RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/03/with-mueller-hopes-gone-so-goes-progressive-unity/

The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos.

But the common hatred of President Donald Trump has united otherwise quite disparate Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); former Vice President Joe Biden; Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

These diverse progressive politicians all shared faith in special counsel Robert Mueller and his “dream team.” They believed over the last two years that the Mueller investigation was slowly grinding down Trump. T-shirts were sold with the slogan “God Protect Robert Mueller.”

The unifying progressive creed assumed that the Mueller’s team would eventually find Trump unequivocally guilty of “collusion” with Russia. That buzzword was the non-criminal euphemism for felonious conspiracy to rig an election.

The hunt for collusion would end with the holy grail of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. In 2020 there would be an almost automatic progressive takeover of government.

Periodic leaks from Mueller’s team during the investigation’s 22 months prompted giddy media anticipation that “the walls were closing in on” Trump. It always seemed that the “noose was tightening” around him, and that yet another “bombshell” was about to go off.

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-residents-rebelling-homelessness

For the past five years, like many of its West Coast counterparts, Seattle has endured a steady expansion of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, crime, and street disorder. But the activist class—a political and cultural elite comprising leaders in government, nonprofits, philanthropy, and media—has enforced a strict taboo on declaring the obvious: something is terribly wrong in the Emerald City.

Last month, veteran Seattle reporter Eric Johnson of KOMO violated that taboo with a shocking, hour-long documentary called Seattle is Dying, which revealed how the city has allowed a small subset of the homeless population—drug-addicted and mentally-ill criminals—to wreak havoc. Johnson’s portrait is backed up by evidence from King County homelessness data, by city attorney candidate Scott Lindsay’s “prolific offender” report on 100 homeless individuals responsible for more than 3,500 criminal cases, and by my own reporting on the homelessness crisis.

In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-judiciary-committee-votes-to-subpoena-mueller-report/

The House Judiciary Committee Wednesday approved subpoenas demanding that the Justice Department provide Congress with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, final report on the results of the his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Committee voted 24 to 17 in favor of a resolution that authorizes subpoenas for the unredacted version of the special counsel’s report, all accompanying exhibits and attachments, and the evidence Mueller used to write it.

Attorney General William Barr submitted a four-page summary of the almost-400-page report to Congress last week and promised in a meeting with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Friday to release a redacted version of the full report by “mid April, if not sooner.” Barr’s summary said Mueller did not find any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) said that Barr is “refusing” to cooperate with him in legally obtaining certain materials but added, “I will give him time to change his mind” before issuing the subpoenas.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/282694/justice-david-wecht-antisemitism

A sitting American justice from the state of the Pittsburgh massacre speaks out on First Amendment rights, Christchurch, and the dangers of a pivotal moment in our history.

Rarely, if ever, has a sitting American judge spoken out publicly on the threat of anti-Semitism in America. However, here, Justice David N. Wecht, a judge serving on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the highest court in the state and the oldest Supreme Court in the nation, has chosen to speak out boldly and firmly about what he perceives to be a national crisis.

The Honorable David N. Wecht was elected by the citizens of Pennsylvania to a 10-year term on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2015. His father’s parents ran a grocery store not far from where Justice Wecht was sworn in. Before his election to the state’s Supreme Court, he served four years on the Pennsylvania Superior Court (the state’s intermediate appellate court). He attended Yale University and Yale Law School, where he served as notes editor of the Yale Law Journal, and then clerked for Judge George MacKinnon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Justice Wecht and his wife were married at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Tree of Life was the site of the Oct. 27, 2018, attack in which 11 Jews were murdered by a white supremacist.

I interviewed Justice Wecht in March of this year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/andrew-cuomos-outrageous-budget-deal/

New York’s Democratic governor has given his blessing to a package laden with billions in new taxes and spending.

The leaders of the state of New York just voted themselves a huge pay raise. Andrew Cuomo is about to become the highest-paid governor in the country with a $250,0000 salary. His lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, will get a bump to $220,000, meaning she’ll be better compensated than the governor of California, who is stuck at $202,000. Members of the state Senate and Assembly will see raises from $79,500 to $110,000 in January and to $130,000 in 2021. Not bad for a part-time job.

It’s all part of the orgy of spending that Cuomo just approved in the Empire State’s annual budget, which was passed in the wee hours of Sunday morning after the usual bonanza of craziness. The state’s already-extravagant spending just jumped to $175.6 billion in 2019–2020. That’s a “double whopper with extra cheese,” in the words of City Journal contributing editor Bob McManus, a 13 percent increase (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars) from 2010–2011, when the state’s population was less than 1 percent smaller than it is now.

New York state spends more than twice as much per capita as Florida, and that’s excluding the gargantuan additional spending of New York City, which is on track to outspend Florida this year on its own. If you, like nearly half of the state’s residents, live in New York City, your state and municipal governments are spending more than $13,000 a head annually. Even California isn’t so loose with its purse strings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maxine-waters-jussie-smollett-charges-dropped-correct/

Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) claimed over the weekend that Cook County prosecutors did the “correct thing” by dropping the charges pending against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after a grand jury indicted him for staging a hate crime.

“It’s the correct thing that the charges were dropped,” Waters told Extra in a Sunday interview. “First of all, we probably will never know all of the details. We’ve heard a lot of information. No one was hurt — that is, physically, killed, shot — he never committed a crime before, he forfeited the bail, and it’s this kind of situation where they close the case all over the country every day. I have learned this isn’t unusual.”

Cook County state’s attorney Kimberly Foxx announced Tuesday that she had dropped disorderly-conduct charges against Smollett due to his history of community service and the nature of the crime.

“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” a statement from Foxx’s office said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-census/trump-declares-u-s-census-meaningless-without-citizenship-question-idUSKCN1RD2DS

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday injected himself into one of the most consequential cases of the current Supreme Court term, saying the nation’s 2020 census would be “meaningless” without adding a citizenship question to the questionnaire.
The comment on Twitter came ahead of an expected Supreme Court ruling by the end of June on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ decision to add the citizenship question violated federal law.

“Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all important Citizenship Question,” Trump tweeted. “Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it costs to put together!”

Trump’s critics have accused the White House of encouraging an undercount by dissuading Hispanics and other immigrants from participating in the census, disproportionately affecting Democratic-leaning states and municipalities.

Many states, cities and civil rights groups have gone to court over the citizenship question, which is among a series of White House policies signaling tighter control over immigration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-taxing-the-rich-isnt-enough-11554159829

Democrats now control New York’s entire state government, and on Sunday Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed off on a $175.5 billion budget he described as “probably the broadest, most sweeping state plan that we have done.” He certainly spares no taxpayer.Mr. Cuomo brags about limiting increases in operating-fund spending to a modest 2%. But in February Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli noted that Mr. Cuomo’s numbers are “a less meaningful gauge of spending levels and trends,” given how the Governor has repeatedly shifted spending off-budget, adjusted the timing of disbursements, and used other sleights of hand.

Mr. DiNapoli puts the increase at nearly 4%, double the inflation rate. Spending on Medicaid and health-care will rise 3.6% to a total of $19.6 billion. Florida had 1.75 million more residents than New York last year, but its total budget was $88.7 billion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/obamacare-replacement-republican-party/

President Trump has tasked three Republican senators with coming up with a replacement for Obamacare if courts strike it down. It’s a prudent contingency plan. Republicans should, for that matter, advance their own health-care plan even if the lawsuit fails — as it is highly likely to do, in part because it lacks legal merit.

Republican senators are not notably eager to take up this assignment; their leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that the Senate will wait for the White House and the Democrats to reach a deal before it tackles health care. Republican strategists say the senators are right: Why put forward a plan and open Republicans to attack over it, when the party can concentrate instead on making the case against Democratic proposals to kick Americans off their health insurance and move toward a government monopoly? Why should Republicans reprise the experience of 2017–18, when they bled public support while trying to pass a health-care bill, spent the next election on the defensive on the issue, and then lost dozens of House seats?

A flaw in this cynical calculation is that Republicans cannot prevent Democrats from attacking them over health care by abandoning the issue; if that strategy worked, the 2018 elections would have gone very differently. Most of the Republicans who will be running for office in 2020 have already gone on record wanting to replace Obamacare. The Republican administration is urging its abolition in court. Democrats already have enough warrant to accuse Republicans of seeking to eliminate a health law on which many millions of Americans rely. Republicans can choose whether to respond to that attack by pointing to their own plan, or by letting Democrats devise a caricatured conservative plan to tie to them.

It is true that especially in the event the lawsuit fails, no conservative health-care plan has a chance of passage through a Democratic House. There is not much chance even that a conservative plan can serve as the basis for a bipartisan compromise. Note, however, that it was considerations much like these that kept Republicans from settling on a health-care plan during the Obama administration: They did not want to take responsibility for legislation they had no way to enact. The consequence was that when they had the power to enact legislation, they were unready to do it. They had built no consensus among Republican politicians or voters.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/01/papadopoulos-hints-conversation-launched-trump-russia-probe-fbi-setup/

The recently released transcript of George Papadopoulos’s congressional testimony reveals a significant fact: Papadopoulos’s introduction to Joseph Mifsud—the source of the “Russia has Hillary’s emails” tip that purportedly prompted the FBI to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign—was arranged mere days after Papadopoulos announced he was joining the Trump campaign.

Saturday evening, Papadopoulos rocked Twitter with claims that “a woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attaché in the U.K.” encouraged him “to meet Joseph Mifsud in Rome in March 2016.” These new revelations raise fresh concerns that, with the approval of the FBI, foreign governments were meddling in the 2016 election.