By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;

While President Trump keeps doing or saying utterly benighted things at the border, on trade, and in smearing his own Justice Department, the Trump-Pence administration is making good policy moves on other fronts.

Already this week, the administration has acted wisely on four different issues that could make a real, positive difference in human lives.

The first involves a tiny nod toward fiscal sanity in the fact of a looming debt crisis. The administration made a real effort to convince senators to pass a “rescissions” package that would have kept Congress from “repurposing,” for other boondoggles, $15 billion of unspent appropriations. As I wrote here last month, “if these theoretical funds are taken away now, they can’t be used to hide more profligacy later.”

Alas, two Republican senators defected on the vote Thursday afternoon, thus killing the measure and saddling taxpayers with more waste, but the administration pushed hard for the right thing.

The second good administration move, one that prior administrations should have taken, is the decision to withdraw the United States from the woefully misnamed United Nations Human Rights Council. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., rightly calls the council a “cesspool of political bias.” Actually, “political bias” is putting it mildly. The UNHRC is a locus of international evil.

The UNHRC’s membership includes notorious human-rights abusers Venezuela, Cuba, China, and the Congo. It repeatedly refuses to say (much less do) anything against massive political imprisonment, torture, or killings in those countries or in places like Iran. It won’t condemn open terrorism when it manifests itself from Gaza. But it passes resolution after resolution, year after year, condemning Israel — and indeed has a permanent agenda item (Item 7) on its docket to accuse Israel of human rights abuses.

“If the Human Rights Council is gonna attack countries that uphold human rights, and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility,” Haley said. Bingo.

The third and fourth Trump-Pence decisions worthy of praise both involve healthcare policy. …

[The full column is here.]

 

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