RUTHFULLY YOURS

The House Intelligence Committee has reportedly issued seven subpoenas in connection with its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of the Obama administration’s potentially illegal use of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection power for the purpose of monitoring Americans — in particular, Americans connected to the Trump campaign and transition.

The news was broken Wednesday afternoon by the Wall Street Journal.

The most intriguing detail of the subpoenas is the demand for any information related to requests for unmasking by Samantha Power, President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“Unmasking” is the revealing in intelligence reports of the identities of Americans whose communications (or information about whom) have been “incidentally” intercepted during foreign-intelligence-collection operations.

Of course, the fact that a subpoena demanding information is issued does not necessarily mean the information exists. Nevertheless, the issuance of a subpoena implies that the issuer has a good-faith basis to believe it does. On that score, it has previously been reported that the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), has reviewed intelligence reporting and detected instances of unmasking.

Were there to be information indicating that Ms. Power was involved in unmasking American identities in intelligence reports, significant questions would be raised. As ambassador to the U.N., Power, a long-time Obama adviser, held a diplomatic position. She was not an intelligence analyst. It is not immediately clear why the U.N. ambassador would be involved in the disclosure of American identities in intelligence reports — after the agencies that collected and analyzed the intelligence had decided such identities should be masked.

The Journal report further indicates that committee subpoenas demand any information related to unmasking requests by Susan Rice and John Brennan. Ms. Rice was President Obama’s national-security adviser (a White House staff position), and, as we’ve noted, previous reporting has tied her to unmasking activities. Brennan was Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is in the business of gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence outside the United States. In that capacity, the CIA routinely makes judgments about whether identities of Americans should be unmasked.

The House Intelligence Committee is investigating both a) Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, an inquiry that entails thus far unsubstantiated suspicions of Trump-campaign collusion, and b) the use of intelligence authorities to investigate the Trump campaign, an inquiry that focuses on whether national-security powers (such as those codified in FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) were used pretextually, for the real purpose of conducting political spying.

The radical Left is so incensed and horrified by the advent of a Trump presidency that it has been driven to adopt what it considers to be the tactics of a grassroots movement it abhors and accuses of being racist, homophobic, anti-government, anti-woman, nativist, and Islamophobic along with the array of other epithets reserved for conservatives and flag-waving Americans. Led by five former Democratic congressional staffers, the recently birthed progressive organization Indivisible admits to modeling its strategy to “resist” the Trump administration after the tactics employed by its perceived nemesis: the Tea Party.

Operating from the conviction that presidential power is not unlimited and that pressure on Congress can reverse Trump’s potential damage, the Indivisible Team has launched a movement mainly for progressives, although disgruntled conservatives or anyone who opposes Trump may apply. The idea behind Indivisible is to resist the Trump agenda by diverting members of Congress, especially conservatives, from accomplishing their goals and preventing them from undoing many of the progressive policies put in place by the Obama administration.

Ironically, the current protestations vis a vis “presidential power gone wild” is incongruous with the absence of complaints from the Left when it came to the Obama administration and its many secretive actions, executive orders, and congressional bypassing, despite unrelenting claims of transparency. The uncontested shift in Washington over the past eight years away from a constitutional republic and congressional legislative responsibility toward more of a bureaucratic, administrative government run without Congress’ intervention belies the sincerity of these assertions.

Characterizing the ideas of the Tea Party as “wrong, cruel and tinged with racism,” the Indivisible Team pledges to protect their values of “inclusion, tolerance and fairness” with an equivalent level of resistance and fervor.

Following the January publication of a guide posted to Google Docs that went viral, the founders reported that within three weeks they had amassed 105,000 interested parties and 2,400 registered groups, one in every congressional district. Today, the Indivisible website boasts close to 6,000 Indivisible groups, at least two in each congressional district.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda refers to Trump as “the biggest popular vote loser in history to ever call himself President Elect.” In their inaugural document, Indivisible’s architects reveal their defensive, ostensibly Tea Party-templated strategy to thwart the policies of the incoming administration. Positing that Trump will “attempt to use his congressional authority to reshape America in his racist, authoritarian and corrupt image” even though he “has no mandate” from the voters, the Team presents a methodology to “stand indivisibly to defeat Trump and the members of Congress who would do his bidding.”

In defense of their position, Indivisible’s founders rationalize that if a “small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump” and prevent him from “victimizing us and our neighbors.” They characterize Trump’s agenda as one that “explicitly targets immigrants, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ people, the poor and working class, and women.”

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday said she believes that Russians likely received help from inside the U.S. on how to effectively use the information that intelligence agencies say was gathered to meddle in last year’s presidential election, which she lost to President Donald Trump.

“The Russians, in my opinion and based on the intel and counterintel people I’ve talked to, could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided,” said Mrs. Clinton at the Code technology conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

Mrs. Clinton added that the guidance would likely have come from Americans and people with polling and data information.

The comments come as federal investigators are looking into contacts between associates of the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Mr. Trump has denied there was any collusion between his campaign and Russia. The talk of collusion stems from Democrats’ disappointment over losing the election, Mr. Trump has said.

Reacting to Mrs. Clinton’s comments, Mr. Trump tweeted late Wednesday: “Crooked Hillary Clinton now blames everybody but herself, refuses to say she was a terrible candidate.”

Mrs. Clinton said she drew her conclusion after reading the report released by the U.S. intelligence community in January that said Russia was behind a sweeping cyber campaign to undermine the election.

She said: “I think it’s fair to ask how did that actually influence the [2016] campaign and how did they know what messages to deliver? Who told them? who were they coordinating with or colluding with?”

Mrs. Clinton said her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state affected the election the most of any factors over which she had control.

She said her use of a private email server “was turned into the biggest scandal since Lord knows when.” She added that she plans to quote others in her forthcoming book who “basically said that this was the biggest nothing-burger.”

She again acknowledged that her use of the server was a “mistake,“ adding that the way it was used by her detractors was “very damaging.”

President Trump and his advisers are debating whether to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, and if he does the fury will be apocalyptic—start building arks for the catastrophic flood. The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.

President Obama signed the agreement last September, albeit by ducking the two-thirds majority vote in the Senate required under the Constitution for such national commitments. The pact includes a three-year process for withdrawal, which Mr. Trump could short-circuit by also pulling out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Paris was supposed to address the failures of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which Bill Clinton signed but George W. Bush refused to implement amid similar outrage. The Kyoto episode is instructive because the U.S. has since reduced emissions faster than much of Europe thanks to business innovation—namely, hydraulic fracturing that is replacing coal with natural gas.

While legally binding, Kyoto’s CO 2 emissions targets weren’t strictly enforced. European countries that pursued aggressive reductions were engaging in economic masochism. According to a 2014 Manhattan Institute study, the average cost of residential electricity in 2012 was 12 cents per kilowatt hour in the U.S. but an average 26 cents in the European Union and 35 cents in Germany. The average price of electricity in the EU soared 55% from 2005 to 2013.

Yet Germany’s emissions have increased in the last two years as more coal is burned to compensate for reduced nuclear energy and unreliable solar and wind power. Last year coal made up 40% of Germany’s power generation compared to 30% for renewables, while state subsidies to stabilize the electric grid have grown five-fold since 2012.

But the climate believers tried again in Paris, this time with goals that are supposedly voluntary. China and India offered benchmarks pegged to GDP growth, which means they can continue their current energy plans. China won’t even begin reducing emissions until 2030 and in the next five years it will use more coal.

President Obama, meanwhile, committed the U.S. to reducing emissions by between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. This would require extreme changes in energy use. Even Mr. Obama’s bevy of anti-carbon regulations would get the U.S. to a mere 45% of its target.

Meeting the goals would require the Environmental Protection Agency to impose stringent emissions controls on vast stretches of the economy including steel production, farm soil management and enteric fermentation (i.e., cow flatulence). Don’t laugh—California’s Air Resources Board is issuing regulations to curb bovine burping to meet its climate goals.

Advocates in the White House for remaining in Paris claim the U.S. has the right to unilaterally reduce Mr. Obama’s emissions commitments. They say stay in and avoid the political meltdown while rewriting the U.S. targets.

But Article 4, paragraph 11 of the accord says “a party may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition.” There is no comparable language permitting a reduction in national targets.

Rest assured that the Sierra Club and other greens will sue under the Section 115 “international air pollution” provision of the Clean Air Act to force the Trump Administration to enforce the Paris standards. The “voluntary” talk will vanish amid the hunt for judges to rule that Section 115 commands the U.S. to reduce emissions that “endanger” foreign countries if those countries reciprocate under Paris. After his experience with the travel ban, Mr. Trump should understand that legal danger.

Just this morning, CNN reported that President Trump plans to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, in defiance of immense pressure from the left not to. There is similar pressure on Trump in regards to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Supposedly, America is legally and morally bound to remain part of these pacts.

Conservative critiques of these deals have typically focused on the agreements’ contents and effectiveness. The nuclear deal allows Iran to continue to pursue nuclear-weapons-related technologies while it is in effect — and despite a recent State Department certification that Iran has complied with this agreement, the truth is Tehran has failed to fully meet the requirements of this deal and has cheated on it. Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement has come under strong criticism as a costly, ineffective, and economically harmful approach to addressing alleged global warming.

But there’s something else these agreements have in common: Both are treaties, but were deliberately negotiated by the Obama administration in a way that enabled it to evade the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that treaties be ratified by the Senate.

America’s Founding Fathers placed a high threshold to ratify treaties: two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favor. The reason is that treaties are major international agreements that legally bind our nation and its presidents long into the future. No president should have the power to make such commitments with just the stroke of his pen.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explained this in an April 2015 NRO article, writing that the Constitution “does not empower the president to make binding agreements with foreign countries all on his own — on the theory that the American people should not take on enforceable international obligations or see their sovereignty compromised absent approval by the elected representatives most directly accountable to them.”

Supporters of the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement argue that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a treaty. They also note that presidents frequently enter into major international agreements without submitting them for ratification by the Senate.

While these arguments have merit, they do not apply to the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement, because these are important pacts that have been treated like treaties by most other states. The Iranian Parliament ratified the JCPOA. The legislatures of over 128 Paris Agreement signatories have ratified that agreement, including those of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the U.K.

Both houses of Congress were permitted to vote on a resolution of disapproval of the JCPOA (the Corker-Cardin bill) in September 2015. But this process did not follow the Constitution’s rules for treaties. Instead of requiring supporters to win two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the agreement, it required opponents of the JCPOA to get veto-proof and filibuster-proof majorities to kill it. Although a majority of Congress voted against the JCPOA, including Senator Chuck Schumer and the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it was not disapproved because of a filibuster by Senate Democrats.

The Average American Family Pays More Money in Regulations Than in Taxes

Anyone who has ever traveled to Washington, D.C. knows that as majestic as the White House and the U.S. Capitol are, they are a mere fraction of the federal government. Alphabet soup departments like the EPA, IRS, VA, HHS, DOE, and others most Americans have never heard of, take up space in the capital and amount to a hidden regulatory tax on all Americans.

In fact, a new report estimated that if the costs of federal regulation flowed down to U.S. households, the average American family would pay $14,809 annually in a hidden regulatory tax. That’s $14,809 in addition to income taxes, state taxes, and Social Security. $14,809 in addition to sales taxes, property taxes, and even estate taxes — where the government taxes you for being dead.

“That amounts to 21 percent of the average income of $69,629 and 26.45 percent of the expenditure budget of $55,978,” wrote Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in the report “Ten Thousand Commandments” released Wednesday.

The average American family would spend more on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, and apparel. Only housing costs more.

Crews analyzed federal government data, past reports, and newer studies to estimate the economic impact of federal regulatory compliance at $1.9 trillion each year. When numbers get that big, it becomes hard to understand them. But a hidden tax that costs each family roughly $15,000 per year, that makes sense.

Liberals and others would point out that no family specifically pays this price, and that is indeed true. But regulations hold back economic progress and make wealth creation harder to come by.

How many entrepreneurs give up on new business opportunities because it is too complicated to hire someone? How many small businesses fail because compliance costs exceed their profit margins? Then there are the increased costs to the larger firms which won’t go out of business when the government adds red tape, but will make ordinary goods just that much more expensive.

Regulation is a silent killer, and it grows even when Americans didn’t vote for it. In 2016, for example, Congress enacted only 214 laws, but federal agencies issued 3,853 rules. The lack of public accountability — when was the last time you voted for the EPA secretary? — means these bureaucrats aren’t held accountable in the same way as members of Congress. So they can issue 18 rules for every law enacted by the people’s representatives.

Hillary and Bill Clinton were a proud, progressive power couple who came into big-time state politics on promises of promoting “fairness” and “equality.” It did not matter much that very little in their previous personal lives had matched such elevated rhetoric with concrete action. And so the ironies and tragedies that followed were not altogether unexpected.

The theme that united the subsequent tawdry reports about the Clinton cattle futures scam and Whitewater was an overweening lust for money. The Clintons seemed to feel entitled, in the sense that their education, sophistication, and taste deserved the sort of peace of mind, enjoyment, and security that only comfortable circumstances could provide, and which was taken for granted among the rich progressive environments in which the Clintons increasingly navigated. They had arrived and they “deserved” it.
In 2001, we are supposed to believe, the Clintons left office “dead broke” as the result of their sacrifices as first family. In Hillary’s words, they were scarcely able to afford the various mortgages on their homes with which they had been encumbered (“we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses”).

Given an ever greater need for cash beyond a mere government pension, given that from 2001 onward they had something to sell beyond Bill as a “wise-man” president emeritus (i.e., Hillary’s New York Senate career as a springboard to a second Clinton presidency), and given their innate characters (or perhaps their hamartiai), the next years were predictable. After 2001, the long arc of their moral universe bent toward personal aggrandizement through the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play State Department favors, and $10,000-20,000-a minute rah-rah speeches to rich people eager to leverage the next episode of Clinton influence peddling.

Such smart, capable, self-assured, and haughty people are the stuff of Greek tragedy, and its warnings about the descent from hubris (overweening arrogance) to atê (unhinged madness) to nemesis (divine retribution and downfall).

At the denouement of most tragedies. the figures who survive the wrath of the gods—and who are not themselves beheaded or slain by their own hands—are sometimes enlightened by their destruction, rediscover some purpose, acquire an appreciation of pathei mathos (wisdom through pain) and find peaceful redemption.

People like the Clintons—or for that matter Euripides’s characters such as Jason (Medea) or King Pentheus (Bacchae)—are oblivious to the ultimate and preordained trajectories of their fates. Hillary Clinton has ended up a two-time failed presidential candidate, stained with money grubbing scandals and chronic deceit, who blew huge leads in 2008 and 2016, despite being the beneficiary of unprecedented cash, campaign consultants, and party endorsements. She has sacrificed her health, her reputation, and her very life to do everything politically right, which was not only ethically wrong but also proved, in good Athenian tragic fashion, politically disastrous. (Tragic figures, remember, do anything and everything they can to pursue an ambitious sense of self—and thereby only ensure that they can never obtain it.)

A gaunt Dorian Gray-like Bill Clinton in his twilight is indeed tragic. He may have the sins of the flesh written all over his face, but he had also convinced himself at one point in his life that his undeniable political cunning, education, and folksy charm could be put to use for noble purposes beyond the tawdry sex, chronic lying, and narcissism that were his brands. But after the scandals, the impeachment, the pardons, the Foundation miasma, the quid pro quo speaking fees, the Lolita Express, the disastrous campaign interventions for Hillary from 2008 to the tarmac scene with Loretta Lynch, the petty rivalries and double-dealing, optics reflect that there is nothing much left of a once dynamic president but an empty shell.

At the denouement of most tragedies. the figures who survive the wrath of the gods—and who are not themselves beheaded or slain by their own hands—are sometimes enlightened by

Here’s the good news.

It’s 2017 and Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House and more statewide offices than you can shake a big bundle of fake news papers at. And, potentially soon, a Supreme Court that takes its guidelines from the Constitution not Das Kapital and the National Social Justice Party.

Here’s the bad news, Republicans are still Republicans.

Whether it’s Flynn, Bannon, Gorka, Kushner, Clarke, they are all too eager to fall for the latest left-wing scandal. The media throws some chum in the water and watches the bloody fun as Republicans go after Republicans. Scandals are manufactured and strategically aimed to divide and conquer Republicans.

But the real target is the conservative agenda. Bogging down the White House in scandals keeps it from dismantling more of Obama’s regulations and orders. Every milligram of oxygen that foolish conservatives give the left’s narratives is a milligram taken from the lungs of the conservative agenda.

At the National Review, Jim Geraghty, who has loathed Trump since Day 1, seizes on the latest scandal targeting Jared Kushner. In recent days, the National Review has run four pieces on the fake scandal.

That’s an odd preoccupation for a conservative publication that ought to be more concerned with conservative policy priorities than parsing the shibboleths that the left is firing at President Trump.

But the National Review occupies a peculiar space between the Never Trumpers who have found cushy jobs on MSNBC and at the New York Times and mainstream conservative support for President Trump. It isn’t ready to leave the movement, but instead it insists on echoing media criticisms in a softer tone.

The Review takes the tone that it’s just asking questions. Those questions just happen to be the same ones that the media keeps on asking. If the mainstream media reads like an angry partisan blog, then the National Review sounds the way that the media used to when it was just biased instead of fake.

It just so happens that the Review is full of innumerable stories and posts about every media scandal. And its preferred pose is innocence. Like the rest of the media, it’s just asking questions.

What’s the big deal?

“What I don’t get is any reflexive defense of . . . Jared Kushner. Trump earned your vote, and presumably, some amount of trust. What did Kushner ever do for you?” Geraghty protests.

Presumably. In Geraghty’s world, winning the votes of conservatives, shouldn’t necessarily earn trust.

Removing four New Orleans statues commemorating Confederate leaders was only the beginning of the campaign to rewrite American history. In the much larger City of Houston, Antifa activists are demanding the removal of a statue of that city’s namesake. KPRC TV reports:

The Sam Houston statue has been at Hermann Park since 1925, but a group that calls itself Texas Antifa has started a campaign to take down this and any other landmark that bears the name Sam Houston.

The statue has been a site to see for nearly a century and for some people, it’s a site they want to see for years to come.

“Honestly, I think they should keep it up. Yeah,” Nicole Nelson said.

But Texas Antifa group members want the Sam Houston statue gone.

On Thursday, the group posted on its Facebook page saying, “Texans agree the disgusting idols of America’s dark days of slavery must be removed to bring internal peace to our country.”

The group also suggested Mayor Sylvester Turner should back the removal of the statue, because of his ethnicity and political affiliation.

Mayor Turner is black, and apparently that is supposed to dictate his every thought and action. Too bad that the Antifa people deny him the moral right to reach his own decisions.

As the article points out, while Sam Houston did own 12 slaves, he was hardly an explicit supporter of slavery:

When Sam Houston was a senator in the 1800s, he repeatedly voted against the spread of slavery to new territories of the United States. He was also ousted as governor of Texas for refusing to align himself with the Confederacy.

Of course, if the statue is removed, then the city itself must be renamed by the same logic. Marcuse, Texas? Obama, Texas?

My gut instinct tells me that Texans will not put up with this nonsense.