RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are more than 66 investigations by the Broward County State Attorney’s office into Broward County Sheriff’s deputies and employees, ranging from drug trafficking to kidnapping since 2012, according to a 2014 Brady list produced by the Broward State Attorney’s office. Forty of the investigations occurred under embattled Sheriff Scott Israel’s watch. His office is now under investigation for allegations that his deputies failed to allow first responders from treating patients at the scene of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Feb. 14, and failure of his deputies to enter the school during the rampage that left 17 people dead, according to reports.

Over the weekend Israel fought back on calls for his resignation saying the actions of his deputies were “[not] his responsibility” when they failed to enter the high school that was under siege by Nikolas Cruz, 19. Police responded to calls regarding Cruz over 45 times over a seven-year period, although Israel disputes the report, stating his office only received 23 callsduring that time frame. The FBI also received a detailed call on Jan. 5, warning that Cruz had posted disturbing images of slaughtered animals and comments on his Instagram saying he wanted to kill people, according to reports. The FBI stated on Feb. 16, that the tip was not forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office.

But Israel has long had been criticized for his leadership. While Israel is battling allegations that his office failed to appropriately respond to the Cruz shooting, he is also fighting a civil court case brought by the family of Jermaine McBean, an African-American information technology engineer. McBean was killed in 2013 by Israel’s deputies after they responded to a call that McBean was walking in his neighborhood with what appeared to be a weapon. It was an unloaded air rifle.

Near-daily gossip surrounds Donald Trump’s three marquee generals.

The media sometimes blare out rumors that General John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, is proving to be a loose cannon and might soon be fired.

Lt. General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, is occasionally rumored to be a robotic PowerPoint wonk and hawkish interventionist who soon might be terminated.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis is purportedly too much the centrist Democrat, and embarrassed by Trump’s antics, and thus might be leaving.

Of course, few Cabinet or White House appointees ever serve throughout an entire administration. Burnout is natural. Lucrative private-sector job offers multiply monthly. Normal people do not enjoy living inside the Beltway.

Barack Obama had four defense secretaries, three national security advisers and five chiefs of staff. That is about par for a presidential tenure covering eight years.

But the problem with all these rumors of departing generals is not just that they are likely false and shopworn. They also make no sense because the three generals have been radically successful. In just a year, they have markedly enhanced U.S. national security as well as the image of the Trump administration itself.

The media, which is mostly anti-Trump, has always been schizophrenic in the coverage of the three generals. Some media outlets initially echoed old worries about too many Pentagon tentacles or the militarization of the executive branch. They forgot that generals, both active and retired, have long held administration jobs. General Colin Powell, for instance, served four different presidents, starting with his tenure as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan.

Others in the media had hoped that the mostly apolitical generals would nudge the wild-card Trump left of center and embed him within the Washington foreign-policy establishment.

“It’s a plot against our election, not by the Russians, but by the left. It’s a plot against freedom of speech, not by the Russians, but by the left. The plotters took a Russian propaganda and influence operation and turned it into a pretext for the greatest assault on democracy and freedom in American history.”

Trump’s election victory was the Reichstag fire of internet censorship. The fury and conspiracy theories that followed were not just about bringing down President Trump, but ending free speech online.

It’s no coincidence that the central conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election involves free speech or that the solution is internet censorship. The claim that Russian trolls and bots rigged the election has zero actual evidence behind it. But it’s a convenient tool for not only delegitimizing Trump, but the very idea of a free and open internet where anyone can say anything they choose.

Senator Ben Cardin, Rep. Jerry Nadler and other members of Congress compared the election influence conspiracy to Pearl Harbor. Rep. Jim Himes went even further, suggesting that it had eclipsed 9/11 by claiming that it, “is up there with Pearl Harbor in terms of its seriousness as a challenge to this country.”

What they’re really saying is that Democrats losing an election is worse than the murder of 3,000 people. It’s why they will oppose a terror state travel ban until Islamic terrorists start voting Republican.

And what did this greatest attack since Pearl Harbor consist of? Speech. On the internet.

After Kimberly Manor lost her husband to lung cancer, she was inspired to make a dramatic career change. Kimberly now owns and operates Moose Jooce in Lake, Mich., a “vape shop” that sells various electronic nicotine devices. These products use battery-powered coils to vaporize liquids, with differing levels of nicotine or none at all. Thus, vapers may inhale nicotine without the tar or other harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, since there is no tobacco and no combustion. Scientific evidence suggests this is a much safer alternative to smoking.

Ms. Manor estimates that her business has helped more than 500 people quit smoking, most of them longtime smokers in their 50s or older. Yet the Food and Drug Administration is discouraging more such enterprises. In a regulation issued in 2016 known as the “deeming rule,” the agency ordered that vaping products would be subject to the same regulations developed for the cigarette industry under the Tobacco Control Act of 2009.

The deeming rule has been devastating to businesses like Ms. Manor’s. To give just one example, vape shop owners frequently experiment by mixing new flavors for the liquid “juice.” Now, each separate creation requires its own prohibitively expensive application for FDA approval, which means that vape shops have been forced to stop innovating.

There are many reasons to criticize the FDA’s action, but its most fundamental flaw—and the one that our legal foundation raises in three lawsuits on behalf of Ms. Manor and nine others—is that the rule was finalized by someone without authority to do so. The rule was not issued or signed by either the secretary of health and human services or the FDA commissioner, both Senate-confirmed officials. Instead, it was issued and signed by Leslie Kux, a career bureaucrat at FDA.

This isn’t the first time the FDA bureaucracy has exceeded its authority. HHS officials in prior administrations purported to delegate their rule-making power to the bureaucrats who held the position Ms. Kux now fills—and she has issued nearly 200 rules.

All these rules are invalid. The attempted delegation of rule-making authority to someone not appointed as an “Officer of the United States” violates one of the most important separation-of-powers clauses in the Constitution. CONTINUE AT SITE

With undiminished esteem for my friend David French’s legal acumen, I confess to being underwhelmed by his defense of the Schiff memo. I am going to explain why, but I first want to apologize for the length of this column, which owes to the fact that David’s observations provide an opportunity to address the political context of the congressional investigation, which I have not done much of. I appreciate David’s kind words about my analysis of the memo, and that his lukewarm approval of Representative Adam Schiff’s handiwork comes with a healthy dose of concern about government misconduct.

I also appreciate that we do not yet know everything we should know, and may never, which makes it impossible to draw definitive conclusions. But that hardly means we cannot draw any conclusions. The Justice Department sharply departed from its practice of providing courts with corroboration of serious allegations, and from its tradition of candor in dealings with the federal courts. It eludes me why it is so hard to acknowledge this just because we are at an information deficit and must navigate through a political maelstrom.

Investigations and Politics

There is no point complaining about the partisanship unavoidably attendant to this controversy. This is not, say, the financial meltdown or the Iraq War — disputed issues that were politicized unnecessarily, if predictably. This is an inherently political dispute: A situation in which the incumbent Democratic administration used its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to monitor the Republican presidential campaign, and did so making significant use of what David charitably calls “opposition research” from the Democratic presidential campaign.

With due respect, this is not a situation in which, out of the blue, “a congressional majority [has made] substantial charges of Department of Justice wrongdoing.” Against the backdrop of its blatant tanking of the criminal investigation against the Democratic presidential nominee, the Democratic administration’s Department of Justice went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign to seek monitoring of a former adviser of the Republican presidential campaign — monitoring that would inevitably have revealed campaign communications in stored email and texts, and quite possibly in real-time conversations — based on a stated suspicion that there was a traitorous confederation between the Republican campaign (quite possibly including the Republican nominee) and the Putin regime.

This one is Judge Juan R. Torruella, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. This 84-year-old dinosaur was nominated to the court in the pre-Reagan era, in 1974, by President Gerald Ford. As a Puerto Rican native and strong advocate for the island, the judge is so troubled by his home island’s financial difficulties that he’s calling for a federal grand jury investigate to see if criminal cases can be made against those responsible for the Puerto Rican government’s monumental debt.

To quote him: “I request an investigation by a federal grand jury to determine if there are criminal cases against individuals and organizations inside and outside of Puerto Rico in relation to the economic crisis facing the country.”

What prompted such an outburst at this late hour? It’s that Judge Torruella notes massive amounts of U.S. taxpayer money is pouring into Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria. He rightly worries that the same corruption and incompetence that led to the island’s pre-hurricane financial disaster will be repeated. He doesn’t want to see that money squandered and drained away to political lackeys. Here, the judge has a legitimate concern. However…

If the grand jury honestly looked into the matter, it could indict the entire political establishment of Puerto Rico for malfeasance or misfeasance along with the island’s public-sector unions. And would such an investigation turn into a witch hunt to hook those deep-pocketed outsiders who had the audacity to loan money to Puerto Rico? Probably.

Where the judge really goes off the rails is when he engages in the blatantly political. As the San Juan Daily Star reports:

He also called attention to the “passivity’ with which the island has accepted unequal treatment by the U.S. government, and called for mobilizing what he called “allies” in minority sectors in the mainland U.S. to denounce the violation of Puerto Rican civil rights. “It is time for that passivity to end,” Torruella said. “Our cause is just.”

We have been watching outrageous judicial usurpation of power for a full year.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Philip Gutierrez issued an order preventing President Trump from revoking DACA protections, and is ordering the administration to reinstate all those who have been dropped from the program. This is more astounding judicial overreach in a year marred by such actions. The initial DACA program was a memo, not legislation, not even a legitimate executive order or regulation. Trump has every right as president to revoke it and enforce that revocation, but this judge has the gall to say he can’t.

An earlier circuit court decision handed down in January, blocked Trump from ending DACA in the first place – an action he had initiated last year. The Department of Justice issued an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to override this decision, but on Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear it. While this is standard practice when an issue is being litigated in lower courts, the clear abuse of power exercised by these lower courts should compel the Supremes to consider this a special case.

We have been watching this outrageous judicial usurpation of power for a full year. It is sheer lawlessness and has to stop. All public officials swear an oath to protect and defend, not subvert, the Constitution. What they are doing is a threat to the very legal foundations of our Republic.

There is only one punitive remedy that can be taken against such judges. Congress can impeach them. Unfortunately, Congress has impeached only 15 federal judges in its entire history, and only eight of those were actually removed. A good example is the case of Alcee I. Hastings (another U.S. district court judge), who was impeached for accepting a $150,000 bribe to reduce sentences for two mobsters. That is certainly a clear-cut case for impeachment, not to mention significant jail time, but so are these overtly partisan decisions made by judges specifically to thwart the irrefutable authority vested in the presidency.

For half a century, the federal government has pursued a disastrous strategy in addressing the problems of black Americans. They were designated a victim class, and enormous sums of money were expended on incentives to perpetuate that status.

The welfare state has perpetuated multi-generational pathologies, while the encouragement of victimology and the blame placed on white racism have poisoned race relations instead of healing them.

It’s fair to say the United States government began its long and catastrophic commitment to this approach fifty years ago today (or yesterday): February 29, 1968. On that day, the Kerner Commission (officially the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) delivered its report (official summary; full 400-plus pages), and white racism was officially blamed for the problems of black America.

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

In those days, I was already a political junkie who read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a local paper and watched network news. I remember well the huge fuss the media made over the Kerner Commission Report. It kicked off an extended campaign that was often labeled a “national soul-searching.”

All the smart people you could find in the media pretty much agreed that we just had to commit ourselves to fighting racism as the solution to the problems of the black community. White guilt gained momentum as a force in individual and group decisions.

The effects of the report were far-reaching. The powerful institutions of America were put on notice that consciously or not, they were perpetuating racism:

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

Lately, the left has been spouting about unchallenged moral authority. Rep. Scalise is the closest thing to a sitting official with unchallenged moral authority on mass shootings. He was seriously wounded when a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire at practice for a congressional charity baseball game. Instead of seizing on that, Rep. Scalise and other Republicans took the high ground.

Meanwhile after Parkland, the left went right back to its swamp.

I don’t expect the media or the left to listen to Rep. Scalise. But maybe this should be a reminder that decency doesn’t work with the indecent. Republicans should have treated the attack just like Parkland.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said Monday that lawmakers should be focused on addressing mental health to help stop future shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14 and the one last summer in which he was shot, before they focus on ways to take people’s guns away.

“Let’s focus more on addressing these problems in mental health that we’ve started to deal with in Congress,” Scalise said on Fox News. “Let’s close loopholes, let’s figure out what went wrong with government before people start talking about taking away the rights of law abiding citizens.”

That would be the right thing to do. There’s majority support for it. But the left is obsessed with dismantling the Bill of Rights instead.

The reactions to the Florida school shooting have been so predictable that most commentary starts with some variation of “here we go again.” The usual “solutions” to the problem are trotted out, each with its varying degrees of weakness, and none able to achieve what everybody expects––no more massacres of kids at school. But more interesting than this fossilized debate are the unspoken assumptions behind the various recommendations, and our culture’s inability to talk meaningfully about the most consequential phenomenon in history: human evil. That’s why it’s easier to ritually repeat the same failed decades-old “solutions,” or to politicize the bloodshed for partisan gain.

The left, of course, thinks “smarter” gun control is the answer. They want to ban “assault rifles,” a scare-term that confuses semiautomatic with automatic weapons, the sale of which is already strictly limited. Then they sell the bait-and-switch by highlighting sinister-looking add-ons like silencers or high-capacity magazines. But if anti-gun nuts were concerned with gun deaths rather than the relatively rare but more politically fungible multiple-victim school-shootings, they’d know that very few murders involve rifles. In 2016, murderers were 19 times more likely to use handguns than rifles. And more murders were committed with hands and feet than with rifles. Demonizers of “assault rifles” forget that they were banned from 1994 to 2004, and that the ban was ineffective, failing to stop the Columbine shooters in 1999, or even to reduce firearm killings.

Other talking points are equally useless for anything other than partisan gain. Like the “assault rifle,” the NRA has become the bogeyman Dems reflexively trot out for a two-minute hate after every high-profile shooting. Politicians who gobble up billions of dollars from public employee unions and tech plutocrats condemn the comparative pittance the NRA spends in lobbying to defend a Constitutional right. Confiscation of guns, along the lines of Australia’s program a few years back, runs afoul of the Second Amendment, not to mention being practically impossible given that there are about 300 million guns in circulation, five million of which are the dreaded AR-15 “assault rifles.”