RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton just doesn’t know how to lose gracefully. She does, however, have a knack for coming up with ever more inventive excuses for her loss to Donald Trump.

Just last month, she chalked it up to “voter suppression” in Wisconsin. This spurious claim was a reference to the Badger State’s common-sense voter-ID law, which has been upheld by the courts. It followed on the heels of a tweet from Wisconsin’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, claiming the law had reduced voter turnout by 200,000 statewide.

Both claims relied on a study commissioned by Priorities USA Action and conducted by CIVIS USA, two liberal groups that actively supported Clinton’s presidential bid. Unfortunately for Clinton and Baldwin, though, the study has been roundly debunked.

Politifact rated Baldwin’s claim as “Mostly False,” asserting that “experts . . . question the methodology of the report and say there is no way to put a number on how many people in Wisconsin didn’t vote because of the ID requirement.”

While it is true that 2016 saw Wisconsin’s turnout drop from 2012, it is also true that the state still experienced higher turnout than in 2008, before the voter-ID law was passed. Moreover, according to the U.S. Elections Project, Wisconsin had the fifth-highest turnout rate in the country, far higher than that of many states with no ID requirement. 69.4 percent of the state’s eligible voters showed up to the polls, far surpassing the national average of 59.3 percent and the 56.8 percent rate in Clinton’s home state of New York, where there is no voter-ID law.

Wisconsin’s turnout decrease from 2012 is just as likely, or more likely, attributable to a natural regression from its unusually high 2012 turnout rate. President Obama’s high-powered turnout operation, coupled with Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan being on the GOP ticket, would easily explain the 2012 surge in statewide voter turnout. Hillary Clinton’s ineffective campaign, her decision not to visit the state, and the general leftward shift of the Democratic party may also have dampened enthusiasm for her candidacy.

Democrats have generally admitted that they failed to connect with blue-collar workers in 2016. In fact, their party chairman, Tom Perez, has organized a year-long outreach program to try to rectify the problem. Unfortunately for Democrats, these voters are highly concentrated in Rust Belt states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, that proved especially susceptible to Trump’s economic message. None of those states saw any increase in voter turnout, but it wasn’t because of voter-ID laws, which vary widely among them; it was because Clinton failed to rally their working-class voters to her side, convinced that she could rely on Obama’s winning coalition from 2008 and 2012 to put her over the top.

The problem with that strategy was two-fold: (1) The voters of the Obama coalition make up disproportionately high percentages of state populations in already deep-blue states such as New York and California; and (2) they were not nearly as enthusiastic about Clinton as they had been about Obama. FiveThirtyEight’s David Wasserman warned last September that the demographic groups the Clinton campaign was targeting were concentrated in non-swing states. The Clinton campaign failed to heed that warning.

In fact, turnout data from 2012 and 2016 do not show any “voter suppression” because of ID requirements. Nine of the eleven states that have implemented so-called strict ID Laws either saw an increase in turnout or exceeded the national average in turnout in 2016. Two of them, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, finished in the top five nationally. Meanwhile only two of the 17 states plus Washington, D.C., that have no ID requirement finished among the top five.

The problem with the election of President Donald J. Trump was not just that he presented a roadblock to an ongoing progressive revolution. Instead, unlike recent Republican presidential nominees, he was indifferent to the cultural and political restraints on conservative pushback — ironic given how checkered Trump’s own prior conservative credentials are. Trump brawled in a way McCain or Romney did not. He certainly did not prefer losing nobly to winning ugly.

Even more ominously, Trump found a seam in the supposedly invincible new progressive electoral paradigm of Barack Obama. He then blew it apart — by showing the nation that Obama’s identity-politics voting bloc was not transferrable to most other Democratic candidates, while the downside of his polarization of the now proverbial clingers most assuredly was. To her regret, Hillary Clinton learned that paradox when the deplorables and irredeemables of the formerly blue-wall states rose up to cost her the presidency.

And now?

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.

I. Political and Judicial

a. Warping the Electoral College. As soon as Trump was elected, progressives mobilized to overturn the very architecture of the Electoral College. They organized efforts to persuade delegated electors not to vote according to their own state results — as they were legally or informally pledged to do so. Had the effort succeeded, it would have destroyed the entire constitutional notion of an Electoral College.

b. Challenging the 2016 Vote. Simultaneously, we saw another failed insurrectionary effort, through the stalking horse of failed leftist candidate Jill Stein, to sue on false grounds of voting-machine fraud that would have required recounts in three swing states that Trump won.

c. Delaying, Stalling, and Accusing. Then Democrats in the Senate systematically delayed customary approval of dozens of key appointments of the newly inaugurated president. Obama holdovers such as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates sought to oppose Trump initiatives while political appointees such as Obama federal attorney Preet Bharara complained of inordinate pressures to step down. The normal assumption is that a new president appoints key federal officials of his own party; liberals abandoned this custom and depicted Trump’s staffing efforts as some sort of insurrectionary subversion of the federal government.

d. Recusal. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress orchestrated false charges of “Russian collusion” against Trump himself, based on leaks of false information and fake-news stories, some of them originally orchestrated by Never Trump primary opponents and the Clinton campaign.

No evidence emerged of Trump’s culpability. But investigations were aimed at diverting attention from, and thereby stalling, the Trump legislative agenda. Again, the goal was driving his popularity ratings down to levels that would advance the cause of future impeachment should the Democrats ride the anti-Trump collusion hoaxes to midterm victory in the House.

An effective way to emasculate Trump was to demand recusals, supposedly due to some sort of hyper-partisanship on the part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. No sooner had each agreed to step aside from some limited aspects of their investigations than Democrats insisted that their magnanimous recusals were both proof of guilt and yet too narrow — as they pressed on to seek recusals from ever more Trump White house officials.

Winston Churchill repeatedly warned the British Nation of what would happen before that fateful act of appeasement towards Hitler and the Nazis by the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, took place at Munich. As Churchill feared, it inexorably led to the catastrophe of World War Two.

Churchill’s words ring eerily true for all of us – be it in Britain, the United States or what is left of Western Europe – as we now face the rising peril of unbridled Islamo-Nazi supremacy and infiltration. His words most certainly rang unnervingly true as we witnessed and endured the appalling political correctness and appeasement towards Islam during the eight long years of the Barack Hussein Obama presidency.

It was desolating to witness the descent of the United States of America; a victorious nation that truly was – and is – a shining beacon in an often dark and frightening world but was fundamentally being changed for the worse by a foreboding presence in the White House.

But political correctness and the insanity of multiculturalism still continues, led by the European Union and by so many Western failed democracies as they act like dhimmies towards the barbaric Islamic scourge of jihad and terror that threatens to destroy all that is left of freedom and Judeo-Christian civilization.

We will soon mark the 16 year old anniversary of that other fateful day in September, 2001; the day when a horrific atrocity in the name of Allah was perpetrated against two of America’s icons: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The barbarity of 9/11 in which so many innocents died was an act of utter evil. But an enfeebled world, shackled by the unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity, largely failed then as now to confront that evil, giving future historians much to contemplate.

So here are Churchill’s words that now can so sadly be applied to what is left of much of the United States, Britain and the West:

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, down the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends.

“A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet … if mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs.

“They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered itself to be brought low, and cast away all that had been gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind!”

Donald Trump is now the duly elected president, a principled man, an American patriot, who desires to return America to that shining beacon in a world gone mad. But he is confronted by a veritable and relentless campaign of hate to remove him from office through the machinations of an increasingly extreme leftwing Democrat party and a mainstream media that spews fake news ad nauseam.

The Supreme Court has done some of its best work in recent years on the First Amendment, and that continued with an 8-0 decision Monday protecting unpopular speech. The Justices ruled that an Asian-American rock band called The Slants can’t be denied a federal trademark because the government fears the name might offend someone.

Simon Tam, front man for The Slants, sought to register the name with the Patent and Trademark Office as a rebuke to those who use it as a pejorative. The government denied the trademark, citing a Lanham Act provision that bans trademarks that “may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols.” The Court ruled that this clause is unconstitutional (Matal v. Tam).

The idea that the government has an interest in suppressing viewpoints that offend “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

The government claimed trademark registration is a form of government free speech, but that was also dismissed by Justice Alito. “If a trademark qualifies as government speech,” he wrote, the government “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently,” endorsing competing products and making contradictory statements.

The effort to “cleanse” commercial speech of any offense is also a nonstarter since there are many kinds of merchandise that “disparages prominent figures or groups and the line between commercial and non-commercial speech is not always clear.” Think anti-Trump T-shirts.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurrence making a useful point about how government could abuse such leverage over speech. “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence.”

In other good news, the Justices on Monday continued to police legal forum shopping. In Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, the Justice ruled 8-1 that California courts don’t have jurisdiction to decide injury claims for some 592 out-of-state plaintiffs when the defendant company isn’t based there and the injuries didn’t occur there.

The law already prohibits violence and threats of violence, and law enforcement authorities are supposed to prosecute those — intimidation, destruction, damage, vandalism, simple and aggravated assault. What “hate crimes” are not already covered by the law?

Why would the House of Representatives find it necessary to make such redundant statements, if not in order to redefine the concept of a hate crime? Perhaps by including “hate speech”? The current resolution includes most of the major ethnic and religious minorities in the United States, so it will have a far better chance of passing, as it will more easily fool Representatives into thinking that the contents of the resolution are harmless.

Would it not be appropriate for the politicians sponsoring and voting for these resolutions first of all to find out what drives the organizations responsible for drafting them? The Investigative Project on Terrorism has authored a damning 88-page report about the Muslim Public Affairs Council. American politicians do not seem to have taken much interest in it.

On April 4, 2017, the US Senate passed Senate Resolution 118, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. The resolution was drafted by a Muslim organization, EmgageUSA (formerly EmergeUSA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). On April 6, 2017, EmgageUSA wrote the following on their Facebook page:

“Thanks to the hard work of Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Susan Collins and Senator Kamala Harris we have achieved the approval of Senate Resolution 118, an anti-hate crimes bill drafted by Emerge-USA. It is days like this that Americans are reminded of this country’s founding principles: equal opportunity, freedom, justice. We are proud to help support the protection of these rights #amoreperfectunion #theamericandream”.

Senate Resolution 118 calls on

“…Federal law enforcement officials, working with State and local officials… to expeditiously investigate all credible reports of hate crimes and incidents and threats against minorities in the United States and to hold the perpetrators of those crimes, incidents, or threats accountable and bring the perpetrators to justice; encourages the Department of Justice and other Federal agencies to work to improve the reporting of hate crimes; and… encourages the development of an interagency task force led by the Attorney General to collaborate on the development of effective strategies and efforts to detect and deter hate crime in order to protect minority communities…”

The resolution refers to hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, African-Americans, Hindus, and Sikhs and was sponsored by Senator Kamala Harris and co-sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Susan Collins.

On April 6, almost the exact same text was introduced as House Resolution H.Res. 257, “Condemning hate crime and any other form of racism, religious or ethnic bias, discrimination, incitement to violence, or animus targeting a minority in the United States”. A House Resolution can be reintroduced as legislation.

“I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.” Nick Carroway, The Great Gatsby
Substitute Comey for Carroway and you have a sense of the arrogance and hypocrisy embedded in the former’s testimony. James Comey is expert at navigating the obstacles that constitute Washington’s politics. The former FBI Director came across as more of a prosecutor than an investigator and public servant. Having used bait-and-switch tactics over the past year, Mr. Comey gladdened, infuriated and appeased Democrats, while he irritated, enthused and angered Republicans. Like his predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, he thought himself invincible.

His testimony was Orwellian. Words meant what he wanted them to mean. To “leak” a memo about a private meeting with the President, via a third party, to The New York Times was okay. Yet, it was not alright to tell the press that the President was not under investigation regarding Russian interference in the election, even though he wasn’t. It was his duty, he alleged last July, to lay out the prosecutorial case against Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server while Secretary of State, but he felt it his responsibility to determine that no reasonable jury would convict her. Nevertheless, he felt bound, in October, to say she was still under investigation. He said he had no doubt that Russia interfered in the election, yet offered no evidence.

Mr. Comey told Senators that Mr. Trump lied as to why he (Mr. Comey) was fired, but was less direct with the President. He construed the word “hope,” as uttered by Mr. Trump regarding Michael Flynn, as implying obstruction, knowing full well it would mean his good friend, special counsel Robert Mueller, would have to investigate the allegation. (If “hope” becomes standard for obstruction of justice charges, all of Washington will be under indictment, as will most Americans.) James Comey testified that he agreed to accept (then) Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s request that the investigation into Mrs. Clinton be referred to as a “matter,” last July, knowing that to do so was wrong. Yet he did not feel obliged to disagree. His performance throughout his testimony suggested he was being either devious or he was a poltroon… or perhaps both. If he truly felt wronged, a courageous, honorable man would have resigned.

Mr. Comey has abused his position as Director of the FBI, certainly since last July. But, while he may have the ethics of a warthog, he is not stupid. For the last nine months, like Uriah Heep, the unctuous Mr. Comey bobbed and weaved around the Scylla of Washington politics and the Charybdis of ethical behavior – that is until he encountered Mr. Trump, an outsider to Washington politics, a man who had promised to “drain the swamp,” a place where he (Mr. Comey) was one of its most prominent denizens. Whether you hate him or love him, all agree that Mr. Trump is no master of subtlety. The President fired Mr. Comey unceremoniously, something unexpected by a man who felt untouchable. As one who tried to please everyone, Mr. Comey would have been well served to have re-read the story in Aesop’s Fables of “The man, the boy and the donkey” – the moral of which is, you can’t please everyone.

Once fired by Mr. Trump, Democrats forgave Mr. Comey his transgressions regarding Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch. Since his firing, Mr. Comey has cast his lot with those who see Mr. Trump as an illegitimate President, an autocrat, they claim, with a far-right agenda – a President who should be hastened from office, regardless of the cost to our democracy. In testimony, Mr. Comey offered the excuse that the leaking of his memo was for self-protection against a President he did not trust. He said it was justified if the consequence was the hiring of a special counsel. Since Mr. Comey was unable to bring the President down on charges of colluding with the Russians over last November’s election, he now hopes his friend Mr. Mueller will find obstruction of justice as cause for impeachment.

You have to wonder how liberals think this works. So, a manifestly conflicted special counsel leading a pack of maxed-out Democrat donors decides Donald Trump has to be kicked out of office for “obstructing justice” regarding a cynical lie about him cavorting with the Kremlin and…then what? President Pence, until they do the same thing to him? Or do we just skip right to President Felonia von Pantsuit, shrug our shoulders, and give up on our foolish dream of having a say in our own governance?

Straightforward from here is…chaos.

Because normal Americans are woke to the scam. No, the affidavits of a zillion DC/NY establishment types attesting to Robert Mueller’s impeccable integrity – ever notice how the guy trying to hose us always has the establishment’s “impeccable integrity” merit badge – are not going to make us unsee the fact that he’s carrying water for an establishment that thinks we need to just shut up and obey.

Now, pulling off the soft coup is going to be harder than they think. The establishment has not thought this out. They sort of assume that if they squelch Trump then everything somehow just goes back to them being in unchallenged control. Wrong.

Mueller can’t indict Trump – that stupid Constitution, always getting in the way! No, the goal is for Mueller and his crack team of committed liberal activist lawyers to generate some head-shaking, tsk-tsk, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, report claiming Trump “obstructed” the probe into Hillary’s Trump/Russia collusion lie that even the liberals reluctantly acknowledge never happened.

But their problem is that impeachment is a purely political act – this isn’t going to get tried before some leftist DC judge and a 96% Democrat DC jury. No, they have to convince the Republican members of the House of Representatives to impeach and, well, have you taken a look at a political map of the US lately? It’s as red as a baseball field full of conservatives after a Bernie Bro shows up with a rifle.

Now, in the circle of jerks that is DC, congressmen are bombarded with the Trump obstruction narrative. Many neutered professional conservatives, eager to return to the old status quo where they sort-of mattered, are helping our enemies. Some of these congressmen are themselves Fredocons, weak and stupid, and are listening. Some might be swayed – except in a couple weeks they have to go home and be around normal people, and they’re going to hear something completely different.

Normal people aren’t falling for it.

Has anyone out there actually met a Trump voter who said something like this?

I supported Trump, but now I don’t because his refusal to passively sit back and let a Washington insider with an obvious conflict of interest and his Democrat staff drive him out of office on the basis of a Hillary-driven lie far outweighs Neil Gorsuch, pulling out of the climate scam, beating ISIS, and repealing Obamacare.

At six in the morning, a man is startled awake by an insistent pounding on his front door. He opens it to find armed government agents. One group of them begins to ransack the man’s home. Two others take him outside and put him into the back seat of a nondescript government vehicle. One of the armed government agents sits on either side of him, trapping him. As he sits, blinking and confused in his pajamas, they begin to bark questions at him. Was he at a particular meeting, on a particular date, with a political figure who is under suspicion of wrongdoing? The man, confused and afraid and thoroughly intimidated, makes a bad choice — he answers, and he lies. He says he was not at the meeting. The armed government agents smile. They already have witnesses placing the man at the meeting. They already have a recording of the man at the meeting. His lie does not deter, mislead, or even mildly inconvenience them. But now they have him, whether or not he’s done anything wrong before — now he’s lied to the government, a serious crime.

That scenario is not from some totalitarian foreign country or some fictional dystopia. It’s from America, here and now. It happened just like that to one of my clients, interrogated at dawn by the FBI. It represents the vast power of law enforcement — especially federal law enforcement — to turn investigations of crimes into schemes to produce new crimes.

Federal criminal investigative power is in the news as President Trump and his associates face an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Reports — and some ill-considered tweets by the president — suggest that Mueller’s focus may be not just Russian shenanigans but obstruction of the investigation into the same. Trump supporters are enraged; some Trump detractors are delighted. Nobody should be comfortable, unless they are at ease with vast and flexible law-enforcement power over citizens, especially controversial ones. Our system gives federal prosecutors and investigators — from locals across the country to the rare and elite like Mueller — extraordinary power to turn Americans’ lives upside down and prosecute not just prior crimes but any very common and human missteps their frightened targets make in reaction to the investigation.

Commentators are expressing shock — and in many cases pleasure — that President Trump and his associates could face criminal exposure not for original wrongdoing but for their reaction to accusations of wrongdoing. Nobody who has paid attention to American criminal justice for the last generation should be shocked. It is routine — mundane, even — for federal investigators to convict people not for the subject of the investigation but for how they reacted to it.

Can we all stipulate that no one ever wants to be the subject of an investigation? If you are innocent of wrongdoing, the fact that there is no meritorious criminal case is often beside the point.

There is a stigma attached to being an investigative subject. Many people who do not appreciate how politicized the legal system has become will conclude that if you are under investigation, you must have done something wrong. Some other people who know precisely how politicized the legal system has become, and like it that way, will exploit the fact that you are under investigation to stigmatize you. Public perception aside, being the subject of an investigation is also debilitating because of the time it takes to defend oneself, the financial burden of retaining lawyers (and, for a public official, retaining press agents who can deal with the media frenzy), and the anxiety that makes it difficult to focus on one’s job and other responsibilities.

President Trump is now in the grip of this situation. This weekend, it produced some of the more excruciating news coverage in recent memory as one of his lawyers, Jay Sekulow, was tendentiously grilled on the question of whether the president has conceded that he is under investigation.

Like many Trump problems, this one was caused by a Trump tweet. Foolishly allowing himself to be baited by a Washington Post report that special counsel Robert Mueller is now weighing whether the president committed an obstruction crime, Trump tweeted: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt[.]”

Clearly, Trump is exasperated over what he sees as much ado about nothing. Constitutionally, the president does not need a reason to fire the FBI director, who — like every unelected subordinate official in the executive branch — serves at the president’s pleasure. Before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general, wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be dismissed. In the subsequent furor over Comey’s dismissal — largely stoked by Trump’s conflicting reasons for firing the director, which first adopted but then parted company with Rosenstein’s memo — Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel. In that role, Mueller is not independent — he answers to Rosenstein (because Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, is recused). So technically, Trump is correct: The man who wrote the memo endorsing Comey’s removal has authorized an investigation that is reportedly probing whether that removal somehow constituted a felony.

Impeachment.

See, it’s not that hard. All together now: Impeachment . . . impeachment . . . impeachment.

Don’t be fraidy-scared. It’s okay to say the “I-word.” Really.

Apparently, Team Trump doesn’t think so.

It was painful to watch Trump apologists fan out in the media to defend the president over the weekend. They have a persuasive argument to make against the obstruction probe reportedly being pursued by special counsel Robert Mueller. But it cannot be made without discussing impeachment.

It seems Team Trump has calculated that the word “impeachment” must be resisted — that utterances of it would cross a psychological barrier, normalize public consideration of it, begin to create the political conditions in which it could actually happen.

It is a bad strategic call. It is like telling your advocates: “Go explain two-plus-two. But whatever you do, don’t mention the word ‘four.’”

Here is how this works.

There is no legal obstruction case against President Trump. As we have repeatedly explained, obstruction requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a public official acted corruptly in endeavoring to influence or interfere with an investigation. To establish the corrupt mental state, prosecutors must prove that the official knew what he was doing was against the law.

The president’s actions here, no matter how much one might judge them ham-handed or inappropriate, were not against the law. A president has prosecutorial discretion: He may lawfully shut down an investigation, to say nothing of merely influencing it. And the intelligence services exist to serve the president: He may lawfully terminate any intelligence-collection effort he chooses to.

In point of fact, Trump did not shut down the investigation of Michael Flynn or the counterintelligence probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Since he had the authority to bring these investigations to a screeching halt, he cannot have acted corruptly by taking lesser lawful action. Period.

The claim that Trump may be guilty of a prosecutable obstruction crime is premised on a legal error – namely, that the FBI and the Justice Department are a separate branch of government, independent of the executive. In fact, they are subordinate to the president. The power they exercise, as inferior officers, is the president’s power. It does not matter whether an FBI director finds it troubling that a president makes suggestions to him about how a case should be handled. The president gets to do that. If the FBI director finds that intolerable, he can resign. The director’s comfort level is constitutionally irrelevant.

Prosecutorial discretion is part of a continuum of executive police powers that includes the ultimate interference in law-enforcement: the pardon power. No matter how offended we are when a president pardons (or commutes the sentences of) serious criminals, the matter is unreviewable by the courts. The president may not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice over it, even though it seems like a profound obstruction of justice, because the president has the indisputable authority to take the action.