RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said the statues of Confederate leaders present in the U.S. Capitol building should be replaced with “female heroes.”

Schakowsky also said other members of Congress should support the proposed resolution “censuring and condemning” Trump over his reaction to the white supremacist violence last month in Charlottesville.

“We should be aware that there are 10 statues within the Statuary Hall collection that represent Confederate leaders. They do not have a place in our Capitol. I, for one, want to see some more women heroes to be there in Statuary Hall, but there are plenty of really heroic Americans who have stood for our values that could replace those statues in Statuary Hall,” she said during a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill with the nonprofit organization Bend the Arc Jewish Action. “So this fight is far from over.”

Bend the Arc’s official website says the organization’s vision is to “build and activate Jewish power to help transform our country to be inclusive, equitable, and supportive of the dignity of every person across race, class, gender and faith.”

According to the censure resolution backed by Democrats, President Trump’s “immediate public comments rebuked ‘many sides’ for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia and failed to specifically condemn the ‘Unite the Right’ rally or cite the white supremacist, neo-Nazi gathering as responsible for actions of domestic terrorism.”

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) shared a similar view of the Confederate statues in the Capitol building and added that Confederate symbols should be moved out of veterans’ cemeteries.

“Right behind me in the people’s house there are statues that glorify racist Confederate leaders who committed treason against the United States and fought to defend the institution of slavery. We’re going to have to change that as well, but mainly today I want stand in solidarity with all of you,” he said.

Huffman also called for passage of his amendment that would cut off taxpayer funding for the salaries of Trump administration officials including White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller for supporting what he called “white nationalist” policies such as the travel ban and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program repeal. The amendment was proposed with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).

“Trump keeps filling his administration with people with these twisted ideologies and sowing their division, racism and bigotry,” he said. “Stephen Miller is still there, and of course he’s the mentee of arch-racist Richard Spencer.”

Huffman said he recently learned that the Republican leadership is not going to allow his amendment to be put up for a vote.

“So we’re going to press forward in every other way that we can,” he said. “We have to stand up and confront this hate, bigotry and racism, and we’ll keep doing it.”

Fulfilling his role as the titular head of “The Resistance,” Barack Obama took to Facebook Tuesday to snipe at the Trump administration’s announcement that it was rescinding the 44th president’s 2012 executive action called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“We shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own,” Obama said. His post was florid and self-serving. But five words in his lengthy screed —“through no fault of their own” — are undeniably true.

It’s not the fault of the “Dreamers” that their parents brought them here, without papers, as minors. On that we can agree. But whose fault is it that they are still in limbo? For that answer, Obama needn’t take to social media. He can simply look in the mirror.

Ten years ago, a narrow consensus was forged in Washington, if only briefly. Its architects were Edward Kennedy and John McCain. Their carefully crafted legislation created a new temporary work visa, established an electronic data base for employers to check employees’ work status, and earmarked money for border enforcement. It also provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 11.6 million illegal immigrants, provided they paid a fine and back taxes, met English and civics requirements, and stayed on the right side of the law.

President George W. Bush signaled his support. But the vote was going to be close, which Kennedy and McCain knew. Conservatives dismissed the path-to-citizenship as a fig leaf for amnesty. Organized labor hated the guest-worker program, known as Y-1. McCain and Kennedy could have overcome that opposition, albeit narrowly, except for one last little group of senators. Call it the Senate Presidential Wannabe Caucus. Its membership included Illinois freshman Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. That’s only two votes, but it was enough.

On June 6, 2007, Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, introduced an innocuous-sounding rider to the McCain-Kennedy bill. Its official description was “an amendment to sunset the Y-1 non-immigrant visa program after a 5-year period.” As everyone in the Senate understood, this was a “poison pill” designed not to shore up the bill, but sink it. Dorgan got his way, too. The amendment passed 49-48, essentially killing comprehensive immigration reform.

Kennedy was incensed. He’d implored Dorgan and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid not to do it. McCain felt particularly sandbagged by Obama, who’d inserted himself into the legislative negotiations uninvited, wrangled a concession he wanted, then voted with Dorgan. McCain assumed Obama didn’t want George W. Bush or himself — the man Obama expected to face in 2008 — to get credit for immigration reform. Ted Kennedy, who ended up endorsing Obama over Clinton anyway, believed this, too.

The extreme right—neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted racists and anti-Semites—and the extreme left—anti-American and anti-Israel zealots, intolerant censors, violent anarchists such as Antifa, and other assorted radicals—both pose a danger in the U.S. and abroad.

Which group poses a greater threat? The question resists a quantitative answer, because much may depend on time and place. It may also be in the eye of the beholder: For many on the center left, the greater danger is posed by the hard right, and vice versa. Yet the most important reason for this lack of a definitive quantitative answer is that they pose qualitatively different dangers.

History has set limits on how far to the extremes of the hard right reasonable right-wingers are prepared to go. Following the horrors of the Holocaust and Southern lynchings, no one claiming the mantle of conservative is willing to be associated with Nazi anti-Semitism or the KKK. Neo-Nazi and Klan speakers are not invited to university campuses.

The hard left lacks comparable limits. Despite what Stalin, Mao, the Castros, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez and North Korea’s Kims have done in the name of communism, there are still those on the left—including some university professors and students—who do not shrink from declaring themselves communists, or even Stalinists or Maoists. Their numbers are not high, but the mere fact that it is acceptable on campuses, even if not praiseworthy, to be identified with hard-left mass murderers, but not hard-right mass murderers, is telling.

The ultimate goals of the hard right are different, and far less commendable, than those of the hard left. The hard-right utopia might be a fascist society modeled on the Italy or Germany of the 1930s, or the segregationist post-Reconstruction American South.

The hard-left utopia would be a socialist or communist state-regulated economy aiming for economic and racial equality. The means for achieving these important goals might be similar to those of the hard right. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all killed millions of innocent people in an effort to achieve their goals.

For the vast majority of reasonable people, including centrist conservatives, the hard-right utopia would be a dystopia to be avoided at all costs. The hard-left utopia would be somewhat more acceptable to many on the center left, so long as it was achieved nonviolently.

The danger posed by the extreme left is directly related to its more benign goals, which seduce some people, including university students and faculty. Believing that noble ends justify ignoble means, they are willing to accept the antidemocratic, intolerant and sometimes violent censorship policies and actions of Antifa and its radical cohorts.

For that reason, the most extreme left zealots are welcomed today on many campuses to express their radical views. That is not true of the most extreme neo-Nazi or KKK zealots, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer. Former White House aide Steve Bannon recently told “60 Minutes” that “the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates and the Klan, who by the way are absolutely awful—there’s no room in American politics for that.” In contrast, prominent American leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and even Bernie Sanders, supported the candidacy of British hard-left extremist Jeremy Corbyn, despite his flirtation with anti-Semitism.

The hard right is dangerous largely for what it has done in the past. For those who believe that past is prologue, the danger persists. It also persists for those who look to Europe for hints of what may be in store for us: Neofascism is on the rise in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Greece, Lithuania and even France. Some of this rise may be attributable to regional issues, such as the mass migration of Muslims from Syria and other parts of the Middle East. But some may also be a function of growing nationalism and nostalgia for the “glory” days of Europe—or, as evidenced in our last election, of America.

The danger posed by the extreme hard left is more about the future. Leaders of tomorrow are being educated today on campus. The tolerance for censorship and even violence to suppress dissenting voices may be a foretaste of things to come. The growing influence of “intersectionality”—which creates alliances among “oppressed” groups—has led to a strange acceptance by much of the extreme left of the far-from-progressive goals and violent means of radical Islamic terrorist groups that are sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Western. This combination of hard-left secular views and extreme Islamic theological views is toxic.

I’m indebted to Luis Gutiérrez, the bumptious congressman from Illinois’s Fourth District, for confirming what I long resisted acknowledging: America’s political discourse has been painfully coarsened.

My epiphany came last week, when Mr. Gutiérrez reacted angrily after Donald Trump put on notice the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Mr. Gutiérrez had met in July with John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was then secretary of homeland security, and who seems to have offered soothing words on the subject. But then Mr. Kelly became President Trump’s chief of staff—and, presumably, signed off on ending DACA.

“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” Mr. Gutiérrez declared last week. “He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House, along with the other white supremacists and those enabling the president’s actions by ‘just following orders.’ ”

Mr. Gutiérrez is no stranger to bombast, but what surprised me here was that his words passed largely unnoticed. A general in government service who is “a disgrace to the uniform.” Where have we heard that before?

In the early 1950s, an Army dentist named Irving Peress refused to complete forms asking about his political background. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy learned in 1954 that Peress had been recommended for honorable discharge, he subpoenaed the dentist to appear before his investigatory committee, where the dentist was alternately defiant and evasive.

McCarthy then summoned the commanding officer at the base where Peress worked to explain why the dentist—who McCarthy believed was a communist—had been promoted and discharged. Patiently and, presumably, very carefully, Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker explained that he had followed the recommendations of subordinates and Army protocol. McCarthy raged: “Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says ‘I will protect another general who protects Communists’ is not fit to wear that uniform.”

Our editorial last week on the spectacle of Senate Democrats questioning the Catholic faith of Notre Dame law professor and judicial nominee Amy Barrett struck a nerve. Many readers are stunned that politicians would suggest that having “orthodox” religious views could disqualify someone from the American judiciary.

Also concerned is John Jenkins, President of the University of Notre Dame. Fr. Jenkins is no conservative but he can spot an attack on religious belief, and on Saturday he wrote to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee who led the assault on Ms. Barrett. Here is the letter in full:

Dear Senator Feinstein:

Considering your questioning of my colleague Amy Coney Barrett during the judicial confirmation hearing of September 6, I write to express my confidence in her competence and character, and deep concern at your line of questioning.

Professor Barrett has been a member of our faculty since 2002, and is a graduate of our law school. Her experience as a clerk for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is of the highest order. So, too, is her scholarship in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law and statutory interpretation. I am not a legal scholar, but I have heard no one seriously challenge her impeccable legal credentials.

Your concern, as you expressed it, is that “dogma lives loudly in [Professor Barrett], and that is a concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.” I am one in whose heart “dogma lives loudly”, as it has for centuries in the lives of many Americans, some of whom have given their lives in service to this nation. Indeed, it lived loudly in the hearts of those who founded our nation as one where citizens could practice their faith freely and without apology.

Professor Barrett has made it clear that she would “follow unflinchingly” all legal precedent and, in rare cases in which her conscience would not allow her to do so, she would recuse herself. I can assure you that she is a person of integrity who acts in accord with the principles she articulates.

It is chilling to hear from a United States Senator that this might now disqualify someone from service as a federal judge. I ask you and your colleagues to respect those in whom “dogma lives loudly”—which is a condition we call faith. For the attempt to live such faith while one upholds the law should command respect, not evoke concern.

Respectfully,

Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.

President

Conservatives who voted for Donald Trump based on his promises to restore the integrity of the judiciary had a point. If there was one compelling reason to support Trump, even for those who harbored serious concerns about his readiness for office, it was that a loss in the 2016 election would render the judicial branch of the federal government a taxpayer-funded subsidiary of the Democratic party for a generation or more. Where Hillary Clinton had her litmus tests, Trump promised to appoint judges who understood the limited role of federal judges in our constitutional system, who respected the text of the Constitution and federal statutes, and who would not let their personal policy preferences dictate the results of the cases before them.

Many conservatives voted for Trump in the hope that he would keep those promises, and in the first eight months of his administration, he has. Along with a sustained rollback of Obama-era regulations, Trump’s judicial appointments — with Justice Neil Gorsuch as the centerpiece — have been key successes for an often-troubled administration. Just this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on two tremendously qualified nominees to courts of appeals in the Midwest: Michigan supreme-court justice and former University of Michigan law professor Joan Larsen, and Notre Dame law professor Amy Barrett. Both are former clerks to Justice Antonin Scalia who will prove to be judicial conservatives. Larsen and Barrett are both names to remember, as both are likely to be short-listers for a future Supreme Court vacancy.

Trump continued his promising run today with the nomination of my friend and former colleague Gregory Katsas to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit left by the retirement of Bush appointee Janice Rogers Brown. Katsas, who currently serves as deputy White House counsel, has a legal résumé that would be difficult to match. An executive editor of the Harvard Law Review during his law-school years, Katsas clerked on the Third Circuit and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals. He then followed his then-boss Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, clerking for Justice Thomas in his first term on the high court.

Katsas then spent a decade in private practice for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., before joining the Justice Department in the early days of the George W. Bush administration. There, Greg oversaw the appellate section of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, where he argued dozens of the most challenging and important appeals facing the Bush administration — cases involving the defense of the homeland in the aftermath of September 11, challenges to the president’s prosecution of the war on terrorism, and the federal ban on partial-birth abortion, and many more cases involving critical constitutional principles. Katsas served the entire eight years in the Bush administration, eventually being appointed as assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division.

In both government and private practice, Katsas has argued cases before the Supreme Court — he was one of the lawyers who argued the landmark challenge to Obamacare in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius — and in every U.S. court of appeals. In all, he has argued more than 75 appeals.

It is hard to imagine a candidate with greater qualifications to serve on the D.C. Circuit, one of the most important courts of appeals in the country owing to its location in the nation’s capital. The court’s docket, while varied, includes key cases regarding the powers and programs of the federal government. Katsas’s vast experience at the highest levels of that government gives him a perspective that would benefit any nominee to that court.

The Donald’s renewed romance with old pals (and donees) “Chuck and Nancy” is already paying more dividends . . . for Democrats. If the president’s tweet on Thursday morning is to be believed (not always a sure thing), he has fully adopted the unconstitutional distortion of prosecutorial discretion employed by President Obama to avoid executing the laws faithfully.

Substance aside, the appearance of the tweet is a story unto itself. Trump was so giddy over sandbagging congressional Republicans and his own Treasury secretary that he called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday morning to gloat about the positive news coverage — squealing, “The press has been incredible!” Smitten, he wanted to explore other potential areas of appeasement — er, I mean, bipartisan cooperation. This should go well: An all-id-all-the-time POTUS, who cares far more about media commentary than policy, rediscovers that nothing floats the MSM boat quite like a nominal Republican who accommodates Democrats while humiliating his party in the process. Can’t you just feel him evolving!

While she had the infatuated president’s ear, the New York Times relates:

Ms. Pelosi took the opportunity to ask Mr. Trump to send out a message on Twitter emphasizing that the 800,000 immigrants enrolled in a program that he canceled this week can keep their protection from deportation and work permits over the next six months as it phases out.

That program, of course, is DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Contrary to the Gray Lady’s assertion — and as we explained this week — Trump has not canceled DACA. Nor is it being phased out. Trump has signaled that either it will be codified in law or he will continue the program by lawless executive action — as he is doing for the next six months, as he has done for the last eight months, and as his predecessor did for four years.

In any event, as Nancy tells it, “I asked him to do it. Then boom, boom, boom! The tweet appeared and that was good.” You can see why she’d say that. Trump tweeted:

For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about — No action!

Translation: There is no daylight between Trump and Obama when it comes to ignoring the president’s constitutional duty to execute laws faithfully under the guise of prosecutorial discretion.

To repeat, properly understood, prosecutorial discretion is simply a resource-allocation doctrine. It is an unremarkable recognition of the fact that there are more violations of law than there are law-enforcement assets to investigate and prosecute them. The government has no choice but to prioritize: Serious crimes get the most attention; many less serious crimes, for the most part, are overlooked. But there’s a caveat: While a low priority is assigned to comparatively less serious crimes, they are still considered crimes. The government evaluates each case individually and reserves the right to take action against the low-priority misconduct in appropriate cases — for example, in a case involving a recidivist offender or an otherwise hardcore criminal.

That was not Obama’s practice. He disingenuously invoked “prosecutorial discretion” when, in reality, he was choosing not to enforce congressional statutes to which he objected on policy grounds. Substantially, there was no case-by-case review; just occasional lip service to the notion of individualized treatment when he’d announce non-enforcement directives and “waivers” of this or that statute. As noted above, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion cannot be avoided. If that is all the executive branch is doing, there is no need to make a big announcement about it. The point of decreeing DACA was not to exercise prosecutorial discretion; it was to confer de facto amnesty on a class of DREAMers, as the president — not Congress — defined them.

The Washington Post reports that defrocked White House aide Steve Bannon and Members of the House Freedom Caucus are plotting a coup to depose Paul Ryan as Speaker later this fall. Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows denied this on Friday on MSNBC, but you can bet something is afoot. And come to think of it, why wait?

If the Freedom Caucus is upset enough to contemplate a mid-session leadership coup, let’s get it on now. Congress is entering a critical few months that will determine whether Republicans will have anything significant to show for their majority. If the fate of this Congress hangs in the balance, then it’s unconscionable to wait and let the House fail. The manly—the patriotic—thing to do is force a debate and vote while there’s still time to save the day.

This has the added advantage of being a stab in the front for a change. The Freedom Caucus specialty is the stab in the back. Claim to be cooperative, to be working constructively toward some legislative compromise, but then at a critical moment raise its demands, vote no and blame the leadership. Soak up the cable-TV appearances and then sit back as someone else cleans up the political mess.

This is how Mr. Meadows played the ObamaCare repeal debate earlier this year. As House leaders and HHS Secretary Tom Price prepared the draft bill, Mr. Meadows was regularly consulted. According to numerous sources, Mr. Meadows’ priority in private discussions was killing any reduction, even a small one, in the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance.

For conservative health economists, this is a crucial policy reform. It would reduce a subsidy that drives up health-care costs, and it would begin to equalize the tax treatment for individual and employer insurance. But Mr. Meadows opposed it as a “tax increase,” a definition which would mean that Congress could never reduce any tax subsidy.

Mr. Meadows worked frantically behind the scenes to make sure there was no change in the tax exclusion, without objecting to other provisions. GOP leaders gave him what he wanted and killed the tax change. But within days Mr. Meadows began trashing the draft bill anyway—this time because it supposedly didn’t reduce insurance costs enough. His assault defeated the first attempt at a House vote, and delay its passage for weeks, helping Democrats build public opposition and making it a much harder lift in the Senate, where it failed.

With this record of accomplishment, clearly it’s time for Mr. Meadows to step into the spotlight and take some leadership responsibility. The honorable act now would be to announce an immediate challenge to Mr. Ryan surrounded by his Freedom Caucus supporters and Mr. Bannon’s Breitbart staff.

Lay out his strategy for passing tax reform, for raising the debt limit, and for passing the Freedom Caucus budget through the House and the Senate this fall. Then the Members of the House GOP conference can hold a debate and vote, and Mr. Meadows and the country can see how much support he has for his political strategy compared to Mr. Ryan.

If Mr. Meadows is too modest, or thinks he can’t win, then perhaps his Freedom Caucus running mate, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, would want to run. And if Mr. Jordan declines the honor, then perhaps Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert will want to exploit the high regard with which he is held by his colleagues.

This is the way a congressional majority is supposed to work. Individuals run for leadership, the Members vote, and then everyone accepts the results and moves on together. That’s what Democrat Steny Hoyer did after he lost to Nancy Pelosi in 2002, and Democrats proceeded to govern in unified fashion after they won the House in 2006.

If Mr. Meadows wants to stage a coup, he should do it publicly by putting his agenda and strategy front and center for everyone to see. Take the dagger out from under the toga, Mark, and show your colleagues that lean and hungry look. Then let’s hold a vote.