Commentary: The Factors Behind Soaring Car-Insurance Rates and Why You Need Me on Your Side

Conservative: Why Car Insurance Is Soaring

Twitter/X is full of grumbling over the “accelerating cost of auto insurance,” with average hikes of up to 25% “for a product that’s already expensive,” observes City Journal’s Steve Malanga.

One reason: Auto parts are more expensive, partly because firms have been hit with costly Biden-administration regulations and higher energy prices due to “limits on drilling.”

Another: Accidents have soared, as traffic enforcement declined in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd riots.

So as government ratchets up “pressure on legitimate businesses,” making it harder to “keep costs down,” local jurisdictions are “spending less time enforcing” laws, e.g. against drunk driving.

Underlying both trends is an “anti-bourgeois philosophy that seeks to restrain” productive people, while tolerating “activities from others that undermine the social order.”

Libertarian: You Need Me on That Bench

“We rule based on the law,” thunders Arizona Judge Clint Bolick of his profession at AZCentral — thanks to the state’s “judicial merit selection system,” a “crown jewel” that ensures judges can work without political pressure.

Now groups that “call themselves progressive” are working to oust Bolick over a ruling on an abortion law.

But Arizona’s system “is not built to withstand political attacks” since judges can’t campaign.

“Weaponizing” this would be a “disaster.” And those “opposing us need a serious civics lesson about the role of the courts.

Nowhere in their materials will you read about the importance of an independent judiciary in protecting our free society.”

We “need this system. And I will do everything I can to pass it intact to future Arizonans.”

Election watch: Panicky Biden Progressives

“President Joe Biden is trailing, and liberal pundits are increasingly saying he has mainly himself to blame,” smirks W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner.

There are even calls for him to step aside so the party can “replace him with someone who didn’t bother to run in the first place.”

This is “a trend in elite Democratic and liberal opinion that should worry the Biden camp. If this is what people are willing to contemplate with Trump ahead” narrowly now, “what happens if the Democrats lose ground?”

Even now, “the decision to debate suggests Bidenworld has some sense that the incumbent is losing, but outside allies see a five-alarm fire.”

From the right: The ICC’s Gift to Hamas

“Some of the imperious prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (ICC) seem to think” it’s a crime “to defend yourself against fascist violence,” fumes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill.

ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, plus some Hamas leaders.

But to treat Hamas and Israel “as equally suspect” is “to abandon entirely the fundamentals of morality.”

“That the ICC seems unable to distinguish between war and war crimes” and “between the Jewish State and a movement devoted to the mass murder of Jews” is “truly alarming.”

“For Hamas, the annoyance of being looked upon as criminals by the ICC” will be outweighed by the “moral gain of warrants being sought for Netanyahu and Gallant.”

Legal beat: Joe’s Tape Trouble

“Despite releasing the transcripts, the Biden administration has invoked executive privilege to conceal” the tapes of his October interview with special counsel Robert Hur, notes James Burnham in The Wall Street Journal.

Biden claims “that he can assert privilege over the Justice Department’s ‘law enforcement functions.’ ”

But “whatever the application of executive privilege to Justice Department investigations of private citizens, it can’t be used to conceal tapes after transcripts have been released.”

In support of Biden’s novel claim, Attorney General Merrick Garland even embraces then-President Richard Nixon’s “argument in Nixon v. Warner Communications (1978) that the press didn’t have a legal right to obtain tapes that had been admitted into evidence at a trial for some of his former advisers.”

While “the long-term consequences of this gambit are uncertain,” for now “Congress and, if necessary, the courts, must swiftly reject it.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board