House Committee Presses Harvard’s Garber on Communist China Influence

Plus, Biden shuffles out to call for a less bold presidency

Harvard University

The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, John Moolenaar, is pressing Harvard for answers about an April 2024 event at which a Harvard student, Cosette Wu, protesting an appearance by Communist China’s ambassador, Xie Feng, was “dragged” out of the event by “a Harvard student from China.”

A July 1 letter from Moolenaar to Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, said that “Tsering Yangchen, another Harvard student protester removed from the event after Wu, later told Voice of America that a student from China, who appeared to be one of the event organizers, approached her and asked for the names of protestors. That individual then followed her, causing her to feel scared.”

“This incident raises serious questions regarding possible transnational repression by the Chinese government and the involvement of international students from China at Harvard in acts of harassment and intimidation condoned by the Chinese government against its critics,” Moolenaar says in the letter. “Universities should be bastions of freedom, and prestigious institutions like Harvard should hold themselves to an even higher standard to ensure a safe environment for students’ freedom of expression and push back against any foreign government effort to silence their critics on campus.”

The letter includes 13 questions that it’s asking Harvard to answer by July 26. It also asks Garber to organize a briefing for the committee about the incident.

The chairman of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, Charles Lieber, was convicted in 2021 for six criminal counts in connection with lying to the government about getting paid by China. He was sentenced last year to time served (two days) in prison; two years of supervised release with six months of home confinement; a fine of $50,000; and $33,600 in restitution to the IRS. 

At a Brookings Institution event today, Secretary of State Blinken accused China of seeking global dominance. Asked, “Are the Chinese looking to compete or are they looking to dominate?” Blinken replied, “I think China’s objectives are clear.  Over time, over the coming decades, they would like to be the leading country, the dominant country, in the international system militarily, economically, diplomatically.  That’s clear.  And if their vision for the world actually matched ours or matched many other countries, that would be one thing.  But they have a different vision, a different vision of what that future looks like.” Blinken didn’t spell out the differences, but the obvious one is that the American vision involves more political and economic and religious freedom than the Chines Communist one does.

Harvard’s mishandling of anti-Israel protests was the subject of a congressional investigation that helped to topple Garber’s predecessor, President Claudine Gay. The protest against the Chinese government official has attracted much less mainstream press attention, at least so far.

Boldness of the president: At Seth Lipsky’s birthday party a few years ago I read, aloud, excerpts from an editorial headlined “Boldness of the President” that had appeared in the February 13, 1998 issue of the Forward, a Jewish weekly. It quoted from Justice Scalia’s dissent in the case of Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 case in which the Supreme Court, with Scalia the lone dissenter, ruled the Independent Counsel Act constitutional. “Perhaps the boldness of the President himself will not be affected—though I am not so sure,” The Great Scalia warned. 

Back in 1998 the president was Bill Clinton and the prosecutor was Kenneth Starr. The Forward’s concern about sapping boldness in the fight against terrorism proved no abstraction, but sadly well founded, as the New York Sun noted in a May 2008 editorial, “The Boldness of the President.” It was published after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported that Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, had four separate times thrown up objections to plans to take action against Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden. 

Now here we are in 2024—26 years after the Forward’s “Boldness of the President” editorial—and boldness of the president is again before the justices. In Trump v. United States the word “bold” or a variation of it appears 11 times. The majority opinion endorsing broad immunity for official actions by the president avers that the “danger” of criminal prosecution “is akin to, indeed greater than, what led us to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from civil damages liability—that the President would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive.” The case cited is a 1982 opinion, Nixon v.  Fitzgerald, in which Justice Powell, in a 5-4 decision, granted broad civil immunity to presidents because in the absence of immunity executive branch officials “would hesitate to exercise their discretion…even when the public interest required bold and unhesitating action.” 

Justice Thomas’s concurrence, in a brilliant echo of Scalia, doubts the constitutionality of the special counsel prosecuting Trump.

President Biden shuffled out at the White House tonight to denounce the Supreme Court as a whole and its ruling in this case, a departure from longstanding custom that a president expresses respect for the rule of law even if he disagrees with an outcome. (Obama violated this taboo with his reaction to Citizens United.) It was a stunning display—a president advocating for an outcome that would sap his own boldness. Perhaps Biden himself is so lacking in boldness that he can’t see the concern, though for a president who has visited both Kyiv and Tel Aviv in wartime, you’d think he’d want to at least leave himself some room to maneuver. Or perhaps the reason Biden is so cavalier about diminishing the boldness of the office of the presidency is that he himself doesn’t intend to occupy it for much longer—and he has an extremely low opinion of all of his potential successors. That’s just about the only situation imaginable in which constraining the boldness of a president with threats of endless prosecution and litigation makes any sense at all.

Pressley proposes packing the Supreme Court: The Vineyard Gazette has an account of a far-left member of Congress from Massachusetts, Ayanna Pressley, appearing at a Juneteenth event at Union Chapel in a conversation with event organizer Kahina Van Dyke.

Ms. Van Dyke then switched the conversation to focus on the Supreme Court, saying that their decisions no longer reflect the beliefs of the general public. She asked Ms. Pressley what needs to be done to address these concerns.

“We need to reform and expand the courts and we need term limits,” Ms. Pressley said. “The court should be balanced.”...

Ms. Pressley said the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade was an example of how the court does not support the general public. She said it was particularly an attack on Black women who have the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.

“What is a national ban on abortion?” Ms. Pressley asked the crowd. “It’s a nation of forced birth.”

This just seems misinformed or not carefully thought out. The Supreme Court does not exist to “reflect the beliefs of the general public.” If there’s a branch of government that comes closest to filling that role, it’s the House of Representatives, with elections every two years. The Supreme Court exists in part to settle controversies about the law and to protect the Constitutional rights of unpopular minorities that otherwise might be trampled by the majority.  If the Court is just going to impose majority rule or serve as a rubber stamp on the democratically elected branches, there’s not much point to its existence. 

As for the Dobbs decision as an “attack on Black women,” I can understand that point of view, and it also omits that many of those aborted pregnancies might otherwise have resulted in the birth of children who would have grown up to be Black women.

I dislike Pressley’s extreme hostility to Israel. The Vineyard Gazette article was a reminder that often when someone is that wrong on Israel they are often not particularly bright about a lot of other issues, too. And when people are out criticizing Trump for disrespecting the Constitution or departing radically from norms, it’s worth remembering that some substantial faction of Democrats are out there talking openly about adding justices to the Supreme Court as part of an effort to achieve majoritarian outcomes. 

Florida chaplains law goes into effect today: HB931, a bill that allows Florida school districts and charter schools to “authorize volunteer school chaplains to provide support, services, and programs to students,” goes into effect today. It’s the summer and July 4 week, so there aren’t many Florida schools in session, and it’s probably too soon to check on whether any chaplains are in the schools and interacting with students. But as the districts and charter schools enact policies and recruit chaplains, it sure will be interesting to see what effect, if any, there is on the mental health of the students, their academic outcomes, or their future religious involvement. 

It’d be interesting, also, to run an experiment on volunteer chaplains versus paid chaplains. Probably a lot of the “volunteer” chaplains will be paid, just by some entity other than the school or school district. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, lots of government-funded hospitals and nursing homes, and the U.S. military manage to pay chaplains without running afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, so it’s certainly possible Florida could find a way if it wanted to. 

Anyway, I’m not sure how this experiment with school chaplains will work, but, at least in concept, it has some interesting potential, and it will be worth tracking to find out. The problem with a lot of education policy research is it can take a long time—potentially, a decade or more—to get and report results on whether, say, the students who interacted with chaplains wind up graduating college or attending church services as grownups at higher rates than those who do not. By that time, the original program may have organically evolved to the point where it no longer closely resembles the program that was the subject of the research.

Correction: The email version of yesterday’s newsletter had Biden’s blunder-filled nightime event in New York on the incorrect day. It was Friday night. The article has been updated online. Thanks to the astute reader who wrote about the error. Accuracy is important to us, so please don’t hesitate to write if you find a mistake.

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