RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/democrats-forgot-to-begin-with-the-end-in-mind/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

On the menu today: With Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander declaring, “there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense,” the Senate’s impeachment trial might be wrapping up as soon as today. If impeachment is indeed coming to a close, it’s time to focus on a strangely unasked question in much of this: Whom were the House impeachment managers trying to persuade? And did they seem like a group that was primarily focused on changing the minds of Republican senators?

Were the House Impeachment Managers Even Trying to Persuade GOP Senators?

In Steven Covey’s bestselling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, his second habit is to “begin with the end in mind,” which means to “begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination.”

In all likelihood, reaching 67 votes in the Senate to support the removal of the president was probably impossible. House impeachment managers had to try to convince, at minimum, 20 Republican senators to vote to remove. This means that targeting their message to persuade a rebellious senator such as Lisa Murkowski wasn’t enough. The message would have to be designed to persuade senators right in the middle of the GOP caucus who usually vote with the president and who have no inherent desire to see him removed from office. House impeachment managers were asking Republican senators to sign off on something that had never happened in 230 years. (George Washington took the oath of office to be president in 1789.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/there-is-no-strict-legal-test-of-impeachment/

It’s an eye test, a political determination, and even great lawyers trip up when they frame it as a legal question.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re a lawyer, particularly a constitutional scholar and criminal-defense practitioner of Alan Dershowitz’s caliber, everything looks like a legal problem.

Not everything is. Impeachment is not. Not principally.

Professor Dershowitz, for whom I have great respect, got a bit carried away in what was otherwise a bravura performance in the well of the Senate on Wednesday night, when he offered a constitutional defense against President Trump’s impeachment. As will be clear momentarily, I have never agreed with Dershowitz’s impeachment theory. Yet the excerpt of his argument at the Senate trial that has critics up in arms was a case of misspeaking; it was not an outrage that would effectively turn the president into a dictator.

I believe Dershowitz was trying to make the uncontroversial point that executive acts a president subjectively believes are in the national interest do not become impeachable just because the president simultaneously believes such acts will help him politically. But Dersh garbled the point — which also occasionally happens, even to those of us who are not 81 and lack the professor’s vigor. Taken out of the context of his broader argument, he could be misunderstood as having asserted that, if a president believed his own reelection was in the national interest, no executive act he took in furtherance of being reelected could be impeachable.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/chief-justice-roberts-blocks-question-from-sen-paul-about-ciaramella-allows-question-about-schiff-staffer/

For the second day in a row, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to read a question submitted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that mentioned the name of Eric Ciaramella, the alleged “whistleblower” at the center of the case who was outed by RealClearInvestigations.

Senators have been submitting questions to Roberts who asks them on behalf of the senators. The legal team and impeachment managers each have five minutes to respond to each question. On Wednesday, Roberts blocked Paul from posing a question that would have named the alleged whistleblower, as well.

After receiving Paul’s question card, Thursday afternoon, Roberts said, “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The Chief Justice did not explain why he rejected the question, which did not identify Ciaramella as the whistleblower.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/misuse-of-whistleblower-law-created-impeachment-farce_3222948.html

Who is the whistleblower, the man or woman who launched a thousand Schiffs?

Okay, bad joke. In any case, anyone with the slightest interest already knows who he or she is, although some pretend they don’t, like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts and the very Adam Schiff.

Nevertheless his (let’s be at least that honest) identity is being hidden because that is allegedly required by the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. It’s unclear whether that is true.

But let’s be honest a second time. Congress (if it’s still awake) and legal scholars should look immediately into revising the Whistleblower Protection Act because it appears to have been turned on its head and used as a weapon for some of the most despicable behavior in American history. Something’s drastically wrong with its language that it could be exploited that way.

The misuse of this act is the proximate cause of the embarrassing impeachment charade that has been numbing minds across our republic for weeks, almost always ignoring the sublime and going straight to the ultra-ridiculous—Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar debating the law with Alan Dershowitz on “The View.”

America deserves to know how [name redacted] was able to manipulate this law for such egregious ends, who manipulated it with him (was it the inspector general? Schiff personnel? Schiff himself? Others?), and when did it start? That last may take us way back into 2015-2016, back to the days of the Steele dossier. So many things are connected now.

We need to know the answer. Was [name redacted] really a whistleblower or just another low rent, stomach-turning political operative, the kind of people who—while assuming they know better than the rest of us—are like termites undermining the fabric of our republic?