POLITICS: Pardon ‘Arctic Frost’ scapegoats, Cuomo deserved humiliation and other commentary

Injustice beat: Pardon ‘Arctic Frost’ Scapegoats

“The Biden administration presided over an unimaginably aggressive political witch hunt,” notes Cleta Mitchell at The Federalist, and turned the FBI into “the Stasi of the Democratic Party” to “vanquish their political opponents, not at the ballot box, but through lawyers, courts, and jail cells.” Operation Arctic Frost “was initiated to criminalize the Trump 2020 presidential electors’ actions in signing elector certificates for President Trump,” at the state level, though the “state proceedings are simply proxies” for federal action. “The state law violations” are “wholly fabricated by the Biden administration” to “punish and prosecute President Trump and his electors, lawyers, and supporters.” Thus, “President Trump should immediately pardon every person indicted” in this effort to “criminally charge” political loyalists.

Libertarian: Cuomo Deserved Humiliation

Andrew Cuomo was never “able to get beyond the idea that all he had to do to win was point at the other candidates and say, ‘you’re really going to vote for them?,’ ” smirks Reason’s Christian Britschgi. Cuomo couldn’t “emphasize” his “own record of achievement and administrative acumen,” partly because he spent the latter part of his governorship “stumbling from one incompetence scandal after another.” He had “seemingly no positive agenda for New York City,” and his “housing policy platform was a bunch of AI-generated pablum.” He fell back on “aristocratic entitlement.” Ultimately “It’s not good to see Mamdani win. But, as a consolation prize, it is good to see Cuomo lose.”

Putin beat: Kremlin Out To Con Conservatives

Vladmir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev “is trying to do an end-run around Team Trump to court his conservative base,” warn Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet at The Hill. After Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s “maximalist negotiating approach with Team Trump failed,” Dmitriev’s job “is to find a way back in from the cold” by pretending to care about America’s culture war. He recently “falsely claimed that Putin upholds ‘traditional [conservative] values’ ” on Lara Logan’s podcast. And after Zohran Mamdani’s victory, he snarked “Good Morning, NYC Comrades!” Toth & Sweet note: “One way to bond with the American right is to warn about communists. Another is to make false claims about Russian conservative and religious values.” Yet Dmitriev’s “sole aim is to undermine U.S. support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

From the right: RFK Jr.’s Shoddy Science

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “promised that his Health and Human Services tenure would be built on gold-standard science, but the reality is more akin to cherry-picked science,” warns Jeremy Nighohossian at National Review. Gold-standard science is “a research approach that can isolate causal connections from the other factors” by selecting “a group of people at random” and then from that group, “randomly select a ‘control’ group and an ‘experimental’ group.” But RFK Jr. “often talks up ‘associative’ studies,” which may “show a relationship between one factor and an outcome,” but “because many of the studies were not randomized,” they can’t “ definitely prove that the factor caused the outcome.” “If you’re going to change national health policy after purporting to find a relationship, a minimum requirement should be to explain how X leads to Y.”

Legal take: Trump Can Bomb Drug Boats

Critics who call “President Trump’s military strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug vessels unconstitutional” are “wrong,” notes Nicholas B. Creel at The Wall Street Journal, but that shouldn’t “comfort anyone.” Nearly “every president since World War II has authorized deadly military actions” without Congress’ OK, and the Constitution “gives the president broad authority” to do so. Congress gets only to “declare” war, not “make” it, and while “the founders placed an unambiguous restriction” on states making war, they placed nothing similar on the president. Still, “fentanyl flows from Mexico,” yet Trump’s strikes “are concentrated” near Venezuela. If Congress objects to that, it could use its “power of the purse” and defund such operations. Or impeach Trump. If it doesn’t, that’s “a failure of political will, not constitutional design.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board