RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-the-impeachment-fishing-expedition-11550188732

As William Barr begins his term as attorney general, House Democrats are aiming a “subpoena cannon” at President Trump, hoping to disable his presidency with investigations and possibly gather evidence to impeach him. Mr. Trump fired back in his State of the Union address: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” To protect the presidency and separation of powers, Mr. Barr should be prepared to seek a stay of all congressional investigations of Mr. Trump’s prepresidential conduct.

The president is not one among many, as are legislators and judges. Crippling his ability to function upsets the constitutional balance of power. For this reason, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or prosecuted. The same logic should apply to congressional investigations.

Congress is targeting Mr. Trump’s actions before becoming president because there are well-established constitutional limits, grounded in separation-of-powers doctrine, on its ability to investigate his official conduct. In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), the Supreme Court recognized a constitutionally based, although not unlimited, privilege of confidentiality to ensure “effective discharge of a President’s powers.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the justices held that presidents and ex-presidents have absolute immunity against civil liability for official presidential acts.

Executive immunity for prepresidential activity is less clear. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), which arose out of Paula Jones’s accusation that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas, the justices reasoned that Ms. Jones’s lawsuit could proceed because the burden on the presidency objectively appeared light. Specifically, because only three sitting presidents had been sued for prepresidential acts, the justices thought it “unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the presidency.”

The court did, however, consider the question of whether civil litigation “could conceivably hamper the President in conducting the duties of his office.” It answered: “If and when that should occur, the court’s discretion would permit it to manage those actions in such fashion (including deferral of trial) that interference with the President’s duties would not occur.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/reps_ilhan_omar_and_rashida_tlaib_and_the_normalizing_of_jewhatred_in_america.html

Editor’s note: A powerful statement that needs to be seriously considered by all Americans has been issued by Rabbi Aryeh Spero, spokesman for the National Conference on Jewish Affairs and a prolific contributor to American Thinker.

“It is becoming more obvious by the day–even by the tweet-hour–that newly elected Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is anti-Semitic and is peddling her anti-Israel and anti-Jewishness through the well-known and effective drip-by-drip method.

It is a strategy, as we have seen from Islamists in Europe, where an anti-Israel or anti-Jewish statement is made and then partially retracted after an uproar. It is repeated multiple times, followed by multiple half-hearted retractions with the goal and effect being the slow but inevitable seepage of anti-Jewish caricatures into the country’s political discourse and into the minds of its people.

“This successful strategy has poisoned Europe’s discourse against Jews and Israel and is being imported here with the arrival into Congress of Ms. Omar and Ms. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

“The question today is: Do the leaders of the U.S. Congress, and especially House Speaker Ms. Pelosi, have the conviction and will to oust this never-ending shower of anti-Jewish rhetoric as they would if such was being said against other groups. Will they permanently shut this down before it metastasizes as it has in Europe and is unfolding in front of our very eyes?

“There is no question that Ms. Omar’s playing-innocent type of apologies are done in such a manner to momentarily quell the outcry against her remarks while assuring her base that she has not capitulated to the powers outside her community. Her nonchalant use of anti-Semitic stereotypes and language is furthermore disturbing for it reflects a communal comfort with and approval of anti-Semitic ideas that most Americans deem beyond the pale.

https://www.city-journal.org/amazon-cancels-queens-hq

Amazon’s announcement that it will cancel its plans to build a major office complex in Long Island City is a huge defeat for Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, who staked their political capital on the high-profile deal. The collapse of the deal is a victory, though, for the anti-gentrification, anti-development Left, which assailed the plan as a giveaway to a trillion-dollar company and its billionaire owner. They claimed that Amazon would drive up rents, destroy the local community, create noise pollution, and increase wealth inequality in New York. A typical response came from law professor and three-time loser political candidate Zephyr Teachout, who exulted on Twitter, “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! POWER OF THE PEOPLE. Speechless. Truth to power wins!”

What has “truth to power” won? It’s not as though Amazon was preventing the rise of sustainable, green, unionized, and well-paying manufacturing jobs in Long Island City, or stopping the construction of affordable low-income housing, along with schools and parkland. The area where the company planned to build its secondary headquarters has been the focus of economic development plans for decades. It is presently the site of parking lots, storage units, and empty, city-owned land. Now it will stay that way. Amazon was planning to rent 1 million square feet in the Citigroup Tower in Long Island City, which is largely vacant of tenants, and will now remain so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/lindsey-graham-demands-andrew-mccabe-testify-to-explain-dojs-bias-against-trump/

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) demanded Thursday that former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe appear before the panel to address “bias against Trump” within the Department of Justice.

Graham’s call for McCabe to testify came hours after CBS aired an interview clip in which McCabe claimed he’d discussed the prospect of recruiting cabinet members to declare President Trump unfit for office with top DOJ officials shortly after the president fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017.

“After Mr. McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview, it is imperative that he, and others, come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to fully explain how and why a FISA warrant was issued against Carter Page and answer questions about what appears to be, now more than ever, bias against President Trump,” Graham said in a statement issued Thursday.

In the statement, Graham referenced a longstanding concern among conservative lawmakers that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant authorizing the surveillance of then-Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was obtained through FBI officials’ misleading a federal judge regarding the partisan source of the evidence against Page.