RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Hensarling, a Texas Republican, (District 5)is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

The Obama presidency placed no greater burden on America’s growth potential than the avalanche of regulations that smother the U.S. economic system. The most destructive and dangerous of the new regulatory bureaucracies created by the Democrat-dominated 111th Congress is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The CFPB stands with ObamaCare as a crowning “achievement” of Mr. Obama’s transformation of America. With unprecedented automatic funding provided directly by the Federal Reserve, the agency is unanswerable to anyone. Democrats chose to insulate it from Congress, the president, voters and the democratic process. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia noted as much in its recent PHH v. CFPB decision, which ruled the bureau’s governing structure unconstitutional. The court said the unelected CFPB director “enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of government of the U.S. Government, other than the President.”

The CFPB is arguably the most powerful, least accountable agency in U.S. history. CFPB zealots have the power to determine the “fairness” of virtually every financial transaction in America. The agency defines its own powers and can launch investigations without cause, imposing virtually any fine or remedy, devoid of due process. It requires lenders essentially to read their clients’ minds, know and weigh their clients’ comprehension levels, and forecast future risk. It can compel the production of reams of data and employ methodologies that “infer” harm without finding any specific instance of harm or knowing violation.

The regulatory web spun by the CFPB can make every provider of financial services guilty until proven innocent, inviting selective enforcement and financial shakedowns. The CFPB is the embodiment of James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

This tyranny has harmed the very consumers it purports to help. Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically declined, while many bank fees have increased. Mortgage originations and auto loans have become more expensive for many Americans.

No corner of American finance is beyond the CFPB’s grasp, even auto dealers—which are specifically excluded from its jurisdiction by the Dodd-Frank Act. To dodge this legal constraint, the CFPB regulates auto dealers through enforcement “bulletins” on auto lenders, employing statistical analysis rather than specific acts to charge lenders with discriminatory lending. The race of borrowers is inferred based on the borrowers’ names and home addresses. Through this ruse they smear and shake down lenders.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-non-silence-of-elizabeth-warren-1486598042

The activist base of the Democratic Party is demanding rage and resistance to Donald Trump and all his works, and Senate Democrats are listening. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General Wednesday on a party-line vote, though not without more pointless melodrama and the informal launch of Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The Massachusetts progressive’s latest diatribe against her fellow Senator Sessions was interrupted after she repeatedly violated Senate Rule XIX, which prohibits members from besmirching the character and motives of their colleagues. After warnings that she ignored and a Republican motion, the Senate rebuked Ms. Warren 49-43. As a result, she lost her privileges to participate in the rest of the AG debate.

Ms. Warren is now claiming she was “silenced,” which is true if she means the Senate floor for an interval lasting fewer than 24 hours. It is not true if she’s talking about the Facebook Live video she taped outside the Senate chamber on Tuesday night, her live call-in to Rachel Maddow’s prime-time television show, her sundry media appearances on Wednesday or her fundraising emails off the incident.

“This is not what America is about—silencing speech,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday, shortly after Ms. Warren announced an April publication date for her new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight.” For a martyr to censorship, she’s remarkably prolific.

Social media are overflowing with memes featuring the likes of Rosa Parks,Harriet Tubman and various suffragettes along with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment about the Senate sanction: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Likening one of the most powerful people in the world to an underground-railroad conductor may be a tad histrionic, but you be the judge.

HRH Warren isn’t a victim, even if she enjoys feeling she is, and Republicans aren’t trying to get her to “shut up,” as if that’s possible. She knowingly broke protocol and said Mr. Sessions was “racist” and prosecuting “a campaign of bigotry,” among other gross, false and personal insults that Democrats now feel entitled to hurl. Our guess is that Ms. Warren wanted to be punished so she could play out this political theater.

A question for Republicans is whether Mr. McConnell enhanced the Warren brand by responding to her provocations in this way. She already has a formidable platform but the story dominated Wednesday’s news. Then again, sooner or later Mr. McConnell had to send a signal that Senate rules can’t be violated with impunity.

The larger context is that Democrats have slowed Senate confirmation of President Trump’s cabinet to the slowest pace since Eisenhower, and by some measures since the 19th century. Though they lack the votes to defeat anyone, they’ve boycotted hearings, maxed out debate time, denied routine courtesies and delayed procedural votes.

New Jersey’s Cory Booker even testified against Mr. Sessions, which no Senator had felt to do against a colleague since Congress was formed in 1789—a period that includes the Civil War and two world wars.

The smear surge against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is certain to sweep in a tide of lies. That was the case thirty years ago in the 1987 hearing for Robert Bork, Supreme Court nominee of President Ronald Reagan. The smearer-in-chief was Senator Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and something of a poseur.

His chief claim to fame was brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who narrowly defeated Richard Nixon for president in 1960. Ted rode the JFK coattails to a Senate seat in 1962 but his self-control issues soon plunged him into trouble.

On July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. Kennedy escaped unharmed but abandoned 28-year-old passenger Mary Jo Kopechne in the car, where the young woman perished. In Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up, Leo Damore showed how the Kennedy family deployed their influence to quash investigations of the incident and shield Ted from accountability.

JFK’s brother got only a two-year suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident and in 1970 was reelected to the U.S. Senate. There he became an object of derision even to liberals.

“Every image that the Democrats have to overcome – that they overtax the Middle Americans, try to meet social problems only with a proliferation of programs, are the junior partners of vociferous but marginal interest groups, look too carelessly at the credentials of the Third World movements and leaders, and neglect the security of the nation and of the free world – is kept alive by this buffoon.” That was Henry Fairlie in a 1987 New Republic piece headlined, “Hamalot: The Democratic Buffoon-in-Chief.”

As it later emerged, Ted Kennedy was also a pioneer in seeking the influence of hostile foreign powers in the American electoral process. In 1984 Sen. Ted Kennedy sought help from the Soviet Union, then headed by the KGB’s Yuri Andropov, an old-line Stalinist. Kennedy offered to lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet boss would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

The gambit failed, and Reagan won in a landslide over both the Democrats’ Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and Communist Party USA candidates Gus Hall and Angela Davis. In 1987, Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court was Robert Bork, solicitor general during the Nixon administration, a professor at Yale Law School, and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. With this highly qualified candidate, who was also a good man, Ted Kennedy took the low road.

A variety of groups ascribe to the Islamist objective of imposing their politicized beliefs on others. Included in these are ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir. However, the largest and best organized of all the Islamist groups is the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the well-spring from which the Islamist ideology flows.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, stated that “It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

A bill, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz, to have the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a terrorist group would have far-reaching impact, and be the single greatest blow stuck against Islamist extremism in the USA.

The Muslim Brotherhood operating in the U.S. made it clear that “their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The North Atlantic Islamic Trust, according to former FBI Agent Robert Stauffer, “served as a financial holding company for Muslim Brotherhood-related groups.” This money was wired into the U.S. from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Egypt, Malaysia and Libya.

Muslims living in the United States likely have little to fear from the Trump Administration and the 115th Congress. By contrast, Islamists living in the United States have grounds to be worried.

A bill introduced by Senator Ted Cruz to have the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a terrorist group could have far-reaching implications, many of which have received little public attention. The bill, if acted upon, would be the single greatest blow stuck against Islamist extremism in the USA. It would also have far reaching impact in Canada and elsewhere.

Islamists are those who have the desire to “impose any interpretation of Islam over society by law.” A variety of groups ascribe to the Islamist objective of imposing their politicized beliefs on others. Included in these are ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir. However, the largest and best organized of all the Islamist groups is the Muslim Brotherhood. They are the well-spring from which the Islamist ideology flows. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, stated that “It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

One political trope of modern judicial politics is to declare a conservative nominee “out of the mainstream.” The line is never applied to progressive nominees because to the media the mainstream is by definition progressive. Expect to hear more of this about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, albeit without evidence to back it up.

According to an analysis by Jeff Harris at Kirkland & Ellis, Judge Gorsuch has written some 800 opinions since joining the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006. Only 1.75% (14 opinions) drew dissents from his colleagues. That makes 98% of his opinions unanimous even on a circuit where seven of the 12 active judges were appointed by Democratic Presidents and five by Republicans. Add the senior judges, who hear fewer cases, and the circuit has 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats.

Judge Gorsuch is known on the Tenth Circuit as a strong writer and consensus builder, and the pattern extends to his participation in opinions by other judges. Judge Gorsuch has heard roughly 2,700 cases and dissented in only 35—1.3%.

Not many of his cases have ended up at the Supreme Court, but when they have his analysis has been routinely upheld by the Justices. Of at least eight cases considered by Mr. Gorsuch that were appealed to the Supreme Court, the Justices upheld his result in seven. In four of those the decisions were unanimous.

Among those was a government speech case on whether a town had to accept a Utah church monument in a public park next to an existing monument of the Ten Commandments (Pleasant Grove City, Utah et al. v. Summum). Judge Gorsuch voted to reconsider the court’s ruling against the town and the Supreme Court agreed. In another, Judge Gorsuch joined a ruling that Oklahoma prevent Texas from taking water from Oklahoma. The Supreme Court agreed. (Tarrant Regional Water District, Petitioner v. Rudolf John Herrmann).