RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/09/the-dems-impeachment-losing-streak-continues/

Has any political ploy failed as spectacularly as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to delay sending the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump over to the Senate. Even Democrats are now telling her the jig is up.

Pelosi had hoped to use the delay as leverage to get the Senate to agree to the Democrats’ demand for witnesses at the trial. It was a foolhardy plan that, had the leadership not been in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, it never would have attempted.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell always had the upper hand. His position was that the Senate trial would be conducted under the same rules that the Senate approved for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Namely, the House managers and the White House lawyers would make their presentations and answer questions from senators. Then, the Senate would vote on whether it needed to hear from any witnesses. The Senate, by the way, unanimously approved those rules in 1999.

In the Clinton trial, after the presentations and Q&A, senators voted to 56-44 to depose three witnesses. They later decided – by a 70-30 margin – that they didn’t need to call those witnesses to testify on the Senate floor because excerpts from their depositions would suffice.

On Tuesday, McConnell announced that he had the votes needed to proceed with the Clinton-era impeachment rules. And soon after, Senate Democrats, in a rare show of bipartisanship, started pressuring Pelosi to stop her pointless delay.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/our-foreign-policy-iran-cringe-bruce-thornton/

The progressives’ reactions to President Trump’s elimination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s blood-soaked chief of their foreign adventurism, covered the whole range of clichés we can predict whenever this country acts vigorously to defend its interests and security. Iran, however, is a special case. For forty years, with a few exceptions our leaders have preemptively cringed in the face of Iranian aggression, conjuring up the specter of a widescale war in order to justify inaction. This bad habit has led to appeasing policies that have emboldened the mullahs into ever-increasing aggression in the region from Iraq to Syria to Yemen.

We will pass over the tedious virtue-signaling and juvenile comments of celebrities, antiwar activists with their trite jingles, and Democrat Media, Inc. As Churchill said of the Bolsheviks, the activists and media “hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins” of our political culture. But the responses of some Democrats reveal just of how fossilized their foreign policy thinking is.

The Democrats questioned the legality of the killing, or claimed it was a wag-the-dog distraction from impeachment. But fear-mongering is their favorite motif. Joe Biden, who opposed killing Osama bin Laden, claimed “we could be on the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” His fellow primary candidate, Elizabeth Warren, read from the same script: Taking out Soleimani was “reckless,” and “our priority must be to avoid another costly war.” Ben Rhodes, an Obama minion, linked Soleimani’s killing to Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which “averted a war,” a claim redolent of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” He claims Trump’s withdrawal from the deal “started this dangerous cycle of escalation that we are still on.” And don’t forget the buffoonish AOC, who fretted, “The President engaged in what is widely being recognized as an act of war against Iran, one that now risks the lives of millions of innocent people.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/war-powers-resolution-vote-trump-andrew-mccarthy

By this time in our history, one supposes, there could not be a presidentially-ordered use of military force without the inevitable opposition party blather about how the commander-in-chief is violating the War Powers Act (WPA). And so it is that Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., has introduced a resolution that would purport to direct President Trump to cease hostilities with Iran in the absence of a congressional authorization.

Though inevitable, the exercise is pointless.

The WPA (often called the War Powers Resolution) was enacted over a weakened President Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 by the Democrat-dominated Congress of the late Vietnam War era. It was an effort to limit the president’s power to commit American forces to battle without a declaration of war or other congressional authorization.

From the time of its passage until the Obama administration, all presidents regarded it as an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s Article II powers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehrans-retaliation-trumps-reply-11578528961?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Maybe the Apocalypse isn’t upon us after all. The lesson after Iran’s missile strike on U.S. bases in Iraq early Wednesday is that deterrence seems to be working.

More than a dozen ballistic missiles hit two U.S. bases in northern and western Iraq, but no Americans or Iraqis were killed in the attack. Iraq says Iran gave advance warning, so U.S. and Iraqi troops had time to disperse or seek shelter. Iran has made advances in missile targeting, as we learned in the attack on Saudi oil facilities. Yet this time the missiles seemed not to have been precise.

All of this suggests that Iran tried to make a show of hitting back at the U.S. for the killing of terror chief Qasem Soleimani while trying to avoid killing Americans. The latter seems to be the red line that President Trump has drawn for an American military response, and Iran knows the U.S. could eliminate much of its military and industrial capacity even from a standoff distance.