RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/state-department-says-nearly-600-security-violations-in-clinton-email-review/

They took their own sweet time about it, but the State Department’s internal investigation into the Hillary Clinton email imbroglio has finally been completed. As you might expect, it was pretty much of a whitewash. The only eyebrow raising news coming from the release is the number of blatant security violations by Clinton and 38 other State Department employees.

Daily Caller:

State Department investigators probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state discovered nearly 600 security incidents that violated agency policy, according to a report the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained.

The investigation, conducted by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, found 38 individuals were culpable for 91 security violations. Another 497 violations were found, but no individuals were found culpable in those incidents.

The investigation concluded Sept. 6, and the report was issued Sept. 13.

No criminal charges, no action whatsoever. It’s like the violations never happened.

Big surprise, huh?

Hillary fared a lot better than others who have mishandled classified information.

https://www.city-journal.org/frick-collection-expansion

Current architectural-alteration plans for the Frick Collection on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—which appear likely to clear their final regulatory hurdle at the end of this month—will cause considerable harm to the finest house museum in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate because the Frick’s superb classical architecture is integral to the experience of its magnificent art collection, consisting largely of Old Master paintings by the likes of Veronese, Rembrandt, van Dyck, and Fragonard.

As part of an expansion of its facilities, which include the 11-floor Frick Art Reference Library building in the northeast corner of its property, the Frick proposes to do away with its Music Room, a fine circular chamber that opens off the building’s Garden Court. Both the room and the court were designed by John Russell Pope in the 1930s. The Frick also proposes to gut the Reception Hall designed by John Barrington Bayley four decades later and to surmount Bayley’s beautiful pavilion housing the hall with a low and recessed—but thoroughly inappropriate—window wall. A new raised roof will make space for a second story on top of the pavilion, where a museum shop will be located, while Pope’s Music Room will be replaced by a special exhibition gallery, rectangular in plan. “Stripped classical” doesn’t do justice to the proposed gallery and new reception hall, which will also replace the Bayley pavilion’s bookshop, lodged behind the existing hall. “Anorexic classical” is more like it. With their dull, blank white walls, these spaces will be as cold as ice, and utterly discordant with the Frick’s architectural character.

The plans have some positive aspects. It will be wonderful for visitors to climb the original mansion’s grand staircase to the second floor, where Pope converted family quarters into museum offices. These will now be used for the exhibition of small paintings, drawings, and works of decorative art. And the Frick has long emphasized its need for a larger auditorium, better conservation facilities, and better accommodations for school groups. But to degrade the existing house museum would be a terrible mistake.

In 1912, Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Clay Frick retained Thomas Hastings, whose New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue had just been completed, to design a home extending from 70th Street to 71st Street and facing Central Park. The Paris-trained Hastings was one of the nation’s foremost exponent of French classicism, the museum’s dominant architectural idiom. The home Hastings designed for Frick was a low-slung mansion built of Indiana limestone whose porte-cochère entrance was set back from 70th Street. The mansion’s exquisitely detailed gallery—100 feet long and 35 feet wide, with walls covered in dark green silk velvet and crowned by a segmental glass vault—fronted on 71st Street.

It has consequences that threaten liberty.

We have a serious governance problem.

Our system is based on separation of powers, because liberty depends on preventing any component of the state from accumulating too much authority — that’s how tyrants are born. For the system to work, the components have to be able to check each other: The federal and state governments must respect their separate spheres, and the branches of the federal government must be able to rein in a branch that oversteps its authority.

The steady federal encroachment on state authority has created an imbalance that probably cannot be rolled back. I want to focus on the collapse of inter-branch checks in the federal government.

This was the issue I dealt with in Faithless Execution. The thesis was that the Framers feared an agglomeration of power in the presidency they were creating, so they endowed Congress with significant checks on the executive. The ultimate one was impeachment. But this was supposed to be reserved for truly abominable misconduct. Though Madison concluded that impeachment was “indispensable” in light of the damage a rogue president could do, it also came with its own set of problems. Not least, impeachment might give Congress too much power over the executive. It might be invoked out of partisan mischief, rather than serious maladministration. Consequently, impeachment was made to be really hard to do.

The Framers were sophisticated men, who saw themselves as both students and victims of executive power run amok (as about two minutes’ perusal of the Declaration of Independence elucidates). They understood that governance would involve tussles between the political branches and episodes of overreach — whether out of incompetence, malevolence, or urgency — for which the extraordinary impeachment remedy would be gross overkill. Routine disputes involving the propensities of both the legislature and the executive to act outside their authorities would be handled by lesser remedies. Congress, most importantly, was given the power of the purse and significant power over executive agencies (to create them, to limit their authority, and, in the Senate’s case, to approve their leaders).

My argument in Faithless Execution was that this system has broken down, with no repairs on the horizon. The Framers naturally thought congressional control of the executive budget would obviate the need to resort to impeachment. Lawmakers could defund dubious executive initiatives and withhold funds necessary to carry out the president’s priorities; this would pressure the executive branch to comply with statutes as well as congressional demands for information and policy modification. The ultimate question of a president’s fitness would be left to the sovereign — the American people, exercising the franchise.