RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-trump-isnt-threatening-our-constitutional-system/

Recently, Tom Nichols, a leading anti-Trump voice (and a former colleague), informed me that “Trump has already changed our constitutional system in ways that will outlast us both. You think it’s worth it. I don’t.”

I hear this claim all the time. Trump’s antagonists keep telling me that conservatives, unable to win through democratic institutions, have adopted extreme policies that are corroding the constitutional order. How is still a mystery.

When I point out that religious freedom, one of the issues social conservatives tend to worry about, doesn’t depend on democratic institutions, Nichols tells me: “I remember when conservatives swore to stop liberals from getting things through the courts as fundamentally inimical to our system of government.”

What policies have Trump-era conservatives conspired to push through the courts that are “fundamentally inimical to our system of government,” I wondered?

“Outlawing abortion, changing the meaning of the second amendment to mean Home Bazookas are two that come to mind,” he answered, “but you’re being slippery here: You want the courts, not the legislature or the public, to be the vessel of ideas. The same thing cons once hated about liberals.”

Now, I understand it’s become routine to scare the public about guns, but there’s never been any political desire or effort to make Home Bazookas, or even fully automatic weapons, more easily available. (Though Tom is free to a buy a Bazooka if he pleases.) In the Heller decision, decided long before Trump’s presidency, Justice Scalia defined protected firearms as weapons in “common use.” It’s the left that wants overturn settled law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/impeachment-power-can-be-abused/

Democrats say Trump exploited his constitutional power for political purposes, but how is that different from what they are doing now?

I t is not a good look for Democrats, in purporting to respond to the president’s abuse of his constitutional power over foreign relations, to abuse the House’s power over impeachment. That, however, is exactly what they are doing in their unseemly zeal to impeach President Trump on a blatantly political deadline.

In a December 1 letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone notified House Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) that the president will not participate in the committee’s first open hearing on Wednesday, December 4. Ordinarily — not that there’s anything “ordinary” about the potential impeachment of an American president — I’d be inclined to assess this as poor judgment.

After all, the lack of due process has been one of the president’s major complaints since late October, when the House belatedly voted to endorse the impeachment inquiry that Democrats have been conducting for months. Among the fundamental elements of due process is the opportunity to be heard. Having denied this opportunity to the president in Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s faux grand-jury phase of the proceedings, Democrats are now inviting the president to participate in the Judiciary Committee phase, where articles of impeachment are soon to be drafted and voted on. The president’s complaints are apt to ring hollow if he carps about the witnesses from the Twitter sidelines while forfeiting the right to question them at the formal hearings.

Abstaining now could also be problematic down the road. Eventually, there will be a Senate impeachment trial. Because the House is now giving the president an opportunity to examine witnesses, Senate Democrats will have a good argument that transcripts from Nadler’s hearings should be admitted as trial evidence — i.e., the president should not be heard to complain since he will have passed up his chance to confront his accusers.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/here-are-four-pieces-of-great-news-for-america-and-president-trump/

Thanks to the noise of the Democrats’ divisive and destructive impeachment drive, hardly anyone is noticing just how good we have it right now. We’re in a Golden Age. Here are four pieces of great news that benefit all Americans.

Unemployment

Unemployment stands at a historic low – just 3.6%. To a degree not seen in previous strong economies, all boats are truly being lifted by the rising tide. Black and Hispanic unemployment are shattering records. You don’t have to listen to me or to President Trump. This is CNN:

The unemployment rate for black women fell to a record 4.4% from 5.2% in July. The unemployment rate for black men crept up to 5.9% from 5.8%. But the previous month’s rate was a record, so the rate is still near its historic low.

Unemployment among workers who identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino also fell in August to 4.2%, which matched a record low set earlier this year.

Minority unemployment has been tracked by the Labor Department since the early 1970’s. Both black and Hispanic or Latino unemployment numbers have traditionally been higher than white unemployment, and it remains so today. White unemployment was 3.4% in August, up from 3.3% previously. But this is the smallest gap on record between the respective unemployment rates for blacks and whites.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/12/the-deep-states-co

The Special Counsel’s investigation of Russiagate was supposed to end with the impeachment of President Trump and the termination of his illegitimate presidency. The Mueller Report, when it eventually saw the light of day, was going to expose Donald Trump as the arch-villain of all times. Not only did this charlatan happen to be a white-supremacist dog-whistler, sexual deviant and financial fraudster of the highest order, he was likely the greatest traitor in American history. This was the prevailing view expressed by the commentariat before the release of Mueller’s findings. The title of an article by Jonathan Chait, published in the New York Magazine on the eve of the 2018 summit between President Trump and President Putin, says it all: “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart—Or His Handler?” Ukrainegate, which is nothing but a reprise of Russiagate, reminds me of Karl Marx’s sardonic comment about Napoleon III: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Coming up empty-handed after $45 million and two full years of scrutiny would suggest that the Great Kremlin Conspiracy had all along been nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Perhaps, offered the tinfoil-hat conspiracists, Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice had been so thorough that all evidence of a conspiracy was erased. Whatever. The mainstream media, Democratic politicians and former directors of intelligence agencies adopted the curious notion that if Candidate Trump did not engage in actual collusion, maybe he was guilty—in the words of Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—of “passive collusion”. But how can anyone, including President Trump, be guilty of a non-crime, one without a definite time or location and unsupported by corroborating evidence? It is as if Donald Trump, like a character in a Franz Kafka story, is guilty of something, and even if nobody is entirely sure of the nature of the crime, that does not make him any less guilty of it.

Paradoxically, perhaps, even those not taken in by the Trump–Putin collusion delusion assumed that Mueller’s team, led by the Justice Department’s Andrew Weissmann, would deliver a game-changer. Something, to put it bluntly, more emphatic than the Mueller Report’s non-condemnation/non-exoneration. After all, Mueller, Weissmann and Co have form when it comes to using coercive, unlawful and unscrupulous tactics to achieve a decisive outcome, if Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014) is anything to go by. Surely Team Mueller could have unearthed some infraction of the law, however minor or obscure, during their inquisition. What about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting of Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr with a bunch of Russian lobbyists, including Natalia Veselnitskaya? No crime, according to Trump’s inquisitors, was committed. Weissmann did eventually nab Manafort on tax fraud unrelated to the Trump campaign. The feds put him away for seven and a half years. The anti-Trump brigade, to use the commentariat’s cliché of the time, talked up Manafort’s arrest as a sign that “the walls were closing in on Trump”, and yet those walls remained distant.

But before we move from the crumbly walls of Russiagate to the newly erected ramparts of Ukrainegate, some perspective. Matt Taibbi, an anti-Trumper and contributing editor to the trendily leftist Rolling Stone, an unlikely Great Kremlin Conspiracy denier, admonishes his peers for the damage they have done to democracy.