The Colorado Education Association (CEA) has approved a resolution produced by the union that states, “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.” A previous draft, apparently edited to avoid being too transparent in revealing the educators’ Marxist agenda, called to replace capitalism with a “new equitable economic system.”

Nice!

But wait…there’s more!

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The New York Times editorial board has issued an editorial calling on Senator Diane Feinstein to step down. It is an entirely partisan appeal, but that’s the Times: the editors are worried that her continued absence from active participation and impairment due to advanced age (she’s 89, and obviously declining in health and cognitive acuity) will threaten the progressive agenda. Their position that Feinstein needs to be responsible and retire is no less valid, however. It was irresponsible for her to run for reelection in 2018, and irresponsible for California voters to elect her. Now the aged Senator is unable to vote or attend committee meetings because of her declining health, and there is no indication when that situation will improve.

So of course she should step down. But Democrats gotta Democrat, so Rep. Nancy Pelosi, herself 83 and another abuser of the public official’s duty not to continue in office past her pull-date, has accused the Times and others of “sexism.” You know the formula by now: if anyone criticizes what a Democratic woman does, it’s sexism, just as when anyone criticizes what a black Democrat does, it’s racism. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that the tactic works, and now it is SOP. “‘I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,’ Pelosi said regarding the calls for Feinstein’s resignation.

Sadly, the supposedly rational and independent law prof-blogger Ann Althouse (who had the sense to retire from teaching before she started spiraling into incompetence) has sided with the ex-Speaker. “But isn’t Pelosi right?,” she wrote yesterday. “Something has been done badly by men for a long, long time, and suddenly it just has to stop… because a woman is doing it?”

Ugh. No, Pelosi is NOT right, and Ann’s ethical reasoning is depressing. That’s as pure an “Everybody does it” rationalization as you are ever going to see. Male Senators were foolishly allowed to continue in office when they were incapacitated (Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, absent for four years with heart problems and Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, unable to do his job for three years after a stroke) or outrageously old (Strom Thurmond, who served into his 100th year and had probably been senile for years), so Ann concludes that the ethical approach now is for Senators to keep on being irresponsible because that’s the way it’s always been done, even though the practice impedes the operation of the government?

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Sorry…other matters were on my mind.

I’m confident that you can make up for lost time…

Ethics Alarms has taken the position that Clarence Thomas’s unreported yearly luxury frolics with conservative power-broker Harlan Crow created a sufficiently substantial appearance of impropriety for Thomas to resign. I’ll hold to that; I don’t trust Thomas’s judgment or independence at this point, and I’m not even a dedicated Thomas critic. What has insulated Thomas, and, by extension, his colleagues, from having to respond to this scandal as seriously as they should is the fact that progressives, Democrats and much of the mainstream media have been trying to manufacture reasons for getting Thomas off the Court—he’s too conservative for them, his real crime in their eyes—since they dug up an old girlfriend of Thomas’s to ambush him during his confirmation hearings. This history, including efforts to use Thomas’s conservative activist wife as way to impugn Thomas (an approach that feminist leaders would condemn if they had any integrity themselves, which, sadly, they don’t), has made the whole issue appear to be a partisan weapon designed to wrest control of the Court. It is, but it also is legitimate, non-partisan problem of substantial import to the functioning of the government.

This week, Senate Democrats held a hearing focused on Supreme Court ethics. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.and the other eight justices presented a united front, as he declined an invitation to testify, issuing a statement of their commitment to abide by “foundational ethics principles and practices.”

Well, to put it starkly, they don’t.

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