RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mission-impossible-world-bank-11549411445

Condolences to our longtime contributor David Malpass, the Treasury Under Secretary who is President Trump’s choice to be the next president of the World Bank. He can expect bitter resistance from the bank’s bureaucracy and its clients to even mild reforms.

Mr. Malpass is well-qualified to run the institution that is supposed to help developing nations with grants and loans. He has spent much of his career working on development economics, starting as the Treasury official responsible for the World Bank in the Reagan Administration. He worked with Latin American countries at the State Department and most recently on Argentine currency and Chinese trade matters in the Trump Administration.

He is an evangelist for pro-growth policies including low taxes, spending control, stable money for the poor as much as for the rich, and the rule of law. This is controversial in some corners of the World Bank, where they measure success not by growth but by how much money gets shoveled out the door.

Readers may recall how the bureaucracy and European governments ran Paul Wolfowitz out of the bank in 2007 after he tried to use bank lending to fight corruption. The path of least resistance for a World Bank president is to do very little, attend conferences, and enjoy a salary free of paying U.S. income taxes.

Mr. Malpass did some good in his current position when he negotiated a $13 billion capital replenishment for the World Bank in 2017. The U.S. share was $1.2 billion. The terms include an annual cap on bank lending of $25 billion, which should force the organization to prioritize lending and keep it from demanding more cash anytime soon.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/riveting-stories-black-american-history-backwoods-alabama/
You might not have heard of these less celebrated Black History Month heroes, but their lives of faith and service are worthy of recognition.

It’s Black History Month and time for the annual student essays and programs on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Jessie Owens. Who better a hero, for example, than a runaway slave who freed others and later was nurse, scout, and spy for the Union Army, like Tubman? Yet there are so many other stories to tell, so why not look at some other heroes worthy of recognition?

With a little digging––a treat for this Yankee transplant––I found some African-Americans who believed in a dream bigger than the narrowness of life in the Jim Crow South, and worked hard, despite the trying times they lived in, to create better lives for fellow African-Americans. I’d like to introduce you to three of my new heroes, who grew up in the backwoods of rural Alabama and became teachers, healers, and builders worthy of a Black History Month essay.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-kavanaughing-of-neomi-rao/

Rao is an outstanding nominee who, like many other conservatives, is not being attacked for her faults, but for her virtues.

If you were to design a perfect judge for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a laboratory, that judge would look like Neomi Rao. The D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second most important court, is the leading court in which administrative-law decisions are made and one that has exclusive jurisdiction over many federal regulatory agencies. As it happens, Rao currently serves as an extraordinarily effective head of the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), from which she spearheads the Trump administration’s approach to regulatory policy.

Rao came to OIRA with deep expertise in regulatory policy, having founded the Center for the Study for the Administrative State at George Mason. A graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago Law School, she clerked for Justice Thomas and the highly respected appeals-court judge J. Harvie Wilkinson.

Rao can view legal issues not just from the perspective of her current perch, but also as a former counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) on the Senate Judiciary committee and as a counselor to former president George W. Bush. Furthermore, she has valuable experience in private practice both domestically and internationally.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2019/02/05/senate_confirm_neomi_rao_for_dc_circuit_court_of_appeals_111028.html

Among the many victories President Trump has given conservatives, his success in reforming the federal judiciary through judicial appointments will be among the most meaningful and lasting elements of his legacy. One of the President’s top judicial picks, former law professor Neomi Rao, is now awaiting confirmation to replace Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She should be quickly confirmed.

Ms. Rao was born in Detroit, a child of Indian immigrants. She completed her undergraduate education at Yale, graduating cum laude. After a brief stint as a reporter with the Weekly Standard, Ms. Rao attended University of Chicago Law School, where she was an Editor of the Law Review and graduated in 1999 with high honors and as a member of the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society.

Following law school, Ms. Rao was awarded prestigious clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with prominent Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III and at the United States Supreme Court with Justice Clarence Thomas. She later served as Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and from 2005 to 2006 as Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to President George W. Bush.

In 2006 Ms. Rao joined the faculty at the George Mason University Law School, where she distinguished herself as a legal scholar with a focus on administrative law. She founded and was the first director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State and was a driving force behind George Mason’s 2016 decision to name its law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.