efforts to put matters into context: the spectacular quality of the crime, its unique devastation as an exercise in mass murder, its utterly unrepentant perpetrator, and his grotesque ideological motivation. For an illustration of the exceptionalism, note that 22 percent of Americans in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll both believe that McVeigh should be executed and oppose the death penalty. Some death penalty opponents have insisted that McVeigh’s is exactly the sort of hard case that requires opponents to stiffen their resolve against capital punishment. On the other hand, there is nothing obviously irrational about opposing capital punishment in general while allowing for an exception in the case of someone who murdered 168 of your countrymen.

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The Washington Times

The Bush administration is getting a massive break from political divisions among Democrats. The conflicts in thinking within the party, which were reconcilable when a Democratic president was doing battle with a Republican Congress, have so far turned out to be debilitating in opposition. The center-left is not holding, and Republicans haven’t had so much wind at their back since the heady days of 1995 (when, to be sure, that wind was actually blowing them into Bill Clinton’s perfect storm).

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The Washington Times

The United States has a major decision just ahead about the future of its relations with Europe. It’s the question of the next round of enlargement of NATO.

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