RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rand-paul-goes-to-war-if-4-gop-senators-vote-for-new-witnesses-hell-demand-subpoena-for-hunter-biden/

Senator Rand Paul is one of the most interesting figures in the United States Senate. One day, he’ll praise the president for his economic policies, but in the next moment, he’ll aggressively go after Trump over his foreign policy decision. See, for example, Trump’s decision to take out Iranian Terror General Qasem Soleimani.

Some conservative commentators — especially Ben Shapiro — like to talk about “Good Trump, Bad Trump.” Well, we could say the same about Sen. Paul. There’s a Good Rand and a Bad Rand. Today, Good Rand has shown up.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-lefts-great-lie-is-a-pervasive-threat-to-our-culture/

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” wrote George Orwell in a 1943 essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War. “Lies will pass into history.” A truer thing was never said about the current omnipresence of the Lie.

Of course, everybody lies. That the vast majority of politicians lie, almost as a matter of principle, is common knowledge. But I had not grasped until relatively late that the Lie—in majuscule—had become so pervasive that it could be said to constitute a public if unofficial institution. Orwell said that truth had ceased to exist in 1936, an exaggeration made for emphasis, but there is little doubt that it has practically ceased to exist in the political and cultural world we now inhabit. It may be a tenuous or metaphysical distinction to make, but I have come to feel not only that lies are everywhere in the political and cultural world we live in, but that the Lie has become that world. We now live inside the Lie; it is the very air we breathe, the food that sustains us, the verbal milieu we communicate in, the dreams that disturb our sleep, the tastes and fashions we affect, the thoughts we think in our solitary moments. We are like fish who never consider the water they swim in; to leave that element requires something like an evolutionary lung and an amphibian yearning, features that pertain to only a few. This is our current condition.

The issue became clear to me some years back when I was researching The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, a book five years in the writing. Before 9/11, I was solidly in the camp of the left. I read Chomsky with approval, harbored duly anti-American sentiments, commiserated with the Palestinians, marched in thought with Peace Now, subscribed to the appropriate dailies, and agreed with the political slant taken by our major news networks. The sources I relied on were the editorials of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail, the news reports of the BBC, CNN, and the CBC, the pages of The Nation and The New Republic, the popular accounts of American perfidy that crammed the shelves of the major book chains, and, most significantly, the smog of stock conceptions that were “in the air,” pervasive but insubstantial as are all airy things.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/an-impeachment-that-will-last-forever/90976/

Why did the Speaker of the House go before the press to declare that the charges against the president are “an impeachment that will last forever?” Mrs. Pelosi used the phrase just before sending the charges over to the Senate. She was flanked by the two key managers who will prosecute the case, Congressmen Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, who showed no emotion. Yet the more we rolled her phrasing over in our mind, the more it struck us as peculiar — off — and even an abuse.

For, at least to us, Mrs. Pelosi spoke as if she doubts her impeachment managers can win a conviction. What she was saying was that she comprehends she is likely to lose but is proceeding anyhow for the purpose of marking the President’s reputation and tarnishing his legacy (and damaging his election chances 10 months hence). She mightn’t gain a conviction, she seemed to be saying, but it is enough to make the charge. The charges themselves will last forever.

Even, the Speaker was suggesting, if there is an acquittal. And that is something to think about. It sent us back to our dog-eared copy of Robert Jackson’s famous speech called “The Federal Prosecutor.” The future Supreme Court justice was attorney general when he delivered his remarks to a gathering of United States attorneys. His aim was to mark for them the need for humility, objectivity, fairness, and decency. And warn of the lurking temptation to abuse of power.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-trial-framers-andrew-mccarthy

“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.” That is the reasoning of the Government Accounting Office, which has just concluded that President Trump’s budget office violated federal law in freezing U.S. aid to Ukraine.

It certainly would have been nice to hear this from the GAO when President Obama was imposing his own immigration policy priorities by executive edict and as a substitute for contrary priorities Congress had enacted into law.

In any event, the finding is in an eight-page report by which the reputedly non-partisan CBO has plunged itself headlong into the deeply partisan impeachment controversy just hours before the Senate impeachment trial is to commence (at least ceremonially; the substantive commencement of the trial will occur next Tuesday).

So … what is the upshot? Are Democrats preparing the ground for another article of impeachment? Obviously, the law that President Trump is said to have violated is not a criminal statute. And it is simply not true that the president never has the authority to countermand a congressional statute prescribing foreign aid; Article II of the Constitution gives the president nigh plenary power over the conduct of foreign relations; and other congressional statutes (such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act) confer sweeping power on the president to regulate foreign commerce if the nation is under threat or in a state of emergency.