Media watch: Burying Haley’s True Gripe

Haley Stevens kept “asking El-Sayed to dial down the campaign’s revolting, flamboyant anti-Semitism; he had blamed the Jews and Israel for everything from the price of groceries and gas to the supposed inability of American children to buy eyeglasses,” observes Commentary’s Seth Mandel. But he told her “to get lost. And so she did” — endorsing the GOP’s Mike Rogers. Cue Democrats’ fury — “but what really made this a true day of rage was the way mainstream news outlets insisted that all this was merely about Israel policy.” She clearly “objected to the El-Sayed campaign’s overt anti-Semitism,” but The New York Times claimed it was about “U.S. policy on Israel” and other outlets chimed in. Snarks Mandel, “The amount of effort the media puts into obscuring what it knows to be the truth is astounding.”

Conservative: Dems’ Disastrous ’28 Agenda

Dems winning Congress now promises just “a period of frothy deadlock,” but National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke “shudders” at thought of their total victory in 2028 and the ensuing “brazen acts of constitutional vandalism” to “permanently change the key rules of the game.” The Dems “smother their designs in euphemisms,” but the party’s “more radical figures” are clear about seeking to “end the Supreme Court as a useful branch of government,” transform “the Senate into a smaller version of the House,” and admit “new states for the sole purpose of making national elections less competitive.” This “project will gut the heart of the American system of government” and lead us to the brink of a new “Civil War.”

Labor beat: Beware ‘Sectoral Bargaining Laws’

Sacramento’s certification of the California Gig Workers Union to “negotiate directly with Uber and Lyft on behalf of all rideshare drivers in the state” is part of new trend of “sectoral bargaining laws,” warns C. Jarrett Dieterle at Reason: “Rather than requiring unions to negotiate with individual companies, these laws allow sector-wide negotiations, which could lead to one-size-fits-all outcomes that limit flexibility for both companies and workers” — and the approach “is unlikely to stop with the gig economy.” Beware: Germany “has long operated under a sectoral bargaining model,” and “German workers are generally less productive than American workers,” as “the German economy has struggled under a broad set of labor rules that have contributed to its sclerosis.”

Centrists: Embrace Parent Power, Gov. Shapiro

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) should “buck party orthodoxy” and opt into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, urges The Washington Post Editorial Board. He’s most likely just “waiting until after Election Day to risk the wrath of the teachers unions, who call the federal credit a private-school voucher program.” Not so: “Scholarships can also support qualifying expenses such as tutoring, books and after-school reading programs for kids in public schools.” Not to mention the “exciting experiment in education competition” they create: When “parents are afforded more power,” “successful providers attract more customers; unsuccessful ones adapt or fail.” “If Shapiro wants to demonstrate the kind of independence that could distinguish him on the national stage, this is an easy place to start.”

From the right: Perils of an Unleashed IRS

Reagan administration lawyers in a 1983 case argued that nothing in written law empowers the IRS “to deny tax exemptions to racially segregated schools,” but the Supreme Court (with future Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissenting) sided with the IRS, treating “the actual language of the tax code as but a subordinate factor,” notes Eugene Scalia at the Wall Street Journal. Now the Trump team hopes to expand the IRS’s “ability to deny tax exemption to universities and other private schools that discriminate based on race.” But while ending racial “preference programs” with “no basis in law” is important, but “other conservative principles must also” apply: Team Trump’s proposal “vastly” expands “an authority that the Reagan administration and Rehnquist rightly said Congress had never granted” and “creates endless opportunities for IRS mischief” — including under “the next Democratic president.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board