Midterms watch: Republicans Set To Lose House

With “fewer than 100 days until Election Day,” GOP “prospects for keeping control of the House of Representatives are still poor,” warns the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

Trump’s approval rating is 39.7%; “the Iran war is an enormous source of uncertainty”; and the president’s party almost always loses ground in midterms.

The only “Republican upside”: “The rise of the Democratic Socialists” lets the GOP portray Dems as “nuts” and “worse than nuts — dangerous.”

As one Republican strategist puts it, “we have a lot of money, redistricting helped us, and the Dems are crazy” — but “that does not feel like enough.”

Conservative: Illegal Migrants More Equal?

“A string of court cases and administrative decisions” have often not just “accorded non-citizens equal rights with Americans,” but actually “offered them better treatment,” fumes Sam Munson at Compact.

One Virginia district attorney “pledged to instruct his office to make charging and plea decisions that ‘limit or avoid immigration consequences’,” meaning “illegal immigrants would potentially face less serious charges than citizens accused of the same crimes.”

Underlying this view is “a philosophical stance” that “any effort to restrict and deter immigration” justifies “all forms of radical resistance,” including “violence in the streets.”

But this dedication to unlimited immigration bespeaks “an imperial” vision of a world in which “every non-US citizen currently alive is potentially American.”  

From the left: Insane Media Fauci Denialism

NPR, CNN and other outlets still deny the extensive evidence that Dr. Tony Fauci intentionally deceived the American public, marvels Racket News’ Matt Taibbi. Huh?

“Eight days after Fauci took part in a conference call at the beginning of the pandemic” where nine out of 12 top scientists said “‘deliberate insertion’ of a key mutation” to produce the COVID-19 virus “was possible,” Fauci told the world that “the idea” it “came from a lab was a ‘conspiracy theory . . . without any scientific basis’” — a “clearly deceptive” claim repeated endlessly.

In short, the same “public health official who repeatedly told the public he believed the virus evolved naturally” covered up his familiarity with the fact that “a prominent Chinese scientist” had been tinkering with the virus “just miles from where the first cases were reported.”

Defense beat: The Space Force Deterrent

“With Washington and the world consumed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as tumult in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, it is nice to see some good news from the Defense Department,” cheers Michael O’Hanlon at The Wall Street Journal after visiting “three Space Force facilities in Colorado.”

Created in 2019, the “Space Force is far smaller than the Marine Corps or Coast Guard” — “about 10,000 personnel.”

With its own “half a dozen bases,” plus “personnel at many other military bases around the country and world,” “Space Force is diversifying its footprint to be more survivable and resilient.”

US advantages in space include “reusable launch vehicles, advanced microelectronics” and “the proliferation of small satellites” — all making America’s space capabilities “more survivable than they were in earlier decades,” and therefore well-suited to help “deter great-power war.”

Libertarian: ‘Economic Development’ = Waste

A new study of states’ economic-development subsidies finds they “do create jobs” — but those jobs are “in lobbying,” snarks Reason’s Joe Lancaster.

The study, published in Small Business Economics, “examined hiring trends of 40,000 lobbying firms across all 50 states” from 1997 to 2019.

“After a state awards its first ‘extraordinarily large’ business incentive,” it found, “employment at lobbying firms jumps 3.6%, with gains concentrated in state capital counties where lobbying employment rises 5%.”

And the literature is conclusive that these subsidies don’t boost other job growth, rages Lancaster: Rather, “each year, states spend tens of billions of their taxpayers’ dollars on economic development subsidies, and yet even by the states’ own metrics, they get very little for the money.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board