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Fox News contributor James Freeman warned on "America's Newsroom" Wednesday that Democrats are facing a "political reckoning" in the 2022 midterm elections as the inflation crisis hits a 40-year high.

STUART VARNEY WARNS OF RECESSION AS INFLATION HITS 40-YEAR HIGH

JAMES FREEMAN: I think we're now at a point where this is the issue of this election season, especially after getting that awful 8.5% rating yesterday, as you said, the worst in 40 years. So it's not too late for Democrats to change course and for the Federal Reserve to be helpful. But we're getting close to a point where I think the political reckoning for the party in power is inevitable.

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Right at the start of the Biden administration inflation started to rise, and he mentioned the American Rescue Plan. And we recall last March 2021 Democrats, former Obama economic advisers were telling him, "Do not enact this plan. It's a lot more spending. It's just going to fuel demand. We have a budding inflation problem. Don't do it." He ignored that advice. And so now he's attempting to rewrite history and pretend that Vlad the Impaler created all this.

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'Political reckoning' for Democrats nearly 'inevitable' as inflation becomes primary election issue: Freeman - Fox News

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Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said on "Americas Newsroom" Wednesday that the Biden administration needs to take action to bring down the inflation affecting his state. Cramer accused Democrats of putting "gasoline" on the problem.

PSAKI SLAMS GOV. ABBOTT OVER TRUCK INSPECTIONS AT TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER, BLAMES HIM FOR PRICE INCREASES

SEN. KEVIN CRAMER: I'm on the Banking Committee and we were pleading, I was pleading, with the Federal Reserve over a year ago to start easing back a little bit on free money. Inflation is a simple issue. When demand outpaces supply, you're going to have inflation. And the Federal Reserve was very slow when it was obvious that there was inflation happening. They called it transitory, and now they still talk about the hope for soft landings. And every now and then, when you have a really bad cancer, you need to cut it out. You can't just simply hope it goes away over the course of time. And so you have that. On top of that, you have an administration and a Democratic Party that just keeps pouring fuel on this. It's like Joe Biden showed up at the West Wing one day and said, Kamala, the Oval Office is on fire, get some gasoline. Everything they do is counter to solving the problem in front of us.

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Sen. Cramer on 'America's Newsroom': Biden and Democrats 'pouring fuel' on the inflation fire - Fox News

On the surface, Ketanji Brown Jacksons confirmation to the Supreme Court appeared to portend a hopeful future for liberals. She was the bright, youthful (as these things go) face of a more enlightened judiciary.

But appearances can be deceiving. A more accurate picture of the Courts future could actually be discerned from two other stories that flanked it. The first was Ginni Thomass ravings to Donald Trumps chief of staff more specifically, the nonplussed response thereto from the Republican Establishment, which is perfectly satisfied to allow a prominent conservative activist to draw on her connection to an esteemed conservative jurist to promote QAnon-inflected conspiracy theories in the highest corridors of power.

The second was Mitch McConnells refusal to commit to hold any hearings for a potential Supreme Court vacancy should his party win a Senate majority when prodded by Jonathan Swan. McConnell made it clear that Jackson is likely the last Supreme Court justice Democrats will nominate for years, maybe even a decade or more.

Jacksons confirmation was a brief, joyful respite. The future is a semi-permanent Republican judicial majority in which, contrary to the visual impression, Thomass worldview is much closer to the mainstream and Jacksons is a relic of a rapidly fading past.

There is a plausible argument that the Ginni Thomas story did not reveal wrongdoing by Clarence Thomas or even his wife. (Being crazy is not a crime.) But this assumes the justice does not share any important elements in his wifes deranged worldview. And while that assumption is possible every marriage is different it is hardly a safe assumption.

The trouble is that we simply dont know whether, or to what degree, Clarence Thomas believes Trump really won the election, that a well of evidence could prove his victory, and so on. The life tenure of a Supreme Court justice means that, once given a seat on the Court, he could easily evolve from a reliable partisan to an unhinged, paranoid nut without exposing his seat to any risk or even necessarily giving any outward indication to the country. Conservatives admire Clarence Thomas, appreciate the results of his votes, and refuse to take any posture other than assuming the best and daring his critics to prove that he agrees with his wife which is, of course, unprovable.

The scandal, in other words, is that we have to rely on the unprovable good faith of the Courts justices. There barely exists any method to wall them off from partisan politics. A couple months ago, Neil Gorsuch appeared at a Federalist Society conference alongside Republicans such as Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and Kayleigh McEnany. A few months before that, Amy Coney Barrett fted McConnell in a speech putatively dedicated to refuting the charge that she and her colleagues are partisan hacks but which in reality served to bolster it.

American Oversight obtained emails from Ginni Thomas revealing that her husband is in regular contact with DeSantis. That story received far less attention than her emails about Trumps stolen-election fantasies but seems far more ethically damning. If a Supreme Court justice can maintain regular, private communication with one of the leaders of a political party, exactly what is left of the Courts nonpolitical role other than its carefully burnished appearance?

What these events all reveal is that the justices, and especially the Republican ones, recognize they operate insulated from any practical accountability. They can appear with their legislative allies in public and confer with them in private, knowing full well they will face no accountability or consequences.

What surely enhances their confidence is the understanding that even if a public backlash were to develop and a backlash of any important magnitude is currently nowhere to be seen it would have little practical recourse. The Republican majority has two seats to spare and no prospect for reversal for a long time to come.

The important news from Jacksons confirmation was not that Democrats managed to seat a justice; their possession of a Senate majority and the presidency made that a foregone conclusion. The news was that Democrats would not get another justice confirmed without controlling the Senate.

When McConnell announced in 2016 that he would not permit a hearing for any Supreme Court nominee put forward by Barack Obama, his stated rationale was that it would be improper for the Senate to confirm anybody during an election year. An army of conservative pundits came forward to vouchsafe this rationale. Only once in U.S. history (in 1888) has the Senate acted before Election Day to confirm a justice who was nominated in the last year of a presidential term by a president of the opposing party, insisted National Reviews Dan McLaughlin.

It was perfectly obvious at the time that McConnell had simply concocted an arbitrary time frame, but conservatives put up a great show in pretending the distinction between election-year nominees and justices nominated other times had real meaning. But McConnell is now dispensing with the pretext and openly refusing to commit to holding hearings for a Democratic Court nominee at all, election year or no. As far as I can tell, the number of conservatives who disagree with him is zero.

The old norms governing Supreme Court nominations generally meant that a well-qualified jurist from within that partys mainstream would command overwhelming approval from senators in both parties. But that expectation relied on the shared belief that judges were ideologically unpredictable. (Because, indeed, they were.)

In the new world, confirming a Supreme Court justice is just like passing any other part of the presidents agenda: You either have a majority of the votes in Congress or you dont get it. It will now become routine for Supreme Court seats to stay vacant for years until one party controls the presidency and the Senate.

In practical terms, this will make it nearly impossible for Democrats to take back the Court in the near future. As Simon Bazelon argues, the median Electoral College state is now roughly four percentage points more Republican than the country, and the median Senate seat is about three percentage points more Republican than the country. Democrats have managed to eke out 50 seats by coasting on previous wins in red states, but the advantage to incumbency is shrinking, while the correlation between how a state votes in presidential elections and how it votes in Senate elections is rising. Bazelon forecasts that Republicans will probably hold somewhere between 56 and 62 Senate seats after the 2024 elections.

Republicans happen to have control of the Court as it is growing far more partisan and as its partisan composition is growing much harder to change. The answer to why they dont want to change the system is so self-evident that McConnell didnt even bother to offer one up in his response to Swan: When the wheel stopped turning, they happened to be on top.

Irregular musings from the center left.

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Why Ketanji Brown Jackson Will Be the Last Democratic Justice for a Long Time - New York Magazine

Liberal: Dems Growing Working-Class Woes

As the most rapidly-diversifying state in the country it recently became majority-minority Nevada should stay solid for Democrats, notes The Liberal Patriots Ruy Teixeira. But their winning margins there from 2008 to 2016 declined sharply from 12.5 to 2.4 points and stayed at 2.4 even as Dems gained nationally in 2020. The problem: Theyre losing working-class votes, including black and Hispanic ones. At risk is Catherine Cortez Mastos Senate seat, as voters are furious over jobs lost to pandemic lockdowns, gas prices and cultural issues including border security. Dropping the Title 42 rule and so boosting the illegal migrant surge may doom her: It seems top Democrats have still not absorbed the extent of their partys Hispanic and working class voter problems.

Rich countries pursuit of carbon neutrality at almost any cost limits economic opportunities for the worlds poor and poses serious geopolitical risks to the West, warns Jason De Sena Trennert at The Wall Street Journal. Fact is, exploration and production of fossil fuels have done more to benefit the lives of ordinary people than any other technological advance in history: Theres a strong correlation between the use of fossil fuel and life expectancy. Plus, as the Ukraine war shows, leaving these fuels in the ground can leave the West at the mercy of dictators, increasing the risk of atrocities. By contrast, easing regulations on oil and gas to flood the global market would do far more than any sanctions to stop Vladimir Putins barbarism.

Americas border security is about to go from terrible to the worst it has ever been, predicts Buck Sexton at Fox News. With the White Houses recently announced decision to end Title 42 Authority a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regulation that allowed a portion of illegal migrants to be expelled from U.S. soil during the COVID pandemic the ongoing flood of illegal migrants is about to turn into a tsunami. In fact, the feds estimate 18,000 illegal migrants [will be] apprehended at the southern border every day, with close to a million illegal migrant border crossings within six weeks. This will completely overwhelm the system. Unfortunately, this lawlessness will continue unless the Democrats are made to fear an electoral annihilation this November.

The investigation into Hunter Biden and his business ventures is rapidly developing and could soon become a mainstream election issue, writes Douglas E. Schoen at The Hill. As more information comes to light, the risk of this becoming a problem for the president is increasing. Theres already some circumstantial evidence that Joe Biden actively assisted his sons business ventures for the collective benefit of the Biden family. If its proven that President Biden was not only involved in but profited from Hunters business deals with Chinese state-owned firms, for example, it would be a politically calamitous development for the president and what is now likely a red wave election could turn into a massive blowout that is more substantial than anything seen in recent history.

Most comparisons of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler are overdrawn, observes John Gray at The New Statesman. Though the atrocities that are being perpetrated on his orders are mounting, Putin has not launched a colossal campaign of genocide as the Nazis did. His strategy in Ukraine which aims to subdue the country by laying waste to its cities is the same one he used in Syria. In their turn of mind, however, Hitler and Putin may have something in common something very dangerous. No longer only the kleptocrat he has been during much of his time in power, Putin seems ready to destroy his country in order to leave his mark on history.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Democrats working-class woes and other commentary - New York Post

Murphy is leading a brigade of lawmakers and advocates pressing Biden to take unilateral action on guns. In a March 25 letter, previously unreported, Murphy and 127 other Democratic lawmakers demanded that Biden move expeditiously on three fronts:

Issue new executive orders on federal gun licensing requirements and create a centralized task force to address gun violence.

And name a new nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Finalize a regulation to crack down on so-called ghost guns before Democrats potentially lose control of Congress.

Its been a year to the day since Biden gave his first White House address on gun violence prevention, announcing what is viewed as his most significant executive action to date on guns from the Rose Garden. But a year later, the ATF regulation he unveiled, which would impose background checks and new requirements for online sales of ghost guns untraceable firearms that lack serial numbers and are constructed from online kits hasnt been finalized.

The White House has said the rule will be finished this month and a source familiar with the administrations planning said an announcement on the regulation is expected as early as Monday. Some Democratic lawmakers have been invited to a Monday event with the president on gun violence reduction, according to a Hill aide.

Though Murphy has been in frequent touch with White House officials about gun safety, he hasnt received a response to the missive, just an acknowledgment of receipt. Meanwhile, gun homicides continue to accelerate. On Sunday, six people were killed in a mass shooting in Sacramento, Calif.

With seven months until the midterms, and an expected shift in control of at least one chamber to Republicans, Democrats are increasingly turning to the White House for answers. GOP opposition to major gun control legislation makes executive actions one of the few tools left to Biden.

Democrats and gun control advocates argue that their voters need to see some sign of progress before the election and executive actions like expanding background checks and installing a director of gun violence could help motivate them to turn out at the polls.

Biden has sought to tackle the rise in crime and gun violence with what the White House describes as a holistic approach: Increasing funding for cops, bolstering community violence prevention programs and removing violent offenders from the streets. But key to those efforts, lawmakers say, is having a permanent ATF director, whose job responsibilities include cracking down on illegal and trafficked guns.

POLITICO reported this week that Biden is expected to announce a new nominee to lead the ATF as soon as this month after his first pick, David Chipman, failed to secure enough support in September.

Democrats including Murphy dont understand the holdup.

Many of us have been willing to have patience when it comes to the ATF director and the regulatory process but I dont have the luxury of patience any longer, he said.

Murphy has also changed his mind about a proposal to name a gun violence prevention czar. Six months ago, the senator was sympathetic to the White House argument that it was unnecessary and that the issue could be handled by the Domestic Policy Council led by Susan Rice. Now, he thinks that wont cut it.

The President should think seriously about a specific, high-level experienced individual to oversee anti-gun violence policy, Murphy said. I dont know that theres a lot of evidence that the current structure is delivering results.

A number of gun safety organizations agree: Theyve pressed the administration since Biden took office to create such a position, and now Democratic lawmakers are increasingly getting behind the idea.

House Democrats led by Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado and Lucy McBath of Georgia are circulating a new letter to send to Biden asking him to create an interagency task force to prevent gun violence and to appoint a director of gun violence prevention to lead it, according to a Democratic aide. The new appointee would help coordinate anti-gun violence efforts across the federal government, with the goal of reducing firearm deaths by half over the next decade.

Theres no doubt we need stronger leadership thats focused on reducing gun violence, including an effective ATF director and executive action to crack down on ghost guns, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement to POLITICO when asked about Bidens actions to date.

The White House pushed back on the idea its moving at a slow pace, arguing that Biden has taken more executive actions on gun violence than any prior president.

The Biden administration has made historic progress, which I would stack up against any previous presidency, said Stefanie Feldman, deputy assistant to the president and senior adviser to the director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Feldman defended the White Houses strategy of deploying the DPC to coordinate the administrations gun policies interagency task force is a fine word for it, she said.

There are no policies that are going at a slower pace because of the structure we have now or that would be going at a faster pace if we had a different structure, she said in an interview Friday. We wake up every day feeling the urgency of this issue.

In addition to the ghost gun rule, Biden has focused on violence intervention programs, securing $50 million for them in a March-passed bill to fund the government. That same bill included a $47 million funding increase for the ATF. Biden has also created strike forces at the Justice Department to crack down on illegal firearms trafficking, but advocates say its unclear what progress has been made. In February, on his way to New York City to highlight his gun violence prevention efforts, Biden and the DOJ also launched an initiative to train a national team of prosecutors to charge people who use ghost guns in crimes.

Democratic lawmakers largely believe Biden is committed to the issue, but they want to see him use the full breadth of his powers.

Action right away is critically important, because some of these executive orders will be challenged in the courts, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). The more time that passes before he issues them, the longer it will take for them to help save lives.

Feldman did not answer specific questions about future executive orders but said that the White House is pursuing a range of measures as it works to determine Bidens legal authority.

In particular, Democrats like Blumenthal and Murphy are worried that the longer the ghost gun rule takes, the more likely a future GOP majority in Congress will use the powers of the Congressional Review Act to revoke it. Similarly, once the rule is enacted, its expected to face challenges from GOP-led states that have made their opposition known. Some advocates pinned the holdup on acting ATF head Marvin Richardson, but the White House contends its moved faster on the ghost gun regulation compared to others.

Still, Democratic lawmakers say, every day of delay means more gun kits and untraceable components sold.

On Friday, advocacy groups March for Our Lives, Guns Down America and Change the Ref will issue a report card on Bidens work to combat gun violence, giving him a D+ overall.

Some Democratic lawmakers, however, say Congress not the president is to blame. House-passed gun control bills have stalled in the Senate, where a majority of Democrats complain the party missed an opportunity to scuttle the filibuster to move Bidens agenda. Efforts in the chamber to find a long-shot compromise to strengthen background checks have also fallen apart. As Republicans oppose Bidens legislative proposals to reinstate the assault weapons ban or remove limits on lawsuits against gun manufacturers, theyve attempted to pin a rise in crime on Biden and Democrats ahead of the November election.

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) praised the administration for crafting model legislation for states to implement red flag laws, which allow courts to bar people who present a danger to themselves or others from accessing a firearm.

But Im frustrated by state legislatures. Im frustrated by Congress, she said. The House has moved. The Senate is not interested in saving lives.

Gun deaths hit a record high in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available up 14 percentage points from the year prior. Some 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries with suicides accounting for more than half, according to a Pew Research accounting of federal data.

Over the last year and half we havent had a Sandy Hook or a Las Vegas or an Orlando, Murphy said. But the absence of the 25- or 50-person mass shooting doesnt mask the fact that daily gun murder rates are exponentially higher than they were before for the pandemic.

I dont know why we dont have outrage about that and that outrage needs to come not just from me and from anti-gun violence groups, he said. It needs to come from the administration.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

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Democrats exasperated with Biden on gun control - POLITICO