The Hill:

President Biden on Tuesday hosted a White House celebration to mark the passage of the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act against an unhappy backdrop:  a tumbling stock market that fell on the news that consumer prices rose in August.

Biden, in remarks to a crowd of more than 1,000 people, called the bill the “single most important legislation passed in the Congress to combat inflation, and one of the most significant laws in our nation’s history, in my view.” …

But the party-like atmosphere masked the reality that Biden must still manage a precarious economy that threatens his positive message heading into the midterms.

The consumer price index (CPI), a closely watched gauge of inflation, rose 0.1 percent in August after staying flat in July, according to data released Tuesday by the Labor Department.

Economists expected the steady decline in gas prices throughout last month to lead to a 0.1 percent decline in monthly inflation, but prices for food, electricity and other products kept rising.

The worse than expected inflation numbers sent the stock market tumbling. The Dow Jones dropped more than 1,200 points, while the S&P 500 had its worst day since June 2020.

Inflation has for months been a thorn in the side of Biden and Democrats, providing fodder for Republican attacks and sinking Biden’s approval ratings. But with the passage of the $740 Inflation Reduction Act with all Democratic votes and months of falling gas prices, Biden and his party have finally felt like they can run on good economic news.

Paul Mirengott:

I would think that anyone for whom abortion rights is a key issue already votes for Democrats.

Speaking of polls, Sarah Weaver:

Nicole Silverio demonstrates that Joe Biden isn’t the only Democrat who believes those who don’t vote for Democrats are enemies of the(ir) country:

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Sunday that 9/11 reminds Americans to fight “extremism” amid the White House’s attacks on “MAGA Republicans.”

Clinton told CNN host Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that the fateful day of September 11, 2001, sends the message of how important it is to fight “extremism” and political violence throughout the country.

“We rebuilt New York, we have done our best to take care of the families that lost so much on that terrible day,” she said. “And we have also, I think, been reminded about how important it is to try to deal with extremism of any kind, especially when it uses violence to try to achieve political and ideological goals. So, I’m one who thinks there are lessons still to be learned from what happened to us on 9/11 that we should be very aware of during this time in our country and the world’s history.”

Clinton credited President Joe Biden for “sounding the alarm” about the posed “threats to our democracy.” She then said she wishes people would back the president in an agenda that “the vast majority of Americans approve of.”

“There’s a small, but very vocal, very powerful, very determined minority who wants to impose their views on all the rest of us and it’s time for everybody, regardless of party, to say ‘no, that’s not who we are as America,’” she said.

Clinton’s words echoed the White House’s repeated claims that supporters of former President Donald Trump and “MAGA [Make America Great Again] Republicans” are “extremists” who pose a threat to American democracy. The president said Trump and “MAGA Republicans” have a philosophy that is almost “semi-fascism” during an Aug. 26 Democratic fundraiser in Maryland.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called on the president to apologize for his “semi-fascism” remark. MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during an Aug. 5 interview if the president “owes half the country an apology.” She answered that the president only referred to an extreme faction of Republicans that have tried to take over the party.

Jean-Pierre said “MAGA Republicans” are an “extremist threat to our democracy” with an agenda attempting to take rights away from Americans at an Aug. 31 briefing. She then argued at a Sept. 1 briefing that this faction of the party is extreme for believing in an agenda the majority of the country allegedly disagrees with.

“When you have national Republicans who are leaders in their political party, who sit in office, who say that they want to take away the rights, even in case of incest and in case of rape, and taking away a woman’s right to make a decision on her body,” she said. “That’s extreme, and the president’s going to call that out. He’s going to continue to do everything that he can to make sure that we protect people’s freedoms. He’s going to do everything that he can to call that out. And that is important to call out, that is important to talk about.”

“And again, we see [a] majority of Americans who disagree, and so when you are not with where a majority of Americans are, then that is extreme, that is an extreme way of thinking,” she concluded.

What a disgusting person (I could have used other words, but I’m trying to be polite) Hillary Clinton is. (But you knew that.) The perpetrators of Jan. 6 are 2,987 dead people shy of what the 9/11 terrorists did, and none of the five who died were representatives of Congress. Note as well that the U.S. Capitol building is still there.

This is what Democrats think of Republicans, including those who didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Daniel Henninger:

It is a big advantage for Joe Biden that no one takes him seriously. He spent Labor Day continuing to express animosity toward “MAGA Republicans,” and one’s instinct is to write this off as Joe rousing his party’s base for the midterm elections. It’s much more than that.

This isn’t just Joe or a blowhard Senate majority leader’s pro forma raking of the other side. No matter how feckless one thinks the occupant of the White House is, an American head of state has extraordinary powers to intimidate, investigate and, if desired, prosecute. The power of this office is incomparable. It is a mistake not to take Mr. Biden’s MAGA speeches seriously, no matter how intemperate.

The day after his dark speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden attempted a distinction, saying, “I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” and suggesting he was referring only to those who condone political violence. This is disingenuous. He is obviously casting a wide net.

Millions of quite-normal Americans, who wouldn’t be caught dead invading the U.S. Capitol, consider themselves MAGA Republicans, which in broad terms means they align to some degree with Donald Trump’s policies and opinions while he was president. Mr. Biden can’t use this phrase and insist he is talking only about a minority within the Republican party or American conservatism.

The president’s continued assaults on MAGA Republicans should be properly seen as an attempt both to marginalize the opposition and to intimidate it into submission and silence. The implicit threat in Mr. Biden’s thought-out aggression is that the legal and investigative powers of the state may be deployed against disfavored beliefs.

One of the most significant episodes in the use of state power to intimidate private citizens’ political behavior was the Internal Revenue Service’s investigation during Barack Obama’s first term of small tea-party groups, which organized around the goal of controlling federal spending. Some threat that was.

The IRS’s investigations of 501(c)(4) groups and delays in approving their tax status made a household name out of Lois Lerner, head of the agency’s tax-exempt groups unit. That federal offensive chilled the tea-party movement. With their just passed legislative “victory,” the Democrats and Mr. Biden are creating an army of IRS auditors.

Last October, Mr. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, issued an extraordinary order directing the FBI and U.S. attorneys to investigate “threats of violence” against school administrators and teachers. The order was directly related to parent protests over racial and gender issues in school curriculums in Loudoun County, Va.

Mr. Garland told Congress it wasn’t his intention to intimidate parents. That, too, was disingenuous. A warning shot was sent. How many parents want to risk getting entangled with FBI agents or federal prosecutors?

Much of the Democratic Party elite believes out loud that the Republican Party is totally Trumpian and should be suppressed. “The basket of deplorables” wasn’t an idea unique to Hillary Clinton. Any president presides over a government filled with loyalists, and these appointees gain access to the investigative powers of the federal state.

Mr. Biden is entitled to be peeved at the former president’s quixotic attempts to reverse the 2020 election. But by enlarging his complaint to the MAGA Republicans as a “threat to our democracy,” he is dog-whistling the Lois Lerners in his government’s enforcement agencies that the “Trumpies” are fair game.

In the private sector, the tactic of message-sending came to be known as cancel culture. Corporations, colleges and cultural organizations have exploited the same mismatch between their institutional power and the limited resources of individuals. After someone’s deviation from the new norms, it always begins with official inquiries, with investigations. It nearly always ends with social ostracism and silence.

As to the whatabout Trump issue, Mr. Biden’s MAGA speeches pointedly fail to mention that Govs. Brian Kemp, Doug Ducey, Larry Hogan and numerous other Republicans have opposed Mr. Trump’s election theories, at some political risk. What Democrat in the past two years has spoken against the politicized violence that erupted in cities across the U.S. in the summer of 2020?

Mr. Biden’s rants about restoring limits on political behavior would have a smidgen of respectability if he criticized any of his own, such as the mobs that paraded in front of the homes of all six Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices, an obvious attempt to influence them and thus a violation of federal law. His attorney general did nothing, even after a man was arrested for allegedly trying to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In other words, the president was OK with this show of intimidation.

The siren song of using state power against opponents tempts all politicians, and that includes in a “democracy,” a word Mr. Biden invokes almost as often as MAGA. Mr. Biden achieved his goal of becoming president of the U.S. His MAGA speeches carry an undercurrent of threat inappropriate to his office. He should stop.