RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the arrogance of the unelected and the power of the unaccountable, these witnesses to nothing revel in their veto over foreign policy.

When a member of the military pulls rank on a ranking member of Congress, when he politicizes his service by admonishing a public servant, when he acts as if the ribbons pinned to his jacket are more legitimate than the pin every congressman wears, when he uses his uniform to command attention—and attempts to commandeer authority—he indicts no one but himself.

When the man in question is Alexander Vindman, his opening statement is a closing argument for the opposition.

When the women in question are Fiona Hill and Marie Yovanovitch, their statements are nothing more than dross in a diplomatic pouch. 

All three statements read like dispatches from the administrative state. 

With the arrogance of the unelected and the power of the unaccountable, these witnesses to nothing—neither present at the creation of presidential policy nor privy to the president’s conversations about policy—revel in their veto over foreign policy. They testify to their Americanness by condemning the chief executive of the American people.

To Vindman, Hill, and Yovanovitch the personal is political. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/24/the-hatred-that-fuels-impeachment/

We are in new territory now. Hating a president is equivalent to finding him guilty of supposed high crimes. Impeachment is a casual affair. Hearsay is as valid as direct testimony.

Neither the NeverTrump Right nor the Progressive Left has yet offered a coherent defense of their de facto, three-year-long singular effort to delegitimize and ultimately remove Trump from office before the 2020 election.

We are now in the midst of a systematic effort to impeach a president on the basis of a thought crime. Trump’s purported quid pro quo sin was issuing a temporary hold on military assistance to Ukraine that supposedly transcended legitimate worries about rampant corruption—to include specifically investigating the suspicious behavior of a corrupt Ukrainian oil company and the compromised relationship of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son around it.

The anti-Trump writ is that it is impeachable even to delay to the Ukrainians lethal military assistance while citing the need to investigate the corruption of Ukrainians, including the career of Hunter Biden, whose father, the former vice president and “point man” on Ukraine, is now running for president.

Supposedly irrelevant to this inquiry is the prior policy of denying military aid to Ukraine, intervening in Ukrainian politics to fire a prosecutor by threatening a cutoff of even nonmilitary aid, and ignoring that the vice president’s son served as a lucrative functionary with a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father was adjudicating U.S. aid to Ukraine.

So why this disconnect? The reason is not “Ukraine,” merely the latest iteration in a long series of efforts, but rather existential hatred.

“Conservative” NeverTrump Disdain

The NeverTrumpers’ position, although rarely articulated, seems fairly clear.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/25/the

Academics and former agency heads have called for the Food and Drug Administration to become an independent agency, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Although the FDA has real problems, giving it more independence isn’t the solution.

The argument may sound compelling. “Partisan political interposition has grown increasingly worrisome” at the FDA, said three academics in an article in the journal Science. They continued: “As the sole arbiter standing between a new drug application and a potential public health calamity, the FDA can hardly afford to be buffeted by undue political interference,” and should, therefore, become an independent agency. A group of former heads of the agency made a similar recommendation in January.

Yet political meddling has been extremely rare in recent years, and the genuine calamities in which the FDA has been involved have been self-inflicted wounds that might have been avoided with more, not less, accountability and oversight.

The FDA is ubiquitous in Americans’ lives, regulating products that account for more than $1 trillion dollars annually — 25 cents of every consumer dollar. Its regulation provides some measure of reassurance and tangible benefits, to be sure, but it has massive costs, direct and indirect. For example, bringing a new drug to market costs, on average, more than $2.5 billion.

Regulation that is excessive actually costs lives, both directly by withholding life-saving products, and also by diverting societal resources to gratuitous regulatory compliance.