RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/21/

If the recent generic ballots tell us anything, it is that the Republican establishment should stop trying to run generic Republicans as candidates. The GOP of Paul “throw-granny-off-a-cliff-and-give-her-Social-Security-check-to-the-Koch-Brothers” Ryan has never been popular, and for good reason. This is why Donald Trump, despite having ostensibly low approval ratings, is virtually unstoppable compared to his purported “allies” in Congress. Against this alleged political party with approval ratings somewhere between those of Typhoid Mary and the man who ran over your dog, and with all the instinct to fight of said dead dog, a blue wave should surprise no one.

On the surface, therefore, the potential success of the Democratic Party would seem to be a banner day for #TheResistance.

Except it won’t be. Indeed, should a blue wave arrive in November, it will be the high water mark of #TheResistance’s influence. Within the administration, and even in Congress, the very policies that could shipwreck #TheResistance on the shores of its own extremism are closer than ever to coming to pass, and what’s more, #TheResistance knows this. Indeed, the campus-style freakout on the part of Democratic Party activists in response to the baseless accusations of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently lobbed a Duke Lacrosse-level slimeball of scurrilous envy disguised as grievance at Judge Brett Kavanaugh, shows as much.

Hobble the Left: Here’s How
No serious party would latch onto the rhetoric of the most asinine #MeToo activist unless it believed that was the only way to avoid an extinction-level event. Republicans everywhere should be much more pleased with Kavanaugh’s nomination, knowing the Left views it as such a threat to their agenda.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/21/

If the recent generic ballots tell us anything, it is that the Republican establishment should stop trying to run generic Republicans as candidates. The GOP of Paul “throw-granny-off-a-cliff-and-give-her-Social-Security-check-to-the-Koch-Brothers” Ryan has never been popular, and for good reason. This is why Donald Trump, despite having ostensibly low approval ratings, is virtually unstoppable compared to his purported “allies” in Congress. Against this alleged political party with approval ratings somewhere between those of Typhoid Mary and the man who ran over your dog, and with all the instinct to fight of said dead dog, a blue wave should surprise no one.

On the surface, therefore, the potential success of the Democratic Party would seem to be a banner day for #TheResistance.

Except it won’t be. Indeed, should a blue wave arrive in November, it will be the high water mark of #TheResistance’s influence. Within the administration, and even in Congress, the very policies that could shipwreck #TheResistance on the shores of its own extremism are closer than ever to coming to pass, and what’s more, #TheResistance knows this. Indeed, the campus-style freakout on the part of Democratic Party activists in response to the baseless accusations of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently lobbed a Duke Lacrosse-level slimeball of scurrilous envy disguised as grievance at Judge Brett Kavanaugh, shows as much.

Hobble the Left: Here’s How
No serious party would latch onto the rhetoric of the most asinine #MeToo activist unless it believed that was the only way to avoid an extinction-level event. Republicans everywhere should be much more pleased with Kavanaugh’s nomination, knowing the Left views it as such a threat to their agenda.

But it isn’t just Kavanaugh. Over the past few weeks events suggest that the Trump Administration and Congress can, and will, hobble the far Left by dismantling their strongest weapons in America’s ongoing cold civil war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-punishment-is-cruel-and-unusual-for-a-crime-committed-at-17-1537567051

What happens when a state supreme court fails to follow the precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court? Over the past decade, the high court has applied the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to limit penalties for juvenile crimes. First the justices barred capital punishment for defendants who committed their crimes—including murder—while they were under 18. Later they barred life without parole for juveniles who committed noncapital offenses, and eventually even for juvenile murderers, unless they were found to be in that “rare” group that “exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

These decisions reasoned that the immaturity of juvenile defendants made such sentences impermissibly disproportionate. Dissenters argued that the Eighth Amendment was written simply to forbid cruel methods of punishment, not to impose a judicially created sentencing proportionality regimen. The dissenters also cited numerous state sentencing laws permitting life without parole for juveniles to show that such sentences weren’t unusual.

Whether one agrees with the majority or the dissenters in those cases—a question on which the authors of this article take different views—a case the high court is now considering for review could unite those positions. In Chandler v. Mississippi, the sentencing judge imposed life without parole after pronouncing the defendant “mature” and noting that 17-year-olds—the age at which Joey Chandler committed the murder in question—may engage in numerous adult activities, from driving to obtaining an abortion. The judge also recounted the story of a 17-year-old who received a Medal of Honor during World War II, adding that he couldn’t have been called “immature.” As a final fillip, in recognition of the Supreme Court’s “talk” about prospects for rehabilitation, the judge pointed out that the executive is empowered to commute sentences.

What the judge did not do before imposing life without parole was consider whether he could find that the defendant was irretrievably depraved. Yet the Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed the sentence over a strong dissent.

The circumstances of Mr. Chandler’s crime include the social pathology that often surrounds such cases. He shot his 19-year-old cousin in 2003 for stealing marijuana Mr. Chandler intended to sell to support his pregnant girlfriend. As also happens occasionally in such cases, while in prison Mr. Chandler appears to have turned around his life, or what there is of it. He earned a high-school diploma, trained extensively in two trades, married and maintained an unblemished disciplinary record. Lawyers and advocates routinely present that sort of evidence to parole boards in aid of release, often successfully.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-presumption-of-guilt-1537570627

“As Judge Kavanaugh stands to gain the lifetime privilege of serving on the country’s highest court, he has the burden of persuasion. And that is only fair.”

—Anita Hill, Sept. 18, 2018

“Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed.”

—Sen. Maize Hirono (D., Hawaii)

The last-minute accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is an ugly spectacle by any measure. But if there is a silver lining, it is that the episode is providing an education for Americans on the new liberal standard of legal and political due process.

As Ms. Hill and Sen. Hirono aver, the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr. Kavanaugh to prove his innocence. If he cannot do so, then he is unfit to serve on the Court.
***

This turns American justice and due process upside down. The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can’t doom someone’s freedom or career merely by making a charge.

The accuser has to prove the allegation in a court of law or in some other venue where the accused can challenge the facts. Otherwise we have a Jacobin system of justice in which “J’accuse” becomes the standard and anyone can be ruined on a whim or a vendetta.

Another core tenet of due process is that an accusation isn’t any more or less credible because of the gender, race, religion or ethnicity of who makes it. A woman can lie, as the Duke lacrosse players will tell you. Ms. Hirono’s standard of credibility by gender would have appalled the civil-rights campaigners of a half century ago who marched in part against Southern courts that treated the testimony of black Americans as inherently less credible than that of whites. Yet now the liberal heirs of those marchers want to impose a double standard of credibility by gender.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-hearings-dianne-feinstein-senate-should-censure/The Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed.

Regardless of the fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the Senate should censure the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Her deception and maneuvering, condemned across the political spectrum, seriously interfered with the Senate’s performance of its constitutional duty to review judicial nominations, and unquestionably has brought the Senate into “dishonor and disrepute,” the standard that governs these matters. As a matter of institutional integrity, the Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed.

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution provides that each House of the Congress may “punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour.” Nine times in American history the Senate has used that power to censure one of its members. Feinstein has richly earned the right to join this inglorious company.

The senior senator from California not only disgraced herself personally in the underhanded and disingenuous way she dealt with the sex-assault charge against Judge Kavanaugh, but she also misused her position on the Judiciary Committee and broke faith with her fellow committee members. She was further, to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, no less, “unfair” to Judge Kavanaugh — manipulating the public disclosure of the charge so as to maximize the adverse publicity Judge Kavanaugh received and minimize the judge’s opportunity to defend himself. Censure is appropriate in this case for the Senate to defend its procedures and institutional reputation.

By her own account, Feinstein was aware of the charge shortly after President Trump nominated Kavanaugh, nearly two months before her committee opened its hearings. She came into possession of the letter making the charge by virtue of her position on the Judiciary Committee. We don’t know what contact she had thereafter with the accuser or the accuser’s Democrat-activist Washington lawyer — but we do know that Feinstein kept the information from her Senate colleagues, ensuring it was untested and unmentioned in the committee’s hearings. This, even though the hearings were accompanied by loud complaints from Democrats that the administration’s document production was insufficient. Indeed, as this is being written, while yet another Judiciary Committee hearing has been scheduled, she still has not released the unredacted text of the letter that made the charge.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-nomination-stop-stalling-and-vote/

This is about preventing a conservative justice from being added to the Supreme Court, nothing more.

Senate Democrats’ blatant abuse of the hearing process, their “delay, delay, delay” strategy, continues to pay dividends. Putting a stop to it would be long overdue.

Thursday was the day Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s manifestly meritorious nomination to the Supreme Court should have been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and sent to the full Senate. Instead the nomination languishes because of an eleventh-hour stunt pulled by committee Democrats — led by ranking member Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.).

Notwithstanding that Feinstein was well aware almost three months ago of a flimsily supported allegation against Kavanaugh — to wit, that 36 years ago, as a 17-year-old high school student, he groped and tried to force himself on a 15-year-old girl at an underage beer party — the senator sat on the information rather than submitting it to the hearing process. Although she met face-to-face with Kavanaugh and later questioned him when he was under oath at the hearing, Feinstein did not utter a word about the ancient, unverifiable claim to Kavanaugh.

Instead, the senator referred the allegation to the FBI, without identifying the self-proclaimed witness, despite knowing that:

1) The FBI had no jurisdiction to investigate a state-law assault claim.

2) Even if the FBI had had jurisdiction, it is federal practice not to investigate and prosecute minors, especially for offenses that state authorities have jurisdiction over, except in rare circumstances involving heinous crimes.

3) Even if the FBI had had jurisdiction over the offense, the bureau would never have opened an investigation of a 36-year-old allegation, even if the evidence were strong.

4) Even though the FBI had jurisdiction to conduct a background investigation of Kavanaugh, such investigations are not occasions to trigger full-blown criminal investigations of crimes the Justice Department has no jurisdiction to prosecute, but rather result in a flagging of allegations for the Senate’s consideration (which has been done here).

5) Even though Maryland state and local authorities (to whom neither Senator Feinstein nor the alleged victim apparently referred the allegation) have jurisdiction over any conceivable statutory offenses in question, they would never have opened an investigation based on a sketchy allegation of 36-year-old misconduct for which the statute of limitations lapsed decades ago (i.e., a case it would be impossible to investigate and prosecute).

https://www.city-journal.org/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-16176.html

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. According to the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, during a party Kavanaugh and a friend, both heavily intoxicated, pulled her into a bedroom, closed the door, and pushed her onto a bed. Kavanaugh got on top of her, and, placing a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, groped her and tried to remove her clothing. Terrified, she was able to escape and hide in a bathroom before fleeing the house.

This happened 36 years ago, Ford says. Kavanaugh was 17 years old at the time and Ford, 15. Kavanaugh firmly denies the story.

These last facts should make all those determined to use the charge as the poison pill to kill the judge’s nomination nervous. They’re on the verge of setting a dangerous precedent that will inevitably come back to bite them.

For one thing, they are setting the stage for condemning to reputation-death not just a Roe v. Wade-threatening Supreme Court nominee but any person, man or woman, Bible-thumper or Democratic socialist, by accusation alone. Ford’s story is almost impossible to investigate, much less to corroborate. It happened either in 1982 or 1983; it was either in June or August; it was a house, but she doesn’t know whose; she can’t recall how she got home.

Despite the hazy details, many find Ford’s story is credible, and for good reason: there’s nothing extraordinary about the events she describes, unfortunately, and over the years she told two therapists about them, though it’s not clear that she ever named Kavanaugh. Still, those who caution that human memory is unreliable, especially after more than three decades, are indisputably right. Is she certain that it was Brett Kavanaugh who was on top of her during those dreadful minutes? She had reason to fear that he was going to rape her, but do we know that that’s what he was intending, and does that make a difference? Kavanaugh himself might not know the answer. Multiply 35 years by large quantities of alcohol—Ford described Kavanaugh and his buddy as “stumbling drunk”—and you’ve got a terrible formula for truth-seeking.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/after-kavanaugh

Is there a silver lining in the malignant circus now playing at the Capitol and beamed to computer and television screens across the fruited plain? Depending on when you happen to read this, you might ask: “Which circus? Who’s playing this week?”

Politics is by nature a performance art. The rhetor declaiming in the Agora or the orator fulminating in the Forum may not have been Cory Booker or Kamala Harris—and certainly wasn’t Dianne Feinstein—but we can see the same habits of exaggeration, grandstanding, calumny, and economy with the truth at work, to say nothing of Machiavellian calculation and preening self-regard.

Politics, in short, may be a high calling—the proper ordering of the state, after all, is a big deal—but it is assuredly a grubby business full of loathsome characters, backstabbing, and power-hungry melodrama. So what else is new?

Everyone’s personal metanoia proceeds at its own pace and is sparked by different contingencies. For me, this week’s performance, starring Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, was a minor Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. I have long known, and often written, that the process by which we confirm candidates for the Supreme Court has become deeply corrupt. (I was going to say “politicized,” but that is not quite right: it’s by nature a political process, but one that has been perverted.)

As many commentators have noted, the definitive twist came with Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. That televised circus, unprecedented in its tawdriness, captivated the nation’s prurient attention and marked a brutal new low, unsurpassed even by the battalions of lies that surrounded Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. This wasn’t “advice and consent” but naked power politics, shocking partly for its breathtaking mendacity and bad faith but mostly alarming because of what it betokened about the place of “the least dangerous branch” in the metabolism of out political life.

Yes, judges were men, and men were interested parties, but here—one had thought—was a part of our political process that was set slightly to one side of the usual rough and tumble “I-want-this-so-you-cannot-have-that” partisan squabbling. The still-novel idea, back then, was that we were a country of laws, not men, and we therefore required people of intelligence and good will who were sufficiently impartial to don the black robe signifying not that they had no personal interests but that they could be sufficiently dispassionate to bracket those interests in order to adjudicate a dispute on the basis of the settled law of the land in light of precedent and the Constitution. Once upon a time, that was the idea.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-new-normal-1537484921

The economy is doing so well these days that even Barack Obama recently emerged 20 months after he left office to claim credit. Perhaps he’ll give another speech after Thursday brought more news that the days of economic malaise are over.

On Thursday morning the Labor Department announced that the number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims last week hit a new low for the current expansion. The seasonally adjusted figure, 201,000, was down 3,000—the lowest since November 1969. Part of the dip could be due to fewer claims in areas affected by Hurricane Florence. But the drop was even steeper in a few states like Illinois, and anyway the four-week average is at a record low too.

Then on Thursday afternoon the stock market, shrugging off President Trump’s latest tariffs, surged to a new high. At market close the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1%, enough to beat its January record. Other indexes followed suit. Mr. Trump, responding to the news on Twitter, seemed to break his caps-lock key: “S&P 500 HITS ALL-TIME HIGH Congratulations USA!” If workers are checking their retirement accounts for the first time in a couple months, they’re probably happy too.

All the usual caveats apply: The data on weekly jobless claims can be noisy, the economy is bigger than the stock market, and nobody on Planet Earth knows what the Dow will do tomorrow. Mr. Trump’s trade fight with China continues to escalate, with no clear resolution in sight.

No doubt most of our readers recall when the sluggish economy of the Obama years was said to be a “new normal.” Economic sentiment began to shift on Election Day in 2016, and economic policy shifted dramatically toward growth over the last 20 months. Coincidence?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dianne-feinstein-on-the-hot-seat-1537463501

“DiFi on the Hot Seat” announces a Los Angeles Times newsletter emailed to readers this morning. It is beginning to dawn on even liberal politicians that the Kavanaugh controversy could potentially hurt Democrats more than Republicans.

The L.A. Times reports on the challenges that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) has created for herself and her party with her handling of an initially anonymous claim that a teenage Brett Kavanaugh assaulted another teen in the 1980s:

Republicans accuse her of withholding the allegation until the most politically advantageous moment. Even some Democrats initially complained that she didn’t share the explosive information with them earlier.

Next week, Feinstein may have to lead Democrats into a hearing — if it takes place — with Kavanaugh and possibly his accuser, Northern California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, that will likely determine whether Kavanaugh goes to the high court or watches his confirmation fall apart amid the #MeToo movement over sexual misconduct.

The Times reports that Democrats have generally rallied to Sen. Feinstein’s defense but notes that “at least one Democrat is ready to publicly criticize.” It’s her November election opponent, California State Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León. Because the Golden State maintains a “jungle primary” system in which the top two vote-getters in the primary election advance, regardless of party affiliation, Sen. Feinstein faces her fellow Democrat in the general election. The Times notes the political fire she’s now taking from both the left and the right:

“The American people deserve to know why the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee waited nearly three months to hand this disqualifying document over to the federal authorities, and why Sen. Feinstein politely pantomimed her way through [the confirmation] hearing without a single question about the content of Kavanaugh’s character,” De León said.

Feinstein landed in hot water Tuesday when she told a reporter that she “can’t say everything’s truthful” in Ford’s account, a comment that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said makes “clear” why she didn’t bring the allegation forward sooner.

Feinstein later tweeted that she’s found “every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable.”

The Times report follows an editorial this week in Ms. Feinstein’s hometown San Francisco Chronicle:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s treatment of a more than 3-decade-old sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was unfair all around. It was unfair to Kavanaugh, unfair to his accuser and unfair to Feinstein’s colleagues — Democrats and Republicans alike — on the Senate Judiciary Committee. CONTINUE AT SITE