RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/bidens-long-hot-summer/

Sometime in the last week, Democrats looked at the calendar and realized that President Biden is in trouble.

My theory is that the moment of truth arrived on May 27. That was when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to scramble to save one of his priorities, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, from falling apart. Then, on May 28, the proposed commission into the January 6 riot at the Capitol failed to clear the filibuster.

The panic started. You began seeing articles about the “summer slump” that afflicts presidencies. You started hearing that Biden can’t let negotiations with Republicans drag on. Before leaving for Memorial Day recess, Schumer told reporters that when the Senate returns he plans to hold votes not only on the constitutionally dubious “For the People Act,” but also on the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Equality Act, and two gun-control bills.

And that’s just what the House has passed already. The president’s $4 trillion American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan haven’t come to a vote in either chamber of Congress. They haven’t been put into legislation. The fate of these projects depends in large part on Biden’s ability to strike a deal on infrastructure with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. The likelihood of a bargain? Not great.

For Democrats, the Biden presidency is an hourglass and the sand is running out. They have two years to enact the “transformational” agenda that, presto change-o, will turn Biden into the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And since they have incredibly narrow margins in the Congress—four votes in the House, a tied Senate—they have to remain unified. “That is a problem with the Democratic Party,” the activist Rev. William J. Barber II told the Washington Post. “What you see with Republicans—they stick together no matter what.” He must not see many Republicans.

It is still a problem with the Democratic Party, though, because Democrats agree on one thing alone: They oppose Donald Trump. They’re happy he’s not president. They don’t want him to be president again. Beyond Trump, however, Democrats are all over the place. They have Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on one side of the caucus and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other.

The coalition that elected Biden is even broader, stretching from Cindy McCain to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An alliance formed on the basis of opposition to one personality is never going to be ideologically uniform. Nor is it going to be stable. The Democrats face a similar problem as the coalition government that was agreed to in Israel this week: What do you do after the boogeyman is gone?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/covid-19-has-forever-destroyed-americans-trust-in-experts/

As even many casual observers of America’s fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution’s framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the “rulemaking” governing Americans’ day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy.

Put more simply, the most straightforward version of the argument offered by partisans of the administrative state amounts to, “Trust the experts.” And over the century-plus since Wilson’s presidency, the “trust the experts” leitmotif has moved well beyond the realm of prevailing dogma for mandarins in such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather, for large swaths of the citizenry and the elected official class, “trust the experts” now reigns supreme for everything from the military (“Trust the generals!”) to public health (“Trust the epidemiologists!”).

And therein lies the rub.

The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunology and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/government-seeks-retribution-for-the-biden-resistance/

The U.S. government’s vengeance case against the Oath Keepers, a group that publicly declared its opposition to Joe Biden’s presidency, is now in its fourth iteration with no end in sight.

Biden’s Justice Department, led by a man denied a seat on the Supreme Court in 2016 by Senate Republicans and a woman loyal to both Barack Obama and Robert Mueller, is sparing no resource to destroy the lives of Americans tied to the group that allegedly “stormed” the Capitol on January 6.

Last week, Channing Phillips, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia overseeing the sprawling investigation into the events of January 6, filed another superseding indictment against the Oath Keepers while adding new defendants. Four men have been arrested since May 27; the total number of defendants is 16 and counting.

The Oath Keepers, as the media reminds us daily, pose a mortal threat to the country. As NPR recently warned, it is “one of the largest anti-government extremist groups in the far-right patriot militia movement.”  The group’s real crime, of course, is opposing Joe Biden; after the election, a founder of the Oath Keepers said the group would “resist” Biden’s presidency, an act of defiance considered mandatory in many quarters when it was directed at the Trump Administration from the Left.

Indispensible to the Narrative

So, retaliation is underway. The first grand jury indictment was filed one week after Inauguration Day; three alleged Oath Keepers—Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, and Donovan Crowl—were charged with four trespassing and disorderly conduct offenses. 

“The Oath Keepers are a large but loosely organized collection of militia who believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor in charge of the early stage of the investigation who bragged about a “shock and awe” manhunt leading up to Biden’s inauguration, wrote in the original charging document. “The organization’s name alludes to the oath sworn by members of the military and police to defend the Constitution ‘from all enemies, foreign and domestic.’”

Since then, the Justice Department has tacked on a total of 13 counts and 13 more defendants with warnings of more to come. The prosecution of the Oath Keepers is critical in fueling the notion that groups of armed, pro-Trump vigilantes organized an assault on the seat of American democracy.