From the right: Union Slows NYC Commutes

The Transport Workers Union just “blocked a plan that would have improved commutes and saved the city money without costing union workers a dime,” thunders The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. An arbiter just sided with the TWU against the MTA, blocking “changes to subway schedules” that aimed “to cut costs and match service with riders’ needs” with “more trains on weekends and the busier weekdays to cut down wait times” since so few commuters now head to the office on Fridays. The union’s only complaint: “the idea of workers’ changing their shift schedules was too much to bear.” “Imagine the union having to adapt like everyone else to a world changed by the pandemic. Can’t have that.”

Defense watch: GOP’s Dangerous New Isolationism

“Mindless, red-meat-type criticisms” of US support for Ukraine “threaten to despoil the Republican Party’s traditional advocacy of American world leadership,” despairs ex-Rep. Peter King at The Hill. For decades, Republicans “stood unwaveringly against this appeasement movement.” Repercussions of “enabling Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression” include: “China will be emboldened to attack Taiwan,” while “Japan and South Korea will view the United States as an unreliable ally and be more accommodating to China.” Republicans must “stand against the policies of surrender and appeasement” or lest, those of the failed America First era, “they be consigned to the ash heap of history.”

Libertarian: A CHIPS Act Bait & Switch

The CHIPS Act “provides $52 billion to revive American microchip manufacturing,” but now the Biden Commerce Department has warned companies they “will have to do (and not do) a bunch of other things if they want the money,” including providing “high-quality” childcare to plant workers. “These strings will significantly undermine chip manufacturing by increasing production costs,” warns Reason’s Veronique De Rugy. For instance, “when the administration says high-quality child care, it really means more expensive child care because of requirements that caregivers be college-educated and such.” Firms must also “do all sorts of financial disclosures and share part of any unanticipated profits with the government.” So much for a real focus on making chips: “Politicians say they want to subsidize this and that to improve manufacturing or bolster national security, but invariably sabotage themselves by weighing the policies down with rules and requirements that have nothing to do with” such goals.

Conservative: Biden Tosses House Dems Under Bus

President Biden’s embrace of a GOP bill to override Washington, DC criminal-justice reforms, argues National Review’s Jim Geraghty, “is exposing a deep fissure right down the middle of the Democratic Party.” Biden’s obvious real gripe: The DC measure is “a law that Republicans could use to paint Democrats as soft on crime.” But the 173 House Dems who already voted against the bill last month “are about as furious with Biden as they’ve been during his presidency.” The prez has covered his own flank, but “the National Republican Congressional Committee is breaking out the party hats.”

Liberal: Dems’ Patriotism Problem

“Just 34 percent of progressive activists say they are ‘proud to be American’ compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks, and 76 percent of Hispanics, the very groups whose interests these activists claim to represent,” gripes The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira, yet the progs’ view defines Democrats thanks to “their strong and frequently dominant influence in associated institutions,” such as “nonprofits, foundations, advocacy groups, academia, legacy media, the arts — the commanding heights of cultural production.” Dems “have tried uniting the country around the need to dismantle ‘systemic racism’ and promote ‘equity’ . . . and failed (and will continue to fail)”; same for “uniting the country around the need to save the planet.” Now, “It’s time for Democrats to return to something’s that’s tried and true”: the “American civil religion” built “around national symbols, founding documents and ideals, holidays, heroes, epic events, rituals and stories that has bound — and can bind — Americans together across social and regional divisions.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board