RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember when Democrats and the press corps complained about “dark money” and wanted to rewrite the First Amendment to ban certain campaign contributions? Well, well. Now the progressive operatives at Fusion GPS are invoking free-speech rights to block the House Intelligence Committee’s probe of the infamous Steele dossier.

Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm behind the Steele dossier claiming that Donald Trump colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. Congress is investigating Russian influence, and former British spook Christopher Steele relied on Russian sources. The dossier is clearly of interest, perhaps even a Rosetta Stone in the probe.

Yet Fusion chief Glenn Simpson won’t cooperate, and on Monday the company’s lawyers sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee refusing to comply with subpoenas for documents and testimony related to the dossier. The letter claims the subpoenas “violate the First Amendment rights of our clients and their clients, and would chill any American running for office . . . from conducting confidential opposition research in an election.”

Hello? Mr. Simpson must be having a good laugh at that one. Surely he knows that his many Democratic clients have spent most of the last decade moaning about “dark money” donations in politics. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders proposed rewriting the First Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling so government could regulate political speech. Fusion must also not have read the avalanche of press releases from Democrats like Chuck Schumer demanding disclosure of all political donations.

Citizens United protected the broadcast of a movie opposing Hillary Clinton—obvious political speech. But the House wants to know who paid Fusion to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump and whether any of that money or intelligence came from foreign sources. The First Amendment doesn’t protect attempts by foreign governments or agents to influence U.S. elections.

Foreign campaign contributions are banned under U.S. law, and in the 1990s Congress conducted extensive investigations into Chinese and other donations to the Clinton campaign. No one claimed the Riady family’s donations were protected political speech because they financed Bill Clinton’s re-election.

Fusion by its own admission has worked in the past on a lobby campaign for a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. Investigators want to know if those clients or other foreign actors had anything to do with the commissioning or production of the Steele dossier.

The press corps is cheering investigations into whether the Russians worked with a Trump campaign to win the election—and we want those answers too. But it’s also important to know if other Americans worked—wittingly or not—with Russian actors to collect and distribute accusations against Mr. Trump.

Fusion can dig up all the dirt it wants on clients and leak it to its media pals. That is its business model. But the company has no constitutional right to avoid a probe into foreign influence. The House’s next move should be a vote for contempt of Congress.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and served as lead counsel in the successful challenge to the Obama insurance payments under the Affordable Care Act.

There appears no end to the villainy of President Trump. This week, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra denounced Trump as nothing short of a saboteur while members have lined up before cameras to denounce his latest executive order as tantamount to murder.

His offense? He rescinded an unconstitutional order by President Obama and restored the authority of Congress over the “power of the purse.” The response to what Becerra called “sabotage” has been a call for a rather curious challenge where Democrats want the judicial branch to enjoin the executive branch from recognizing the inherent authority of the legislative branch. It is an institutional act that would have baffled the Framers.

I had the honor of serving as lead counsel, with an exceptionally talented team from Capitol Hill, for the U.S. House of Representatives in its challenge to unilateral actions taken by the Obama administration under the Affordable Care Act. In a historic ruling, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled in favor of the House of Representatives and found that President Obama violated the Constitution in committing billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury without the approval of Congress.

The money went to insurance companies, even though Congress had rejected an Obama administration request for the appropriations. The case is pending on appeal, but the Trump administration has filed a notice with the D.C. Circuit that it was rescinding the order found unconstitutional by the federal court. The result of the order is to return the matter to the place where it should have remained: in Congress.

The ruling of the federal court was a triumph for those of us who have warned for years about the erosion of the separation of powers within our constitutional system. That high point in the judiciary followed a low point in Congress. In a State of the Union address, President Obama announced that he would circumvent Congress after it failed to approve measures in immigration and health care that he demanded.

This alarming declaration was met with an equally alarming response of rapturous applause by members thrilled by the notion of their own institutional obsolescence. President Obama proceeded to then assume the core defining power left to Congress under the “power of purse” in Article I of the Constitution. When Congress refused to appropriate money for subsidies for insurance companies, President Obama ordered the money from the Treasury through a claim of executive authority.

As affirmed by the federal court, the actions of President Obama directly violated the “power of the purse” clause of the Constitution, which provides that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” It also violated the federal law itself and the court declared that such actions “cannot surmount the plain text [of the law].”

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For over forty years the left has been successfully reshaping American culture. Social mores and government policies about sexuality, marriage, the sexes, race relations, morality, and ethics have changed radically. The collective wisdom of the human race that we call tradition has been marginalized or discarded completely. The role of religion in public life has been reduced to a private preference. And politics has been increasingly driven by the assumptions of progressivism: internationalism privileged over nationalism, centralization of power over its dispersal in federalism, elitist technocracy over democratic republicanism, “human sciences” over common sense, and dependent clients over autonomous citizens.

But the election of Donald Trump, and the overreach of the left’s response to that victory, suggest that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the left’s cultural, social, and political dominance.

The two terms of Barack Obama seemed to be the crowning validation of the left’s victory. Despite Obama’s “no blue state, no red state” campaign rhetoric, he governed as the most leftist––and ineffectual–– president in history. Deficits exploded, taxes were raised, new entitlements created, and government expanded far beyond the dreams of center-left Democrats. Marriage and sex identities were redefined. The narrative of permanent white racism was endorsed and promoted. Tradition-minded Americans were scorned as “bitter clingers to guns and religion.” Hollywood and Silicon Valley became even more powerful cultural arbiters and left-wing publicists. And cosmopolitan internationalism was privileged over patriotic nationalism, while American exceptionalism was reduced to an irrational parochial prejudice.

The shocking repudiation of the establishment left’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, was the first sign that perhaps the hubristic left had overreached, and summoned nemesis in the form of a vulgar, braggadocios reality television star and casino developer who scorned the hypocritical rules of decorum and political correctness that even many Republicans adopted to avoid censure and calumny. Yet rather than learning the tragic self-knowledge that Aristotle says compensates the victim of nemesis, the left overreached yet again with its outlandish, hysterical tantrums over Trump’s victory. The result has been a stark exposure of the left’s incoherence and hypocrisy so graphic and preposterous that they can no longer be ignored.

First, the now decidedly leftist Democrats refused to acknowledge their political miscalculations. Rather than admit that their party has drifted too far left beyond the beliefs of the bulk of the states’ citizens, they shifted blame onto a whole catalogue of miscreants: Russian meddling, a careerist FBI director, their own lap-dog media, endemic sexism, an out-of-date

Electoral College, FOX News, and irredeemable “deplorables” were just a few. Still high on the “permanent majority” Kool-Aid they drank during the Obama years, they pitched a fit and called it “resistance,” as though comfortably preaching to the media, university, and entertainment choirs was like fighting Nazis in occupied France. The bathos and ridiculous hyperbole of their whining exposed for all to see their rank egotism and lack of discernment and judgment.

This childish behavior came hard on the whole “snowflake” and “microagression” phenomenon in colleges and universities. Normal people watched as some of the most privileged young people in history turned their subjective slights and bathetic discontents into weapons of tyranny, shouting down or driving away speakers they didn’t like, and calling for “muscle” to enforce their assault on the First Amendment. Relentlessly repeated on FOX News and on the Drudge Report, these antics galvanized large swaths of American voters who used to be amused, but now were disgusted by such displays of rank ingratitude and arrogant dismissal of Constitutional rights. And voters could see that the Democrats encouraged and enabled this nonsense. The prestige of America’s best universities, where most of these rites of passage for the scions of the well-heeled occurred, was even more damaged than it had been in the previous decades.

Last week, I went to a dinner event at social club of which I am a member but rarely patronize. You will guess why when I tell you I ran into a friend of longstanding—someone I know well, but hadn’t seen in a couple of years—and she greeted me with the exclamation, “Here’s a Trumpster!” I could see that that was partly for the benefit of the gents she was talking to, a sort of tribal-marking announcement (“He’s one of those, boys”) but I couldn’t immediately tell whether the glint in her eye was friendly or otherwise. She soon cleared up that ambiguity. I said something about “our president.” “He’s not my president,” she snapped, adding that Donald Trump was deeply unpopular and would probably be driven from office soon.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/15/yes-trump-is-winning/

“Actually,” I offered, “his approval ratings are on the rise.”

“So were Mussolini’s,” came the icy rejoinder.

Got it. At least I knew where we stood.

One is encouraged to leave politics at the front door of this particular club (unlike London’s “Other Club” where Rule 12 stipulates that “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics”). But so thoroughly pink is the majority of the membership that the issue rarely arises. For the herd of independent minds, unanimity is a consoling patent of authenticity. “We all believe this, ergo it must be true—indeed, it is invisible. It simply is.”

Hence a defining irony of the contemporary progressive (one cannot truthfully call it “liberal”) dispensation: convinced that their opinions represent not their opinions but, on the contrary, that they mirror a virtuous state of nature, they regard dissent not as disagreement but as either heresy or insanity. The former calls for condemnation or ostracism, the latter for pity tinctured by contempt.

Donald Trump has introduced several novelties into this dynamic. From the point of view of my (I suspect former) friend, Trump is both (never mind the contradiction) an impossibility and an affront. Everyone she talks to knows this.

And yet on the ground, in the real world, Trump is methodically pushing ahead with the agenda he campaigned on. That includes:

Nominating judges and justices who can be counted on to interpret and enforce the law but do not endeavor to use the law to promote their social agenda;
Addressing the problem of illegal immigration and securing the borders of the United States;
Developing America’s vast energy resources;
Rolling back the regulatory state, especially the administrative overreach of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency;
Pursuing policies that put America, and American workers, first, not to the detriment of our relationships with our international partners but through a recognition that strength and sovereign independence make nations more reliable actors;
Restoring the combat readiness and morale of the United States military;
Simplifying the U.S. tax code, making it more competitive for U.S. businesses and more equitable for individuals;
Getting a handle on the unconstitutional and shockingly inefficient monstrosity ironically called the Affordable Care Act;
Putting a stop to the obscene violation of due process that Title IX fanatics brought to college campuses across the country.

The radicalization of the Democratic Party is transforming everything that happens in America into another battle in our unending culture war.

Is there anything left in American public life that isn’t an occasion for political rancor and division? NFL games are now nothing more than crude pieces of political theater. On Sunday even Vice President Mike Pence got in on the act, showing up to a Colts-49ers game then leaving after a few players knelt during the national anthem. Next day was Columbus Day, which the cities of Los Angeles and Austin decided this year to replace with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” because Christopher Columbus is apparently the new Robert E. Lee. And it’s only Tuesday.

It should be obvious by now that our culture wars will henceforth be constant and unending; the next battle could be triggered by almost anything. Whether it’s the reactions (or non-reactions) of Hollywood celebrities to the unsurprising news of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misdeeds or the outraged calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment the instant news broke of the Las Vegas massacre, very little can happen in America now without it being an occasion for an appeal to one’s own political tribe. No matter how tawdry or horrifying the news, there is vanishingly little room for solidarity because there is no appetite for it. Not even late-night comedy shows with their shrinking audiences can resist the urge to devolve into partisan political rants.

For all his eagerness to wage the culture wars in his improvised, bombastic style, this didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It didn’t begin with Barack Obama, either, but a recent study by Pew Research Center found that divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values reached record levels during the Obama administration. You don’t need a Pew survey to tell you that, of course, but the data helps illuminate an otherwise vague feeling that American society is coming apart at the seams, and has been for years.
Right and Left Are Moving Farther Apart, And Fast

The Pew study measures responses to issues Pew has been asking about since 1994, things like welfare, race, and immigration. On almost every count, the gaps between Republicans and Democrats held more or less steady up until around 2010, when they began to widen. Today, “Republicans and Democrats are now further apart ideologically than at any point in more than two decades,” with the median Republican more conservative than 97 percent of Democrats and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 percent of Republicans. Here’s what that looks like in a chart:

Ask most Republicans to identify Donald Trump’s biggest triumph to date, and the answer comes quick: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. That’s the cramped view.

The media remains so caught up with the president’s tweets that it has missed Mr. Trump’s project to transform the rest of the federal judiciary. The president is stocking the courts with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors. Mr. Trump’s nastygrams to Bob Corker will be a distant memory next week. Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett’s influence on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could still be going strong 40 years from now.

Mr. Trump has now nominated nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year. There are another 160 court openings, allowing Mr. Trump to flip or further consolidate conservative majorities on the circuit courts that have the final say on 99% of federal legal disputes.

This project is the work of Mr. Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Every new president cares about the judiciary, but no administration in memory has approached appointments with more purpose than this team.

Mr. Trump makes the decisions, though he’s taking cues from Mr. McGahn and his team. The Bushies preferred a committee approach: Dozens of advisers hunted for the least controversial nominee with the smallest paper trail. That helped get picks past a Senate filibuster, but it led to bland choices, or to ideological surprises like retired Justice David Souter.

Harry Reid’s 2013 decision to blow up the filibuster for judicial nominees has freed the Trump White House from having to worry about a Democratic veto during confirmation. Mr. McGahn’s team (loaded with former Clarence Thomas clerks) has carte blanche to work with outside groups like the Federalist Society to tap the most conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn has long been obsessed with constitutional law and the risks of an all-powerful administrative state. His crew isn’t subjecting candidates to 1980s-style litmus tests on issues like abortion. Instead the focus is on promoting jurists who understand the unique challenges of our big-government times. Can the prospective nominee read a statute? Does he or she defer to the government’s view of its own authority? The result has been a band of young rock stars and Scalia-style textualists like Ms. Barrett, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice David Stras.

Senate Republicans have so far blown their major agenda items, but they’ve remained unified on judges. They agreed to kill the Senate filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so as to confirm Justice Gorsuch; have confirmed six other judicial nominees; and stand ready to greenlight dozens more. This is a big shift from divisions the party had over the Bush 41 and Bush 43 nominees.

Because Mr. Trump’s picks have largely spent their careers focused on administrative law and constitutional questions, few have gotten bogged down by controversial cultural rulings. They do have paper trails, but mostly on serious and technical issues. This helps reassure Republicans even as it deprives Democrats of the fodder they’d need to stage dramatic opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Beltway media move in a pack, and that means ignoring some stories while leaping on others. Consider the pack’s lack of interest in the story of GPS Fusion and the “dossier” from former spook Christopher Steele.

The House Intelligence Committee recently issued subpoenas to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that paid for the dossier that contained allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and ties to Russia. The dossier’s details have been either discredited or are unverified, but the document nonetheless framed the political narrative about Trump-Russian collusion that led to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Democrats and Fusion seem to care mostly that House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes issued the subpoenas, given that he temporarily stepped aside from the Russia probe in April. But only the chairman is allowed to issue subpoenas, and Mr. Nunes did so at the request of Republican Mike Conaway, who is officially leading the probe.

The real question is why Democrats and Fusion seem not to want to tell the public who requested the dossier or what ties Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson had with the Russians in 2016. All the more so because congressional investigators have learned that Mr. Simpson was working for Russian clients at the same time he was working with Mr. Steele.

Americans deserve to know who paid Mr. Simpson for this work and if the Kremlin influenced the project. They also deserve to know if former FBI director James Comey relied on the dossier to obtain warrants to monitor the Trump campaign. If the Russians used disinformation to spur a federal investigation into a presidential candidate, that would certainly qualify as influencing an election.

The House committee also subpoenaed FBI documents about wiretap warrants more than a month ago but has been stonewalled. There is no plausible reason that senior leaders of Congress—who have top-level security clearance—can’t see files directly relevant to the question of Russian election interference.

Justice Department excuses about interfering with Mr. Mueller’s investigation don’t wash. Mr. Mueller is conducting a criminal probe, while Congress has a duty to oversee the executive branch. Both investigations can proceed simultaneously. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mr. Mueller, needs to deputize specific Justice officials to handle Congress’s requests.

The media attacks on Mr. Nunes for issuing the subpoenas are a sign that he is onto something. He recused himself in April after complaints about his role bringing to light Obama Administration officials who “unmasked” and leaked the names of secretly wiretapped Trump officials. Mr. Nunes has since been vindicated as we’ve learned that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power did the unmasking. Yet Democrats on the House Ethics Committee have refused to clear Mr. Nunes—trying to keep him sidelined from the Russia probe.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has also pursued the Fusion GPS trail, but he could use House backup. Speaker Paul Ryan needs to call on the Ethics Committee to render a quick decision on Mr. Nunes or allow him to resume his Russia investigation. Mr. Ryan should also prepare to have the House vote on a contempt citation if the Justice Department doesn’t supply subpoenaed documents.

Mr. Mueller will grind away at the Trump-Russia angle, but the story of Democrats, the Steele dossier and Jim Comey’s FBI also needs telling. Americans don’t need a Justice Department coverup abetted by Glenn Simpson’s media buddies.

The Women’s March is throwing the Women’s Convention featuring Bernie Sanders and other feminists aren’t happy about it.

Seems the flashier new group, which made a name for itself by marching against President Trump’s inauguration in pink “pussy” knit caps, has annoyed the more garden-variety feminists by choosing a man to headline the group’s next big event, upseting the delicate identity-politics political eco-system.

Daily Caller reports:

Progressives came out in full force Thursday to denounce Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the headlining speaker at a convention organized by the Women’s March.

Feminists and their organizations blasted the Women’s Convention, a three-day event aimed a female liberation, for having Sanders speak on the opening night of the convention. Some women took to Twitter to voice their frustrations, while others rallied behind a petition calling for the immediate removal of Sanders.

After all, who more logical to speak for women at a Women’s Convention than a man? And not just any man, but one who published an essay on women’s “rape fantasies” with multiple men during his days as a leftist radical in 1972. You can see the idiocy of this peculiar choice for a Women’s Convention. It only make sense when one recognizes the Women’s March is better titled the Ladies Auxiliary March for leftist politicians.

That’s not to say the other side is not equally idiotic. The Women’s March organizers are snapping right back at their more conventional feminist sisters by arguing that Rep. Maxine Waters of California will be the official keynote speaker, not the featured speaker, as Bernie Sanders will be.

Organizer Tamika Mallory also pointed out that while Sanders may address the women the first night, Rep. Maxine Waters is the convention’s keynote speaker. The outrage over Sanders only serves to erase the work of black women, Mallory added.

“To the folks yelling at @womensmarch & directly at me: Why does your version of advocating for women’s rights = bashing Black women leaders?” Mallory tweeted.

So, to complain about Bernie is to demean Maxine Waters? Guess there really were women who voted for Hillary Clinton solely because she was a woman.

The left has such fascinating logic. These people will be yelling and backbiting for years abouot this. They deserve each other.

The rest of us should break out the popcorn.

The Women’s March is throwing the Women’s Convention featuring Bernie Sanders and other feminists aren’t happy about it.

Seems the flashier new group, which made a name for itself by marching against President Trump’s inauguration in pink “pussy” knit caps, has annoyed the more garden-variety feminists by choosing a man to headline the group’s next big event, upseting the delicate identity-politics political eco-system.

Daily Caller reports:

Progressives came out in full force Thursday to denounce Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the headlining speaker at a convention organized by the Women’s March.

Feminists and their organizations blasted the Women’s Convention, a three-day event aimed a female liberation, for having Sanders speak on the opening night of the convention. Some women took to Twitter to voice their frustrations, while others rallied behind a petition calling for the immediate removal of Sanders.

After all, who more logical to speak for women at a Women’s Convention than a man? And not just any man, but one who published an essay on women’s “rape fantasies” with multiple men during his days as a leftist radical in 1972. You can see the idiocy of this peculiar choice for a Women’s Convention. It only make sense when one recognizes the Women’s March is better titled the Ladies Auxiliary March for leftist politicians.

That’s not to say the other side is not equally idiotic. The Women’s March organizers are snapping right back at their more conventional feminist sisters by arguing that Rep. Maxine Waters of California will be the official keynote speaker, not the featured speaker, as Bernie Sanders will be.

Free at last! That’s the message for millions who don’t get health coverage at work and, until now, faced two dismal options: going without insurance or paying Obama­Care’s soaring premiums. On Thursday, President Trump announced changes that will allow consumers to choose coverage options costing half of what ObamaCare’s cheapest bronze plans cost.

Democrats are already accusing the president of kneecapping ObamaCare, but these changes will reduce the number of uninsured — something Democrats claim is their goal.

The Affordable Care Act requires everyone to buy the one-size-fits-all package. You have to pay for maternity care, even if you’re too old to give birth. You’re also on the hook for pediatric dental care, even if you’re childless. It’s like passing a law that the only car you can buy is a fully loaded, four-door sedan. No more hatchbacks or two-seaters.

Trump’s taking the opposite approach, allowing consumers choice. His new regulation will free people to again buy “short-term” health plans that exclude many costly services, such as inpatient drug rehab. These plans aren’t guaranteed to be renewable year to year; the upside is they cost much less.

Short-term plans have been around for years. But after ObamaCare premiums began soaring, these plans became very attractive to people who were ineligible for an ObamaCare subsidy and balked at paying full freight.

Hundreds of thousands of customers signed up for them — until the Obama administration slammed the door shut. A year ago, President Barack Obama slapped a 90-day limit on the plans, as a way to force people into ObamaCare no matter how unaffordable.

Trump is removing Obama’s 90-day limit, reopening that low-cost option. That’s good news for 8 million people currently getting whacked with an ObamaCare tax penalty for not having insurance, and another 11 million uninsured who avoided the penalty by pleading hardship. Count on many of them to buy coverage when they have an affordable option. That will reduce the number of uninsured.

Yet Democrats are ranting that Trump’s regulatory changes are sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. They warn that healthy people will abandon the ObamaCare exchanges to buy these lower-cost plans, destabilizing the system. It’s a wild overstatement.