RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—Senate Republicans voted to end the filibuster of Supreme Court nominations Thursday, setting the stage for the rapid elevation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the high court and removing a pillar of the minority party’s power to exert influence in the chamber.

Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation by the Senate, expected Friday, would return the Supreme Court to full strength for the first time in 14 months, since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of last year. It means Judge Gorsuch could be a key vote on coming cases, including the high court’s possible consideration of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on immigration and visas.
The confirmation would also give the president a much-needed win, after setbacks in recent weeks on a health-care bill and the immigration order, as well as shake-ups and dissension among the White House staff. It would allow Mr. Trump to quickly put his stamp on the high court, replacing one conservative justice with another and keeping a promise to conservative activists that he made during the presidential campaign.

The battle’s aftermath appears less positive for the Senate, where it became unusually personal.

Democrats successfully pressured House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Thursday to recuse himself from that committee’s Russia probe. This is how today’s Washington thanks Members who do their jobs.

Officially, Mr. Nunes stepped aside after the House Committee on Ethics said he was under investigation for accusations that he disclosed classified information. This followed complaints filed by progressive groups to the separate Office of Congressional Ethics (a Nancy Pelosi creation) claiming Mr. Nunes broke the law when he announced he’d seen reports proving the Obama White House received intelligence about Trump transition officials and unmasked at least one identity.

Mr. Nunes’s real offense is believing he should investigate both sides of the Russia story—whether the Trump team colluded with the Russians, and the equally important question of whether Obama officials were snooping on their political opponents. Mr. Nunes had brought the role of Mr. Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice into the light.

It is ironic that Mr. Nunes’s carefully worded press briefing was done in part to root out the real scandal of who in the Obama Administration gave the media the unmasked name and classified conversations of Donald Trump’s first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn.

The House Ethics Committee will make the final call on whether Mr. Nunes inappropriately discussed classified information. Democrats failed in their primary goal of stripping Mr. Nunes of his chairmanship. While he retains the rest of his Intelligence Committee duties, the Russia probe is now taken over by Michael Conaway (Texas), Trey Gowdy (South Carolina) and Tom Rooney (Florida).

This trio has a duty to finish what Mr. Nunes started. That means getting to the bottom of both internal snooping on U.S. citizens and any Trump-Russia ties.

The Trump trade isn’t dead yet. While the wheels of legislation turn slowly in Washington, the real economy continues to send encouraging signals about the potential for robust growth. And workers are enjoying higher wages. The National Federation of Independent Business report on hiring at small firms, due out later today, will show an average seasonally adjusted increase of 0.16 workers per firm. NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg calls this “a solid showing.”

The report contains more good news for workers at small businesses. Not only are more of them employed, but they’re making more money. Mr. Dunkelberg writes in a draft of today’s release: “The net percent of owners reporting that they raised worker compensation remained at the highest levels observed since when 64.7 percent of the adult population was working (compared to about 60 percent today after being stuck in the 58 percent range from 2009 to 2014). Owners then and now are increasing compensation to attract and/or hold critical employees.”

Let’s hope that this demand from employers pulls more discouraged Americans back into the workforce. Small businesses will be needing them, according to another NFIB finding. A seasonally adjusted net 16% of small businesses plan to create new jobs, “up 1 point and a very strong reading,” writes Mr. Dunkelberg.

Based on these encouraging data, Mr. Dunkelberg expects an increase of more than 200,000 jobs when the U.S. Department of Labor issues its March employment report for the whole economy on Friday morning.

This is solid but not spectacular job growth. Such a monthly reading was cause for celebration during the dreary Obama era, and the “secular stagnation” crowd figures this is about as good as it gets. But it’s not. While today’s NFIB report is encouraging, it’s also a reminder that if Mr. Trump and U.S. workers want Reagan-style growth, the economy still needs Reagan-style tax cuts.

President Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is heading for a final showdown Friday, in what is emerging as likely the most high-stakes partisan battle yet during the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

On Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the selection by a party-line vote of 11-9, and sent the nomination to the full Senate floor for final action. The Democrats have decided to launch a filibuster in an effort to block the Gorsuch nomination from receiving an up-or-down vote. Democrat Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declared Sunday, “We call it the 60 vote standard,” to ensure that “you get a mainstream justice.” Of course, there is no such “standard.” Justices who received less than 60 votes in the past were still confirmed. And the fact that Judge Gorsuch voted 99 percent of the time with the other judges on his federal appeals court means nothing to the ideologues who oppose him. For the Left, “mainstream” means only a judge’s willingness to bend the Constitution to suit the progressives’ social justice agenda.

The Democrats appear to have lined up enough votes to make their filibuster stick, placing them on a collision clause with the Republican majority. If the Democrats do not budge, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) is on course to lead his party majority to adopt the so-called “nuclear option” and change the Senate rules, eliminating the 60 vote filibuster barrier for Supreme Court nominations. A simple majority can then proceed on an up-or-down vote to confirm Judge Gorsuch. In addition to the 52 Republicans voting in favor, 3 Democrats so far have also indicated their intention to vote for Judge Gorsuch – Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. A fourth Democrat, Michael Bennet of Colorado, said he would not vote to support the filibuster.

The Democrats’ desperate gambit will not succeed. “What I’m telling you is that Judge Gorsuch is going to be confirmed,” said Senator McConnell on Sunday. “The way in which that occurs is in the hands of the Democratic minority.”

The Democrats conveniently ignore the fact that Republicans did not stand in the way of former President Barack Obama’s first two choices for Supreme Court seats – Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Instead, like spoiled brats, the Democrats are still sore that the Republicans would not consider Obama’s choice of Judge Merrick Garland during Obama’s last year in office, with a presidential election looming. They wanted to preemptively change the ideological balance of the Supreme Court by giving the seat of conservative originalist Scalia to a liberal replacement, without giving the voters a chance to weigh in first. More than a year later, they are taking out their wrath on President Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, justifying their obstructionism with the bogus claim that the seat Judge Gorsuch would be filling was “stolen” from them.

On Tuesday, in a National Review Online column, I contended that the reported involvement of former national-security adviser Susan Rice in the unmasking of Trump officials appears to be a major scandal — it suggests that the Obama White House, of which she was a high-ranking staffer, abused the power to collect intelligence on foreign targets, by using it to spy on the opposition party and its presidential candidate.

It should come as no surprise that the defense Ms. Rice and Obama apologists are mounting is heavily reliant on a fact that is not in dispute: viz., that the intelligence collection at issue was legal.

I anticipated that line of argument a week ago. The issue is not technical legality, it is monumental abuse of power.

To analogize, if a judge imposed a 20-year jail term on a man for passing a marijuana cigarette to a second man, the sentence would be perfectly legal — a distribution of a Schedule I narcotic drug controlled substance calls for a sentence of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, see 21 U.S.C. §841(b)(1)(C). Nevertheless, the sentence would also be an outrageous abuse of judicial power. A judge who did such a thing would be unfit — worthy of condemnation, if not impeachment.

Abuses of power are offenses against the public trust. They often overlap with a criminal offense, but they are not the same thing as a criminal offense. For example, a politician who accepts money in exchange for political favors commits both the crime of bribery and an impeachable offense of corruption. The jurors in the bribery case need not find that the politician breached his public trust; they need only find an intentional quid pro quo — payoff in exchange for favor. By contrast, the breach of public trust is central to the impeachment case: To remove the pol from office, there would be no need to prove the legal elements of a criminal bribery charge beyond a reasonable doubt, but it would have to be demonstrated that the politician is unfit for office. If it is a petty bribe, a prosecutor might ignore it, but the public should want to throw the bum out.

This is why a “high crime and misdemeanor” — the constitutional standard for impeachment — need not be an indictable criminal offense. It may be a chargeable crime, but it need not be one.

A famous example (though one not much remarked on during the last several years) is the second article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. It alleged (my italics):

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purpose[s] of these agencies.

One hundred years ago on April 6, the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I. It was an event that changed America, and the world, forever.

America’s entry into that war was the result of the dream of one man, President Woodrow Wilson. In the light of America’s experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it’s easy to retrospectively dismiss our participation in World War I as the first egregious exercise in Wilsonianism — an act of high-minded liberal idealism and moralism leading to disaster rather than redemption.

Yet seeing this centennial exclusively through that lens is a mistake. Whatever else it was, America’s role in what was then the world’s bloodiest and most destructive war signaled the emergence of the U.S. as the arbiter of a new world order, one that would be built around America’s economic strength, military power, and moral authority as promoter and defender of democracy and freedom. Assuming that role and burden has caused the U.S. a good deal of trouble and brought considerable cost, much of it in human lives — but far less cost, one has to argue, than if the U.S. had stayed out of World War I and evaded a responsibility we still carry today, however reluctantly: that of the superpower of freedom.

It’s worth remembering how we got into the war in the first place. America, and President Wilson, had worked hard to stay out of the conflict that had broken out in the summer of 1914, pitting France, Britain, Italy, and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. In just two and half years, it had all but consumed the heart of Europe, leaving more than 10 million dead and pushing three long-lasting empires — Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov — to the brink of dissolution.

Wilson’s personal view had been that staying out of war meant preserving America’s role as the beacon of the future, of a peaceful and harmonious world in which war would be a thing of the past — and even possibly negotiating a final peace once the combatants finally exhausted themselves.

But Imperial Germany was unwilling to leave America alone. It knew that although America was officially neutral, the Allies were steadily buying from U.S. factories the food and other supplies they needed to stay in the war. Germany’s resumption of all-out submarine warfare in February 1917 aimed at sinking neutral shipping (it had been suspended after Wilson’s protest over the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, which killed 128 Americans) was meant to sever the transatlantic supply line between America and Britain. German experts figured that cutting this supply line would lead to German victory in six months, regardless of what Wilson did in response to German torpedoes’ killing more Americans.

In case the Americans did take military action, however, Germany came up with another plan, one that proved to be disastrous: offering to give Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico, if Mexico joined with Germany in opening a second front on America’s southern border. The gist of that plan was contained in a telegram that was intercepted by British naval intelligence and passed on to Wilson; that telegram, and the sinking of three American vessels in three days in late March, finally tipped Wilson’s hand. The man whose reelection campaign slogan in 1916 had been “He kept us out of war” now asked Congress on April 2 to enter that war, by declaring war on Germany. Four days later, Congress enthusiastically agreed.