RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/10/16/ever-wonder-about-the

How is 97 percent of Congress able to get re-elected each year even though only 17 percent of the American people believe our representatives are doing a good job?

It’s called an incumbent protection system. Taxpayers have a right to know how it works.

Recently, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, mashed up the federal checkbook with the congressional campaign donor database (source: OpenSecrets.org). We found powerful members of Congress soliciting campaign donations from federal contractors based in their districts.

We followed the money and found a culture of conflict-of-interest. The confluence of federal money, campaign cash, private employment, investments, prestigious committee appointments, political power, nepotism, and other conflicts are a fact pattern.

Furthermore, members of Congress own investment stock in, are employed by, and receive retirement pensions from federal contractors to whom they direct billions of taxpayer dollars.

Moreover, members sponsor legislation that affects these contractors. The contractor’s lobbyists then advocate for the legislation that helps the member and the contractor. Oftentimes, the contractor’s lobbyist also donates campaign cash to the member.

Here are five case examples detailing the conflict-of-interest among five powerful members of Congress:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/18/adam-schiffs-impeachment-witness-tampering/

The House Intelligence Committee chairman has lied with impunity to the American public and to Congress. Now he’s running a secret inquiry, withholding evidence from colleagues, and may have coached the “whistleblower” behind Ukraine-gate.

House Republicans on Monday will attempt to force a vote to censure Representative Adam Schiff (D.-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The resolution, authored by Rep. Andy Biggs (R.-Ariz.), has 170 Republican co-sponsors. (It’s unclear why the remaining 27 GOP congressmen have not signed on.)

The motion condemns Schiff for actions that “misled the American people, bring disrepute upon the House of Representatives, and make a mockery of the impeachment process, one of this chamber’s most solemn constitutional duties.” It lists several specific offenses, including Schiff’s repeated claims that he possessed solid evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and his intentional misrepresentation of the July phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

If Schiff were a Republican, his own colleagues would have dispatched him long ago. Compare the way Schiff’s caucus is condoning his misdeeds with the way House Republicans in 2017 signed on to a bogus House ethics inquiry into Rep. Devin Nunes (R.-Calif.), sidelining his nascent investigation into the corrupt origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe for eight crucial months. (He was cleared of any wrongdoing.)

Schiff has lied with impunity to the American public and to Congress. He is suspected of leaking nonpublic, and in some instances, classified material to the press.

At the same time, Schiff is denying access to his secret impeachment proceedings and withholding information from House members. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee sent a letter to Schiff on Friday, accusing him of failing to furnish documents related to his “impeachment inquiry,” a clear violation of House rules. Yet Schiff remains a media darling and a hero of #TheResistance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/schiff_caught_tampering_with_another_witness.html

Adam Schiff is at it again, tampering with witnesses.

Yesterday, he got caught trying to shove words into a witness’s mouth, to make him say things he didn’t want to say. I wrote about that here.

Today, he’s doing something just as bad, getting together with other witnesses and working out a pre-coordinated story for the coming show trial.

According to Breitbart News:

Itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council think tank reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, now a key witness for Democrats pursuing impeachment.

The Atlantic Council is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Taylor has been called by House Democrats to appear next week to provide a deposition as part of the investigation being led by Schiff into President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Against precedent, and under the cover of secrecy, he’s holding hearings to impeach President Trump, loudly stating that he’s doing it secretly to make sure the Trump-linked witnesses don’t coordinate to get their stories straight.

https://nypost.com/2019/10/16/pelosis-impeachment-drive-is-all-politics-no-law/

President Trump won’t budge: He refuses to comply with demands for information because the House has not formally voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry.

House Democrats won’t budge: Speaker Nancy Pelosi says nothing requires the House to vote for an impeachment inquiry before conducting one.

So who is right? They both are.

We are an over-lawyered society that likes to see itself as governed by the rule of law. In truth, our fundamental law, the Constitution, is about the division of political authority — particularly between the Congress and the executive, the federal government’s political branches.

The ultimate check on presidential power is impeachment. Article I vests the sole power over impeachment in the House of Representatives. (The Senate is assigned the sole power to conduct impeachment trials and decide whether the president should be removed from office.)

Often overlooked, though, is a critical constitutional check on Congress: It is powerless to enforce its own laws and demands for information. Only the president can execute. Congress needs the executive branch’s cooperation.

When presidents believe congressional actions are unconstitutional, they often refuse to cooperate. Congress may threaten contempt and impeachment, but it cannot make the president comply. Our brows furrow as we try to sort out the legal ramifications of all this. But in the main, the fallout is not a legal dispute; it is a political contest.

The Constitution is designed to promote both cooperation and competition between the political branches. Often, the judiciary stays out of these duels, prudently reasoning that the Framers endowed the executive and the legislature with powerful tools to confront each other.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/william-barr-remarks-notre-dame-decline-religiosity/

He singled out for criticism those who believe that, in effect, government social programs could replace the virtues instilled by religion.

Attorney General William Barr finds himself the target of criticism for remarks he made at the University of Notre Dame in which he made the case that a decline in religiosity — and, indeed, attacks on the beliefs of the religious — might have something to do with personal and social dysfunction in the United States.

For this — and his expressed view that “militant secularists” might actually prefer to replace the “traditional moral order” — Barr stands accused of endorsing some sort of Christian theocracy.

Barr, of course, hardly endorsed the idea the church–state divide should be erased in the United States. Nor did he insist that only the religious could live a healthy and productive life. Rather, he singled out for criticism those who believe that, in effect, government social programs could replace the virtues instilled by religion. It’s an important distinction. Since the New Deal, and increasingly since the Great Society, we have done exactly what Barr asserted: We have “called on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility . . .”

One tends to think in this regard of financial social-safety-net programs — the social-welfare state. But much more is involved in what might be termed the social-service state — the huge constellation of social-service “providers” who claim they can use counseling techniques to improve the lives of the addicted, the promiscuous, the domestic abusers. The distribution of federal funds to these not-for-profit organizations has, as Barr suggested, reflected a dramatic shift in values.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/17/why-it-matters-that-sidney-powell-wants-data-from-joseph-mifsuds-smartphones/

While Sidney Powell’s latest motion barely comprised two pages, the implications are multi-pronged and monumental.

On Tuesday, attorney Sidney Powell struck again, revealing yet another huge development in the Spygate saga between the lines of her latest motion. That motion, filed in the still-pending criminal case against Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, demanded exculpatory evidence from federal prosecutors.

But unlike her previously filed motion to compel, here Powell seeks evidence “that has only recently come into its possession.” And the evidence sought? The data and metadata from two Blackberry devices used by Joseph Mifsud.

While Powell’s latest motion barely equaled two pages, the implications are multi-pronged and monumental.

That the U.S. government has only recently obtained possession of a pair of smartphones used by Joseph Mifsud tells us two things: that Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia-collusion hoax is both serious and successful, and that the Crossfire Hurricane targeting of President Trump and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were neither.

After all, Mifsud was the man whose tip to young Trump volunteer advisor George Papadopoulos, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, supposedly formed the basis for the FBI to launch Crossfire Hurricane’s targeting of the Trump campaign in late July 2016. Yet no one bothered to interview Mifsud until six months later, when he traveled to D.C. to speak at a conference sponsored by the State Department.

And then the FBI let him go, later blaming Papadopoulos for their inability to properly question the purported Russian agent. Mueller seemed equally uninterested in Mifsud—a strange position to take toward a putative enemy agent.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/a_texas_mayor_defends_the_constitution_from_sharia_law.html

Time and again in every election we see politicians promise everything, and once elected deliver very little or nothing. Beth Van Duyne is a welcome exception and her past record clearly proves it. A person of impeccable integrity, Beth has always remained loyal to the values and wishes of her constituents and has not compromised them on the altar of political expediency so widely practiced by self-promoting politicians. A devoted mother beaming with energy and the talent to get things done, Beth is indeed the kind of person the US Congress desperately needs.

Under Beth’s leadership as a Mayor of Irving, TX, the city became one of the best and safest towns in the great state of Texas. Beth Van Duyne’s achievements attracted the attention of President Trump’s administration and accepted to serve, this time, at the national level in the Department of Housing and Urban Development Office in Fort Worth.

City of Irving Islamic Tribunal

Van Duyne’s reputation soared outside her city since February 2015, when she became aware that some Muslims intended to create a Sharia court in Irving, TX. To follow with her oath of office, she wanted to make sure if in fact, these stories were accurate.  

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/16/morning-greatness-pelosi-says-there-will-be-no-impeachment-inquiry-vote/

THERE WILL BE NO VOTE

When I watch Pelosi’s highly-choreographed press conferences, I get the feeling she’s trying to convince herself of her righteousness just as much as she is trying to get the public to buy in to the Democrats’ plan.

“There’s no requirement that we have a vote, and so at this time we will not be having a vote,” Pelosi said. “We’re not here to call bluffs — we’re here to find the truth, to uphold the Constitution of the United States. This is not a game for us. This is deadly serious.”

How serious? As serious as the reasons the Democrats needed to impeach Trump after the sensational Mueller Report was released? What happened to those reasons because we were told those were DEADLY serious too.

There will be no vote, not because of any principles, but because Pelosi doesn’t want to put her vulnerable members on the record and she may not have the votes. Why hold a vote that could threaten her majority when there’s no downside and she will not be held accountable with negative media coverage for breaking from the norms and traditions of impeachment. (Why is Trump so dangerous for “breaking norms” but Pelosi’s norm-breaking is glossed right over?) Her clown Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) will continue to leak strategic information to the media to help damage the president and ignore the fact that, despite chest thumping about the seriousness of manufactured charges, this is entirely hidden from the public . There is no downside for the Democrats to hold a secret, hidden tribunal to impeach the elected President of the United States. It’s that simple and that’s why it is happening.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/mark-meadows-calls-for-adam-schiff-whistleblower-testify

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., must call the initial Trump-Ukraine whistleblower to testify, according to Rep. Mark Meadows.

“Obviously, tonight, Nancy Pelosi decided to not put a resolution on the floor which would hopefully start the process of it being fair,” Meadows claimed Tuesday on “Hannity.”

“Jim [Jordan] and I have been now in over 40 hours of deposition and what we’re finding is that Adam Schiff only wants to have witnesses who will give the response that he hopes they will give — and even at that it’s a swing and a miss.”

Pointing to reporting earlier this month that the whistleblower allegedly had contact with Schiff’s staff prior to filing his complaint, Meadows said that individual must answer for those claims.