DON SURBER: Politico reported, ‘National Democrats land on a nickname for the new House speaker: MAGA Mike.’ How much is he paying them?”

WHAT THE PRESS SAYS: INFLATION IS OVER!

What the Big Mac Index says: McDonald’s revenue soars as it hikes menu prices: ‘$18 Big Macs.’ “Though he didn’t specify by how much, Borden said McDonald’s expects to increase the cost of its menu items just over 10% for the full year — the second consecutive annual 10% price hike.”

Related: Big Mac Index Shows Official CPI Under Reports Inflation.

And America’s Paper Of Record is on it: McDonald’s Now Offering 36-Month, 0% Interest Financing On All Value Meals.

BUY GUNS: Joel Kotkin: Will Jews return to the Ghetto? The Jewish Century is rapidly fading. More like the Jewish 3/4 Century, and even that’s a stretch. “On the surface, Jewish life, both inside and outside the diaspora, may seem unassailable. But just as terrorists were able to breach Israel’s supposedly impenetrable defences, the forces of antisemitism have penetrated Western society, as young, educated progressives, including a few Jews, make common cause with Hamas and its allies.”

TO BE FAIR, IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE GARBAGE PEOPLE: Far-Left Support for Hamas is not an Aberration: It’s rooted in a long history of defending horrific mass murder and other atrocities.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: No, Vanderbilt Isn’t Governed By “Principled Neutrality:” The university’s actions give the lie to its professed stance.

But other universities won’t be following Vanderbilt’s example. And they won’t be following it for the same reason that Vanderbilt won’t be following it. American higher education is now honeycombed with sacrosanct warrens of administrative offices whose political activism makes a mockery of any claim to “principled neutrality.” As long as these offices remain on campus, the political indoctrination of students at the hands of the institution will continue unabated.

Take Vanderbilt’s office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for example. To be sure, the EDI mission statement claims to promote only what is good and true: a “sense of belonging”; environments where “equity, diversity and inclusion are inseparable from institutional excellence”; “human potential and growth”; and “practices that respect the humanity of all.” The office even lists more than two dozen “trainings,” a term that suggests objective instruction on settled subjects.

But whereas Vanderbilt’s Medical Center offers training in CPR, and its cybersecurity office offers training in data privacy, the EDI office promotes training in—to take just one example—“Countering Colorblind Ideologies,” a course administered by Vanderbilt’s “Student Center for Social Justice and Identity.” Quite apart from the misuse of “ideologies” here (routine among administrators), Vanderbilt evidently considers disregarding skin color—yes, disregarding skin color—to be the equivalent of respiratory failure and malware: a recognizable evil that right-thinking people will naturally oppose. The only question is how to oppose it, which is what the “training” is for. So much for President Diermeier’s commitment to “thoughtful debate.”

Once students have been trained to oppose “colorblind ideologies”—that is, once they’ve been taught to reject Martin Luther King’s dream of judging people according to character rather than color—they’ll be better equipped to appreciate the color-conscious approaches to racism that Vanderbilt endorses. “White women … have a history of upholding white supremacy,” writes Elly Belle in her essay “White People Can Hold Each Other Accountable to Stop Institutional Racism.” Lincoln Anthony Blades makes the same point more emphatically in his article “11 Things You Can Do To Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence.” Vanderbilt’s EDI office recommends both essays—published in Teen Vogue—on its “Anti-Racism Resources” page. Is this what Chancellor Diermeier means when he claims the university is fighting “moral tribalism”?

It’s unclear that higher education can be saved. From itself.

MASSIVE RESISTANCE: Once Again, the Ninth Circuit Contorts Itself to Delay Ruling in a Key Second Amendment Case. “Just when I thought the Ninth Circuit could not more brazenly thumb its collective nose at the Supreme Court and the Bruen decision, over the weekend a Ninth Circuit panel proved once more that there truly are no limits to that court’s enmity toward Second Amendment rights.”

STANDING UP AGAINST TWO GANGS OF BARBARIANS AT ONCE! House Republicans Unveil Israel Aid — Funded by IRS Cuts.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Welcome To The Party, Pal! Erwin Chemerinsky discovers that higher education is a hotbed of antisemitism.

PROF. JACOBSON: Toxic Atmosphere At Cornell For Jewish Students Is Getting Worse.

LOCK HIM UP! Archives locates 82,000 pages of Joe Biden pseudonym emails, possibly dwarfing Clinton scandal: Disclosure made in little-notice status briefing as FOIA litigation advances.

Related (From Ed): What Must the President Have Known?

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

SPACE: FAA anticipates extension of commercial spaceflight regulatory learning period.

SO MANY PEOPLE FROM HARVARD ARE RACIST AND SEXIST THESE DAYS: David Hogg Blames Violence on Suburban White Women.

Go to class, kid, your 15 minutes are over.

UNLESS YOU’RE A WITCH, WHEN IT WEIGHS THE SAME AS A DUCK: The Immune System Weighs The Same as a Pineapple, Study Finds.

WHY IS THE IVY LEAGUE SUCH A GARBAGE PLACE? Yale campus newspaper censors pro-Israel writer’s column on Hamas beheading men, raping women.

JOSH BLACKMAN: Jewish Professors Should Place A Mezuzah On Their Office Doors: These symbols will let Jewish students know they are not alone.

MAYBE THEY ARE: Why isn’t Israel more focused on the Hamas leaders in Qatar? Hamas committed crimes against humanity – not Jews, humanity – on Oct. 7. Why are its top officials living in luxury in Qatar’s skyscrapers and villas?

It takes time to plan an assassination.

OOPS: Automakers Wake Up to Reality on Electric Vehicles.

FLASHBACK: Woke colleges are literally driving students mad.

FLASHBACK: Duke Energy “sorry” about that cold, dark Christmas weekend.

Related: A deep dive into what’s behind TVA’s unprecedented rolling blackouts in the face of not-unusually cold weather.

I’ll just repeat: This cold weather was just high single-digit temps, which are hardly unknown in Tennessee. We’ve had below-zero temps in the past without these problems. TVA’s failure to maintain adequate capacity to meet this situation is unforgivable.

REMINDER: THE PEOPLE DOING THIS SORT OF THING ARE GENERALLY THE BAD GUYS. Death Of Shani Louk Confirmed, Was Kidnapped And Driven Through Gaza Streets Mostly Naked To Jeering Crowds.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Berkeley Students Threaten Hunger Strike to Reinstate Professor Suspended for Stalking. “The supporters say del Valle is beloved at the university, where she is the only first-generation Mexican woman among faculty in the school’s Spanish and Portuguese Department.”

“But records obtained by KQED paint a troubling picture of what led to del Valle’s suspension. Over three investigations, which looked into behavior that began in 2018 and continued through 2022, the university found del Valle had repeatedly harassed, stalked and retaliated against Joshua Clover, an English and Comparative Literature professor at UC Davis, and then violated orders not to contact him. . . . In an interview with KQED, del Valle acknowledged some of the behavior described in the investigative reports, including keying Clover’s car, vandalizing the area outside his apartment door, contacting his friends, posting an image of his partner online and leaving messages outside the home of his mother. Those messages included one that said ‘I raised a psychopath,’ according to the university’s investigative reports. She has also acknowledged in the report calling Clover’s office phone line at least ten times within 90 minutes.”

AS ALWAYS: As the Maine Shooting Once Again Showed, ‘Gun-Free’ Zones Kill.

I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS: Avoiding A Presidential Succession Nightmare.

The ousting of Kevin McCarthy as speaker threw the House into turmoil for weeks, and the situation would have been more chaotic if it weren’t for a little-known rule adopted 20 years ago that put Rep. Patrick McHenry in the chair temporarily. That rule is inadequate, however, as it limits the speaker pro tempore to mostly ceremonial functions. The rule reflects a broader problem of poor succession planning in the U.S. government that extends to the White House. The current system for ensuring continuity in the U.S. presidency has gaping holes that could create political instability in a national emergency. Solving these problems doesn’t require a constitutional amendment; Congress can do it with new legislation.

Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, if the U.S. president and vice president both die, become incapacitated or otherwise leave office, the House speaker is next in the line of succession, followed by the Senate president pro tempore, then the cabinet secretaries, starting with the secretary of state. But a closer examination of this plan reveals lurking dangers.

The current system is flawed in several ways, but four stand out. The first problem is that lawmakers are in the line of presidential succession, which could create a political crisis if a speaker from one party replaced a president of the other. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson could replace Democratic President Joe Biden. One can imagine the outcry and the challenges to presidential legitimacy that could arise. Scholars have also long been split on the constitutionality of lawmakers’ succeeding to the presidency. Except for succession involving a president-elect and vice president-elect—which has a different constitutional basis—legislators should be removed from the line of succession and replaced with cabinet secretaries to eliminate concerns over the constitutional separation of powers and to ensure party continuity in the White House.

The second problem is that current law makes it possible for several successors to serve as acting president during a brief period. If a cabinet secretary becomes acting president, the law permits either the speaker or the Senate president pro tem to unseat the acting president if a lawmaker doesn’t initially take the reins of the executive branch. This provision should be eliminated altogether.

The third danger is that there is no legal process for determining when the president and vice president are incapacitated or how they might regain their powers and duties if they recover. If both officeholders are unable to serve, the U.S. must have a plan of action. Congress should adopt a statute modeled after the 25th Amendment, which governs situations in which the president alone is incapacitated. The statute should allow the designated successor to the presidency—ideally the next eligible cabinet secretary—and the other secretaries to determine whether both the president and vice president are unable to fulfill their responsibilities. The successor and the cabinet would then submit that declaration to Congress. The president and vice president could regain their powers and duties through procedures similar to those outlined in the 25th Amendment.

Finally, under current law, the U.S. has no process for handling the problem of an incapacitated vice president serving alongside a healthy president. This scenario carries risks: It thwarts the 25th Amendment’s mechanisms governing presidential incapacity, in which the vice president plays an essential role. It also means that if the president dies or suddenly leaves office, the incapacitated vice president is poised to become an incapacitated president. Congress should create a process, again modeled after the 25th Amendment, to determine when a vice president is unfit to serve and to designate someone to fulfill the office’s succession- and incapacity-related responsibilities.

Following 9/11, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution co-sponsored a bipartisan panel—the Continuity of Government Commission—to explore policy options for preserving our political institutions during crises. In 2021 AEI established a successor commission following the Covid pandemic. Both panels highlighted the current succession plan’s shortcomings. Despite their warnings, neither the executive branch nor Congress has shown much interest in fixing the flawed presidential succession statute.

With much lower stakes, I served on a state commission to amend the Tennessee Constitution to fix some succession bugs for the Governor. Our changes eventually wound up in the Tennessee Constitution over a decade later. These things seem to move slowly, but it’s very much worth addressing the problems in advance.

MATT TAIBBI: Orf vs. the Memory Hole: The Trevor Bauer Controversy. “A controversial and unpopular baseball player is accused of savage behavior, spurring instantaneous calls for banishment. A few years of legal process later, it appears the gun was jumped.”

Someone should be held responsible.