RUTHFULLY YOURS

The provision was buried deep in a 1,000-page bill that Congress passed in December by large bipartisan majorities. Most lawmakers probably didn’t know it was there. Yet it is the start of an answer to the biggest question on Washington’s mind: What to do about ObamaCare?

The 21st Century Cures Act, which President Obama signed Dec. 13, focuses mainly on helping patients obtain breakthrough drugs and medical devices. But it also includes provisions that will give small employers—those with fewer than 50 workers—more flexibility in the insurance marketplace. As Republicans debate how to replace ObamaCare, giving that same flexibility to all employers would be a perfect place to start.

One reason that most Americans get health insurance through work is that there are tax advantages for doing so: Employers can pay for the insurance with pretax dollars. If companies wanted to simply give their workers cash, and let the employees choose their own insurance, that money would be taxed by Uncle Sam.

The problem is that this system ties the worker’s insurance to his job. If he quits, he loses coverage. Polls have consistently shown that what employees most want in health insurance is portability. They want to own their policy and take it from job to job.

Many companies would like to accommodate this by giving employees a “defined contribution”—a fixed amount of money—and letting them choose their own health insurance. Thanks to the 21st Century Cures Act, small employers now can do this. They can put pretax dollars into accounts called Health Reimbursement Arrangements, or HRAs. Workers can then use that money to buy their own health coverage.

This represents an abrupt reversal of policy. Since 2015 the Obama administration has been threatening to punish any employer who used HRA accounts in this way with a fine as high as $100 per employee per day.

Small companies were already exempt from ObamaCare’s employer mandate, but this has taken on increased importance. They are now the only employers that can choose how health insurance will be subsidized by the federal government. They can (1) use pretax dollars to provide health insurance directly; (2) pay higher taxable wages and allow the employees to buy their own insurance, benefiting from the ObamaCare tax credits if they quality; or (3) put pretax dollars into an HRA. Extending this freedom to all employers would be a remarkably effective solution to ObamaCare’s many problems.

One reason so little progress has been made in increasing employer-based coverage is that larger companies are meeting the law’s minimum requirements by offering low-wage workers bronze ObamaCare plans. But these plans might have deductibles of $6,000 or more and premiums equal to 9.5% of the employee’s wage. Workers routinely reject this kind of coverage.

What if these firms were given the same choice that small businesses have? What if they could put money into an HRA for each employee, which the worker could then use to purchase coverage on his own, with the help of tax credits? CONTINUE AT SITE

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York compiles photo evidence of the freak show that Saturday’s “Women’s March” devolved into — “Women’s March” being the euphemism for the hard-left anti-Trump protest whose organizers excluded pro-life and conservative women. The lowlight of the affair was a rant by the moronic Madonna. Between F-bombs, the aging “Material Girl” proclaimed, “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know that won’t change anything.”

It is perfectly appropriate for critics to highlight this bile and mark it indelibly on Saturday’s protest march. It’s even fine to link it with the rioting at the inauguration the day before as indicative of the modern community-organizer left’s notions of dissent and civility. What would really be poor judgment, though, is to equate the fading pop star’s idiocy with felony violations of law.

There are some reports that the Secret Service will open an investigation. That agency, of course, enforces such laws as section 871 of the federal penal code, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, to “knowingly and willfully” threaten murder, kidnapping, or the infliction of bodily harm against the president of the United States.

Even taken at face value, Madonna’s bombast was not such a threat. If you take her seriously (I don’t), the most she said was that she had fantasized about doing President Trump harm but realizes this would be pointless. Would that Madonna had kept all her fantasies to herself lo these many decades. In any event, her remarks were not in the nature of “I’m going to blow up the White House,” or “We should go blow up the White House.”

There is often some subtlety involved in discerning threatening statements or distinguishing them from harmless commentary. If you are called to testify at a trial and a friend says, “You better tell the truth on the witness stand tomorrow,” that is good advice. On the other hand, if Luca Brasi shows up on your doorstep with a baseball bat the night before your testimony and utters the exact same words, that is a threat. The circumstances make all the difference. But c’mon: there has never been anything subtle about Madonna.

The incident would not be worth commenting on except that we are in a time when the Left is cracking down on political speech everywhere – on campus, in the media (including social media), in regulations and resolutions. That is the threat to fret over. I realize that, on a gut level, many will find it appealing to imagine Madonna blubbering her way through a visit from a couple of stern Secret Service agents who warn her to be careful when she speaks about the president. But that is exactly the thing we shouldn’t want.

Progressives mapped out ways to combat newly sworn-in President Trump at a liberal confab at the swanky Turnberry Isle resort in Aventura, Fla., over the weekend.

The confab, organized by Media Matters founder David Brock, attracted more than 100 well-heeled progressive donors who came to plot and scheme ways to neutralize Trump, The Washington Free Beacon reports. The tireless Clinton defender is reportedly aiming to build a liberal donor network for the left that rivals that of the Koch brothers.

A confidential memo from Brock, obtained by The Free Beacon, outlined plans to use his numerous organizations to defeat President Donald Trump through “impeachment” or at the ballot box in 2020.

“No other progressive organization has the resources and assets that American Bridge has amassed over the past several election cycles to hold Trump, his administration, and the politicians accountable,” the 44-page confidential memo states.

“Only Bridge stands ready with staff already hired, Trump’s web of business ties mapped out, and a massive video archive at our fingertips.”

“The right will bolster Trump aggressively and deceptively. The campaign to stop him must be nonstop. At American Bridge, it has already begun.”

Brock’s group claims to have more than 20,000 hours of video, 289 candidate research books, and the largest available archive of Trump research in the Democratic Party. Within weeks of the election, Bridge launched a “Trump War Room,” which has already scrutinized Trump’s transition team and will continue to watch the personnel, policies, and practices of the administration.

The “state-of-the-art Trump War Room” will strive to “uncover details of Trump’s affection for Russia and Putin.” They are tracking Trump’s foreign and domestic business partners, construction projects in foreign countries, and negotiations on potential future projects that he “could use to put personal profit ahead of our national security.”

“With so many opportunities for foreign governments and corporations to gain influence over Trump, American Bridge will use every means at its disposal to hold Trump and his administration accountable—including FOIA requests, lawsuits, and regulatory complaints. As the progressive movement’s political research clearinghouse, we will arm our allies to join us in taking on the administration through paid advertising, earned media, grassroots efforts, and legal recourse.”

“Almost immediately after” Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the New York Times reports that defense counsel for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl – the deserter for whom former President Barack Obama exchanged five Taliban commanders – asked a court-martial to dismiss charges against him. The motion cites Trump’s denunciation of Bergdahl as a “dirty rotten traitor,” a staple of his campaign rallies – as were Trump gesticulations and sound effects, imagining Bergdahl before a firing squad.

Bergdahl’s lawyer, Eugene Fidell (whom, the Times takes pains to add, “teaches military justice at Yale Law School), contends that the statements violate the prohibition against “unlawful command influence,” which the Gray Lady – that well-known stickler for legal principle – emphasizes is “a bedrock of military justice.” It prohibits commanders from behavior that could prejudice a defendant’s case.

It is a frivolous claim, notwithstanding the gravitas with which the Times imbues it, as it often does Mr. Fidell’s work. Trump was a candidate not a commander when he made the statements in question.

Clearly, Fidell and his note-takers are mindful of this inconvenience. Thus, they endeavor to stretch the command-influence prohibition beyond recognition. It applies, we are told, not only to commanders but to “anyone with the ‘mantle of command authority’” – a term said to be mined from an opinion by a military appeals court. Perhaps … but the “anyone” in question still has to be in the military chain of command at the time the “influence” is exerted.

Out on the campaign trail, Trump did not have the mantle of command influence. He was a civilian seeking to be elected commander-in-chief. No sensible person would have seen him as vested with any military authority. He was not any part of the chain-of-command – not formally, and not by any reasonable perception.

Obviously, Fidell knows this. otherwise, he would not have waited until Trump was sworn in as president to bring the motion. Counsel nonetheless tries to bootstrap Trump’s pre-presidential meanderings to his later commander-in-chief duties because the new president will now have a say over the promotion and assignments of military officers who are responsible for Bergdahl’s court-martial (like Gen. Robert B. Abrams, who ordered Bergdahl to a court-martial). Those officers, according to Fidell’s theory, will be guided not by the law and the evidence but the campaign bombast.

Nonsense. To flout the principle Fidell invokes, there must be an exercise of influence that is both unlawful and related to an existing command relationship. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump’s red-meat campaign riffs, there was nothing unlawful about them. They could only have been deemed “unlawful” if, at the time, he had been in command and thus obliged to protect the integrity of military proceedings. He wasn’t.

It is the flimsiest of speculation that his campaign statements might influence the conduct of Bergdahl’s case. Court’s don’t dismiss charges based on speculation.

A constant need, an occasional series —

When Sen. Joseph McCarthy died, shockingly, at the age of 48, he, his aides and his committee had identified at least fifty Soviet agents, ideological communists and Fifth Amendment pleaders, dedicated to the overthrow of our constitutional system, and loyal/sympathetic to Stalin, Mao and a new wave of genocidal dictators. It was the late M. Stanton Evans, America’s greatest McCarthy expert, author of Blacklisted by History, who created the table of fifty (link above), drawing proofs from personal papers, declassified FBI memos, congressional archives, intercepted Soviet communications, defector testimonies, and the like.

He wrote:

Looking at this mass of materials and matching them up with McCarthy’s cases, the main thing to be noted is a recurring pattern of verification. Time and again, we see the suspects named by McCarthy and/or his committee–treated at the time as hapless victims–revealed in official records as what McCarthy and company said they were–except, in the typical instance, a good deal more so.

To normal Americans, some large number of Deplorables among them, this probably sounds like a monumental record of accomplishment for a US Senator, who, while beating back the media-political-complex of the 1950s seeking to destroy him (as they did), upheld his oath to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” If this is not a record elected officials today would do well to emulate I don’t know what is.

However, after more than 60 years of “McCarthyism” — the perpetual slander of Joseph McCarthy as a “witch-hunter,” as opposed to an honest accounting of this fearless investigator of deep and widespread infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s secret agents, which had become a virtual Soviet intelligence army occupation of FDR’s Washington by the time of World War II — Americans have been conditioned to react entirely differently. We are supposed to hate, loathe and revile McCarthy. This not only does grievous injury to a great patriot gone six decades, it imperils the safety of our nation today. The slander of “McCarthyism,” wielded like a cudgel, has had the dire effect of bludgeoning our abilities to detect or even acknowledge the existence of any constitutional enemies, especially “domestic.”

To avoid triggering foaming denunciations and tribal acts of ostracism over “McCarthyism,” Americans have become hard-wired not to understand and not to identify and not to tell the truth about the enemy, any enemy, any threat, in order to remain in fluffly-good standing with the flock. Every now and then, a free-thinker comes along — former Rep. Michele Bachmann comes to mind for her eminently responsible and national-security-minded efforts to ensure that Muslim Brotherhood agents were not penetrating the government policy-making chain. The Keepers of “McCarthyism” roasted Bachmann alive as the second coming of Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Remaining sheep shuddered and closed ranks.

It would be interesting to know how many of the useful idiots donning “pussy hats” at Saturday’s massive “Women’s March on Washington” had any idea—or even cared to know—who the principal organizers of the event were. The answer is undoubtedly close to zero, since the purpose of the entire charade—like all leftist charades—was merely to give the participants an opportunity to publicly signal their own moral superiority while smearing—as racists and fascists—anyone who doesn’t accept socialism, identity politics, and perpetual grievance mongering as the ultimate expressions of the American Dream. But for those who actually have an aversion to mindless indoctrination, the facts will be rather disturbing.

A leading organizer of the Women’s March was the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. This group was founded shortly after 9/11—not to condemn the attacks, of course, but rather, to lament “the heightened sense of fear and the acts of blatant discrimination aimed at [the Muslim] community” in the racist wasteland known as America. On the premise that all government efforts to forestall additional terrorism constituted Nazi-like fascism, Sarsour and her organization played a central role in pressuring the New York Police Department to terminate its secret surveillance of the many Muslim groups and mosques suspected of promoting jihadism.

Sarsour is also a member of the Justice League NYC, which seeks to draw public attention to what it portrays as an epidemic of police brutality against African American civilians in New York City. The group’s constant drumbeat is the claim that the United States is awash in essentially the same ugly strain of racism as was prevalent in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

An outspoken critic of Israel, Sarsour avvidly supports the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.

Vis-a-vis the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Sarsour favors a one-state solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. She made clear her opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state when she tweeted in October 2012 that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

In 2004, Sarsour acknowledged that a friend of hers as well as a cousin were both serving long sentences in Israeli jails because of their efforts to recruit jihadists to murder Jews. Moreover, she revealed that her brother-in-law was serving a 12-year prison term because of his affiliation with Hamas.

On Saturday, the nation’s capital was inundated with masses of loud, obnoxious, foul-mouthed Trump-hating women (there were also men) at what was billed the “Women’s March on Washington.” The Guardian called the event a “spontaneous” action for women’s rights, while Vox spoke of a “huge, spontaneous groundswell” behind the march.

While the mainstream media bombarded news consumers with news stories claiming few Americans were interested in the inauguration festivities, television ratings for President Donald Trump’s inauguration were the second-highest Nielsen has recorded in 36 years, drawing 30.6 million TV viewers across 12 networks. Factoring in live streams provided by the networks, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other online portals adds millions more viewers to the total. But what happened Saturday at the “Women’s March” was not spontaneous. No mass rallies are, especially on the Left.

This so-called “protest”, like the violent attacks orchestrated by the DisruptJ20 coalition on pro-Trump events such as Friday’s “DeploraBall” at the National Press Club, was not an organically generated demonstration.

The usual culprits were involved behind the scenes using the same fascistic tactics they used to shut down the massive Trump campaign rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago in March last year.

The groups that organized the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday were underwritten by radical currency speculator George Soros, the same man who says Communist China’s system of government is superior to our own and that the United States is the number one obstacle to world peace.

The Soros people brought in protesters from all over the country to express their displeasure with Donald Trump on his first full day as president of the United States. These left-wingers don’t accept the votes of the 63 million Americans in 3,084 of the nation’s 3,141 counties or county equivalents who chose Trump as president. They keep telling themselves the lie over and over again that Trump is somehow not a legitimate president even though he received a majority of Electoral College votes, as the Constitution requires.

Writing in the New York Times, Asra Q. Nomani writes that “the march really isn’t a ‘women’s march.’ It’s a march for women who are anti-Trump.”

Nomani is a former Georgetown journalism professor and Wall Street Journal reporter who describes herself as “a lifelong liberal feminist who voted for Donald Trump for president.”

She continues:

As someone who voted for Trump, I don’t feel welcome, nor do many other women who reject the liberal identity-politics that is the core underpinnings of the march, so far, making white women feel unwelcome, nixing women who oppose abortion and hijacking the agenda.

Nomani burnt the midnight oil poring over, in her words, “the funding, politics and talking points of the some 403 groups that are ‘partners’ of the march.”

President Obama is known for telling some whoppers — “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” is perhaps the most infamous – so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he told a final one as president right before leaving office last week.

At his final press conference, Obama promised that he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed. “It traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery, and it became sort of acceptable to restrict the franchise. . . . This whole notion of election-voting fraud, this is something that has constantly been disproved. This is fake news.”

The argument over whether or not there is voter fraud will rage on, in part because the Obama administration has spent eight years blocking states from gaining access to federal lists of non-citizen and other possibly illegal voters. Even so, there is abundant evidence that voter fraud is easy to commit. The Heritage Foundation’s website contains hundreds of recent examples of people convicted of stealing votes.

But Obama’s first statement, that the U.S. is unique in trying to enforce ballot integrity, is demonstrably false.

All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting. Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption.

In 2012, I attended a conference in Washington, D.C., of election officials from more than 60 countries; they convened there to observe the U.S. presidential election. Most were astonished that so many U.S. states don’t require voter ID. Lawyers with whom I spoke are also astonished to see Obama link voter ID with the Jim Crow era. As John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog wrote:

President Obama says the effort to ensure ballot integrity “traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery.” This is idiotic. When Democrats imposed Jim Crow laws across the South in the wake of Reconstruction, they relied on poll taxes and ridiculously difficult or ambiguous tests — administered only, apparently, to African Americans who hadn’t finished a certain grade level — to maintain Democratic Party control. Voter ID had nothing to do with it. But no one ever said that Barack Obama knows anything about history.

And if Obama knew much about geography, he might notice that our neighbors require voter ID. Canada adopted voter-ID requirements in 2007 and saw them reaffirmed in 2010; they have worked smoothly since, with almost no complaints. Mexico’s “Credencial para Votar” has a hologram, a photo, and other information embedded in it, and it is impossible to effectively tamper with it. “Mexico’s paper ballots have a level of sophistication equivalent to legal tender,” Catherine Engelbrecht, of the nonprofit True the Vote organization, told me. “They’ve found a balance between security and access to the polls that has restored confidence in their once tainted elections.”

The media have been clucking their disapproval at the “darkness” of Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. “Uniquely dark vision of the U.S.,” read a New York Times headline on Saturday. The Washington Post reported that “Trump delivered a dark inaugural address” — adding, somewhat contradictorily — “in which he pledged fealty to all Americans.” A New York Times op-ed by a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton decried Trump’s “dark, counterfactual picture of ‘American carnage’: an economy in decline, communities under siege by ‘the crime and the gangs and the drugs.’” A New York Times editorial, “President Trump’s Dystopian America,” scoffed at how President Trump “waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation’s cities. ‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,’ [Mr. Trump] vowed,” the Times wrote incredulously.

The press unleashed an identical outpouring of criticism for Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which was likewise said to adopt a counterfactually bleak view of the nation.

Are you scratching your head and wondering, Since when did liberals and the Left embrace a sunny, light-filled vision of the United States? If so, you’re not misremembering things. These are the same liberal elites who have been telling us for decades that America is shot through with an ever-expanding array of hatreds and injustice that disenfranchise large portions of the population and force them to live in fear.

While the conceit of an endemically bigoted and unjust America is longstanding, you need look no further than Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, D.C., to refresh your memory. One sign bobbing in the crowd read: Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them. Ashley Judd unceremoniously pushed Michael Moore off the stage to declare at high volume: “I am not as nasty as racism, misogyny, white privilege, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and white privilege.” (The “nasty woman” theme pervaded the march.) Judd yelled that “blacks are still in shackles and graves just for being black.” Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) announced that “black women are struggling every day for justice and equality.” Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator from California, said that “if you are a black mother trying to raise a son, you know black lives is a women’s issue.” Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood was “standing up for the rights of immigrants to live without fear.” A rapper called for an end to “white supremacy, white privilege, and white wealth” and “thanked God for Michelle Alexander” (who argues that white Americans have manipulated the criminal-justice system in order to reinstate slavery and segregation).

These thoroughly representative members — and products — of the cultural elite are the same people who have given us “safe spaces” and “allyship” on college campuses, under the preposterous notion that any American college student who is not white, male, and heterosexual is “unsafe.” The Left has developed a typology of American students as victims, their allies, and their presumed oppressors. When black students at Bard College in 2015 called for an end to “systemic and structural racism on campus . . . so that Black students can go to class without fear,” they were not making a joke. Of course they were treated as truthsayers by Bard president Leon Botstein and Bard’s bureaucrats. When black Princeton students announced that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” adopting the words of civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been beaten in the 1950s for trying to vote, no one laughed in the face of these fantastically privileged Princetonians. The press, the campus-rape bureaucracy, and an army of federal regulators proclaim that terrified college co-eds are living through a rape tsunami, which can be eradicated only by campus kangaroo courts.

So rapidly does American oppression metastasize into new forms, in the eyes of the Left, that the Left is constantly forced to coin a new vocabulary for it: microaggression, intersectionality, institutional racism, white privilege, cis privilege, implicit bias, etc.

The media’s contempt for Trump’s use of the phrase “carnage” to describe the rising violence in the inner city is particularly ludicrous. The press has slavishly amplified the Black Lives Matter claim that we are living through an epidemic of racist police shootings of black men. A New York Times editorial from July 2016 was titled “When Will the Killing Stop?” That same month, President Barack Obama asserted that black mothers and fathers were right to fear that their child will be killed by a cop — remarkably, he made this claim during the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin.

“Stop killing us” is one of the less profanity-saturated slogans aimed at cops during Black Lives Matter marches. A Black Lives Matter manifesto released last summer called for an end to the “war on black people.” A New York Times op-ed contributor, Roxanne Gay, writes: “As a black woman in America, I do not feel alive. I feel like I am not yet dead. . . . I don’t know how to feel like my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.”