How will history judge the impeachment of President Trump? When I saw the headline, my first thought was that asking such a question was premature, at best. But since the article was written by Hans von Spakovsky, who I respect, I decided to start reading.

He is obviously speculating. But he uses the 19th century impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson to provide a context. Johnson was hated by many in Congress because he began to implement Abraham Lincoln’s conciliatory policies toward the Southern states.

He quotes from two history books that I have on my shelf to illustrate how historians now view the political impeachment of Johnson. One book, A Patriot’s History of the United States, documents the harsh criticism of Johnson who they say was a “wild-eyed dictator bent on overthrowing the government.” This is strikingly similar to Adam Schiff who called Trump a “despot” and Jerry Nadler who called Trump a “dictator.”

Another book is Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, which is a book I often quote when talking about America’s founding. He records that Johnson was subjected to “torrents of personal abuse” by the House managers during the impeachment trial. They also argued that he had “challenged the authority” of Congress. That does sound familiar. The House impeachment resolution argues that Trump “impeded” the House and even engaged in “defiance” of Congress.

It’s also worth noting that the major argument for Johnson’s impeachment was his removal of Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War by replacing him with Ulysses S. Grant. During the impeachment hearings in the House, remember how the House mangers focused significant time on the decision by President Trump to remove the US ambassador to Ukraine.

The parallels between the two impeachment trials are significant. That doesn’t mean the historians will record the Trump impeachment the same way they recorded the Johnson impeachment. Only time will tell.

At the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, many people made comments and criticisms of the speech by President Trump. Most of those comments were accurate but they all ignored a very good message by Dr. Arthur Brooks. He is a Harvard professor and former president of the American Enterprise Institute. He has been on radio with me, and I often quote from his books and articles.

He attempted to diagnose the political division and social upheaval in our society today. He explained that the “problem is what psychologists call contempt.” The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defined contempt as “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” The political problem is that “we treat each other as worthless, which is why our fights are so bitter and cooperation feels nearly impossible.”

This isn’t the first time Arthur Brooks has talked about the problem of contempt, but it may have been the first time a majority of the people in that room heard him address it in such an elegant way. And he offered three homework assignments for those gathered at the National Prayer Breakfast.

First, he said they should ask God to give them strength to do the hard thing and follow the teachings of Jesus and love your enemies. “Ask God to remove political contempt from your heart. In your weakest moments, maybe even ask Him to help you fake it.”

Second, everyone should “make a commitment to another person to reject contempt. In other words, have someone hold you accountable “to love your enemies.” Third, go out “looking for contempt, so you have the opportunity to answer it with love.”

I appreciated the fact that he admitted that even he has struggled with trying to apply this consistently. But I think we would all agree that our world and our political discourse would be better if we followed his advice. Then let’s go out and do it.

During the past decade or so, pro-life state legislators have been passing laws placing commonsense, often very modest, restrictions on abortion. It’s sad to see a lot of this progress wiped out when a different party comes into power. This is happening right now in the state of Virginia.

The new democratic majority in Virginia’s house and senate is working to pass a package of bills that will reverse these protective laws.

One bill removes Virginia’s requirement that abortions be performed by doctors. Nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, and certified nurse midwives will soon be allowed to abort babies.

There’s also a bill repealing Virginia’s informed-consent requirement, under which abortion providers must provide each woman at least 24 hours’ notice of her right to withdraw consent for the procedure, to speak with the physician who is to perform the abortion, and to know the gestational age of her unborn child.

Another bill takes abortion facilities out of the “hospital” category, thus weakening their safety regulations.

The hard-won requirements that an ultrasound be performed on each woman seeking abortion, and that she be given the opportunity to see that sonogram, will be gone. Mandatory parental consent for minors seeking abortion will be abolished.

Pro-abortion advocates told Associated Press they hope to make Virginia a “safe haven” for women in neighboring conservative states that have these laws regulating abortion.

Tarina Keene, Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, says “These laws have been about shaming women, stigmatizing abortion, shutting off access, discouraging doctors from providing this care.” Care? These protective laws were a way to enhance safety and provide protective care for women who chose abortion, which is not care. Every abortion kills an unborn baby and damages its mother.

Pro-choice advocates in blue states see the Supreme Court chipping away at Roe v. Wade. They worry Roe will be reversed. So they are proactively repealing these abortion restrictions where they can. And negating a decade of progress.

Jonah Goldberg reminded his readers of a famous essay by Tom Wolfe entitled “The Great Relearning.” It was an essay about the Summer of Love in 1968 in San Francisco. It had great significance to me since I grew up in the San Francisco area during that time, but it also has significance to all of us concerned about our culture.

He said that doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic “were treating diseases no living doctor had every encountered before, diseases that has disappeared so long ago they never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” He concluded that this happened because “the hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.”

They rejected everything from modern society, including basic hygiene. They had lots of sex with each other and shared everything from bedsheets to toothbrushes to food utensils. They were the beneficiaries of centuries scientific investigation and wise application of sound medical and scientific knowledge. But they decided to tear down some fences and paid a heavy price.

Supposedly G.K. Chesterton warned, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” Unfortunately, we had a counterculture in the 1960s that was willing to tear down fences of civilization without giving much thought to why those moral, medical, and sexual guidelines were created in the first place.

Does that sound like our world today? Moral anarchy reigns. Our society mimics Judges 17:6 where “everyone does what is right in his own eyes.” Sexual morality is now based on doing what each person feels is right for them. And marriage has been redefined by divorce and same-sex marriage. All of this suggests that maybe it is time for another “great relearning.”

Jonah Goldberg talks about “The Miracle” in his book, The Suicide of the West. The major focus of his book is on tribalism and populism, but he begins with a description and an explanation of the remarkable change in western societies in the last few centuries.

“The Miracle is about more than economics, but economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty.” People used to live on the equivalent of a dollar or more a day. By the 18th century, human prosperity exploded in Europe and North America. And now so many people in so many countries have been lifted out of poverty.

A major reason for this dramatic change had to do with a change in the way human beings thought about the world and their place in it. Sure there was trade, science, and technology. But those things existed before The Miracle. He argues that ideas brought about this change.

What were those ideas? Here are three: that the individual is sovereign, that our rights come from God not government, and that the fruits of our labor belong to us. These are Christian ideas but Jonah Goldberg doesn’t give credit to Christianity. In fact he begins his book with this statement: “There is no God in this book.” Instead, he assumes humans are merely an evolutionary product that eventually discovered the ideas that ushered in The Miracle.

He does give credit to John Locke. That would be the man who referred to the Bible over a thousand times in his first treatise on government and invoked the Bible more than three hundred times in his second treatise.

Jonah Goldberg rightly reminds us that we are the beneficiaries of a change in thinking that affected our political institutions and economic systems that brought us both liberty and prosperity. But I also think Christianity deserves some credit for The Miracle.

The impeachment trial may now be history, but the Mueller investigation and the impeachment investigation and trial have set new norms for our federal government. Last month Victor Davis Hanson wrote about this in what he called “The New Post-Trump Constitution.” Here are just a few of them.

First, private presidential phone calls will be leaked and printed in the media. This is how the impeachment inquiry started, and it seems likely that this will happen again and again.

Second, impeachment of a president now has become a casual affair. It doesn’t have to be due to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” It doesn’t necessarily have to have overwhelming public support. It doesn’t have to even have bipartisan support. We might also add that apparently there is no time limit on an impeachment. You can put the articles of impeachment on the shelf and pull them out weeks or even months later.

Third, it appears that the leadership of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA are immune from any reasonable oversight. Surveillance (what most of us would call spying) was justified with the thinnest of evidence. So far there hasn’t been any repercussions for an FBI director or anyone in the intelligence community lying to Congress. No indictments, much less convictions, have been brought against anyone involved.

Fourth, the FISA courts have been misused and abused but no one has been held accountable. They may now be used as agencies to grant the FBI or the DOJ power that can be used against candidates and officeholders.

This is the new political climate brought about by politicians and bureaucrats who wanted to investigate and remove the president. Ironically, some of them now want to seek refuge and relief in the customs and norms they previously abolished. But it may not be possible to undo what they destroyed.

The Attorney General was in the news again because he was talking about the importance of religion in American life. You may remember that William Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame arguing that religious commitment provides the source of virtue and moral discipline necessary for self-government.

Although that is true and was considered essential by the founders of this country, there were many secularists who criticized his speech. That was not surprising since he even mentioned in his speech the fact the religion is not popular with many in our secular society and you “risk a figurative burning at the stake—social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion” if you defy the secular creed of our day.

This time William Barr was on the radio show hosted by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. He explained: “The problem today it not that religious people are trying to impose their views on non-religious people. It’s the opposite—it’s that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people, and they’re not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.”

We went on to explain that the founders believed in “the centrality of religion to the health of the American democracy.” They feared the loss of popular religiosity was the danger to the republic.

He further explained that religion in society “permits a limited government and minimal command and control of the population—and allows people to have freedom of choice in their lives—and trust in the people is the fact that they are a people that are capable of disciplining themselves according to moral values.”

When people are moral and discipline themselves, you don’t need a large government or police force to control the population. When a secular society rejects moral principles, the inevitable social anarchy requires police officers on every street.

Last month the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to enforce a rule concerning foreign nationals. A separate opinion raised important questions about how one federal judge can stop the government by merely ordering an injunction.

The new rule would deny green cards to foreign nationals who use taxpayers-funded social services. As you might imagine, the decision was controversial as evidenced by the fact that it fell along typical 5-4 liberal-conservative lines.

The Immigration and Nationality Act dictates that foreign nationals should not receive green cards if they are likely “to become a public charge.” The administration attempted to more accurately define “public charge” to include such things a food stamps, housing benefits, and Medicaid. And the rule does not apply to migrants who are refugees or asylum-seekers.

What if you disagree with that rule? That brings me to the other equally important aspect of the Supreme Court ruling. If you disagree with the rule, then you have an opportunity to change that rule in the next election. The next president and the next Congress can address that issue as the debate on immigration rules takes place.

I would argue that unelected judges should not decide the fate of this rule or any other rule or regulation involving immigration or a myriad of other political issues. Of course, that is actually what is happening. After the administration promulgated the rule in August, a district court judge ruled against it and issued an injunction. Then the circuit court of appeals affirmed that decision.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in a separate opinion expressed his concern that the rise of nationwide injunctions is forcing “judges into making rushed, high-stakes low-information decisions.” This is the wrong way to decide important issues in America.

A pro-life state law authored by a Louisiana Democrat is set to be heard at the United States Supreme Court March 4th. In June Medical Services v. Gee, the abortion industry is challenging legislation requiring that any doctor performing abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital located within thirty miles of the facility at which those abortions take place.

State Representative Katrina Jackson, who has since been elected state senator, authored Act 620, which simply requires that abortion doctors live under the same regulations as other Louisiana outpatient physicians. Senator Jackson will actually join the Louisiana Attorney General’s office in arguing this case before the Supreme Court. She told The Stream that the bill addresses a woman’s health issue. She said, “Louisiana requires a certain standard of care for outpatient surgery, and we will not lower it for those electing to have abortion.” When she learned that abortion laws were in a different section of Louisiana statutes, Senator Jackson acted to remedy the situation.

To a question about how she reconciles her strong pro-life views with the overwhelming pro-abortion position of the Democrat party, Senator Jackson explained that she’s a Christian, adding: “when they’re right I stand with them, and when I believe they’re not, I cannot stand with them.”

The fact that the Louisiana statute governing outpatient doctors has been on the books for years and was believed to apply to all doctors makes it different from a similar Texas law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016.

The Court’s ruling in this case could affect a bill that’s been introduced in both houses of Congress. John Kennedy, US Senator from Louisiana and Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs call their companion bills the Pregnant Women Health and Safety Act.

How appropriate that these lawmakers introduced their bills just three days before the 47th annual Washington DC March for Life. The march’s theme this year was “Life Empowers: Pro-Life is Pro-Woman.”

Will robots destroy jobs and put all of us in the unemployment lines? Some futurists seem to be predicting this scenario. Jay Richards disagrees. He says it is an old argument that is new again. He is the author of the book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines.

One report predicts that; “The future of robots appears to be a dystopian march to rising inequality, falling wages, and higher unemployment.” A number of books warn of the “rise of robots” and even suggest this new technology will lead to the death of capitalism.

Jay Richards acknowledges that we have a coming disruption that could be as abrupt as the Industrial Revolution. But looking back, we can see that previous revolutions didn’t lead to the end of employment. They often provided new jobs without the boredom and danger of the past. At the founding of this country nearly 95 percent of Americans got by on farming. Today, the American population is ten times larger while only 1 percent of the US population works on farms.

If it is true that technology leads to permanent unemployment of the masses, the history of the last few centuries would be a history of joblessness. That is not true. But some politicians accept the faulty premise that jobs will be scarce, and therefore have proposed the idea of a universal basic income that would essentially put millions more on welfare.

One obvious problem would be money. The government is going broke right now with various entitlement programs. Expanding that is economically unrealistic. Do we really want to pay millions more in this country to not work?

The lesson for government and education is to stop training kids to do jobs that robots will be doing in a few years. The lesson for parents and their children is to focus on developing skills a robot could never take away from you.