RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/neglecting-foreign-policy-in-the-presidential-debates/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

The second night of the first Democratic 2020 presidential debate had even less discussion of foreign policy than the first. Were it not for a few of the candidates themselves choosing to bring up some of these issues, the audience would have heard almost nothing about foreign policy. There was one important moment when Biden was forced to address his 2002 vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and he gave a remarkably bad answer that was consistent with his overall poor performance. It was striking how the former Vice President still had no answer for why voters should trust his judgment.

Biden’s answer was scattershot, and most of what he said wasn’t related to the Iraq war:

Because once we — once Bush abused that power, what happened was, we got elected after that. I made sure — the president turned to me and said, Joe, get our combat troops out of Iraq. I was responsible for getting 150,000 combat troops out of Iraq, and my son was one of them.

I also think we should not have combat troops in Afghanistan. It’s long overdue. It should end.

And, thirdly, I believe that you’re not going to find anybody who has pulled together more of our alliances to deal with what is the real stateless threat out there. We cannot go it alone in terms of dealing with terrorism.

So I would eliminate the act that allowed us to go into war, and not — the AUMF, and make sure that it could only be used for what its intent was, and that is to go after terrorists, but never do it alone. That’s why we have to repair our alliances. We put together 65 countries to make sure we dealt with ISIS in Iraq and other places. That’s what I would do. That’s what I have done. And I know how to do it.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/28/california-legislature-passes-bill-put-trans-men-womens-prisons-even-rapists/

While it should be obvious that women’s prisons are for convicted criminals who are female, California Senate Bill 132, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), requires men who say they are women to be housed in women’s prisons.

The State Senate passed the bill in May, and it passed the state Assembly with very little opposition on June 25. The bill demands that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ask prisoners their preferred pronouns and gender identity at intake, then house them accordingly. This means that a man need only say at intake that he is a woman to gain access to women’s prison. In passing this bill, California has turned its back on incarcerated women.

In describing the bill, the Legislative Council’s Digest states:

The bill would require staff and contractors to consistently use the gender pronoun and honorific an individual has specified in verbal and written communications with or regarding that individual that involve the use of a pronoun or honorific. The bill would require the department, for a person who has a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth, to only conduct a search of that person by an officer of the gender identity of the person’s preference, and to house the person in a correctional facility designated for men or women consistent with the incarcerated individual’s gender identity, except as specified.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/28/former-president-jimmy-carter-said-trump-not-legitimately-elected/

Former President Jimmy Carter said he believes President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate and that “he didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”

At a Carter Center event in Virginia with author Jon Meacham, Carter said that Russian interference in the 2016 election invalidated Trump’s presidency, reported USA Today’s Susan Page.

“I think the interference, though not yet quantified, should be fully investigated and would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016, he lost the election,” he said.

“He was put into office because the Russians interfered,” he said. Carter was then asked if that meant he believed Trump was illegitimate.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/28/roberts-the-mind-reader-joins-liberal-justices-on-the-census/

The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling on Department of Commerce v. New York is being characterized as nothing more serious than a temporary setback regarding President Trump’s wish to reinstate a citizenship question in the 2020 U.S. Census; the administration is expected to whip up a new rationale that the high court won’t consider “contrived” and get the question in.

Unfortunately it is far worse than that, and Chief Justice John Roberts is giving further sign that he is yet another unpleasant surprise in GOP appointments to the highest level of the Judicial Branch, following in the footsteps of David Souter (Bush 41), Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan), and John Paul Stevens (Ford).

“The Court’s holding reflects an unprecedented departure from our deferential review of discretionary agency decisions,” Justice Clarence Thomas warns in his dissent, joined by Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. “And, if taken seriously as a rule of decision, this holding would transform administrative law … the Court has opened a Pandora’s box,” Thomas declared.

Motivated by politics and ideology, lawyers would challenge all sorts of Executive Branch decisions “with accusations of pretext, deceit, and illicit motives” leading to “an endless morass of discovery and policy disputes,” Thomas cautions. “Now that the Court has opened up this avenue of attack, opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them. Moreover, even if the effort to invalidate the action is ultimately unsuccessful, the Court’s decision enables partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction.”