RUTHFULLY YOURS

If ever there were an example of why a congressional committee is a terrible vehicle for investigating misconduct with alleged criminal or national-security implications, it was Monday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. The session, a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, featured the much-anticipated testimony of Democratic diva Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Trump in the early days of his administration. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the proceedings were heavy on politically charged innuendo and light on substance.

If you were looking for hard evidence of Trump collusion in a Russian influence operation, there was none to be found. And if you were hoping for insight into the only known crime to have been committed in this escapade — namely, the leaking of classified information to the media — the hearing chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) was a disappointment.

What we mainly heard was that the Obama administration really does not like Michael Flynn. Not exactly the late-breaking news.

President Obama fired Flynn after making him head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn was a naysayer on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East — especially Iran and radical Islam. Flynn also made enemies throughout the so-called “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies because he called out our spooks on politicizing their analyses to paper over Obama’s policy failures. How surprising that many of these officials have no use for him either.

Thus, the schadenfreude runneth over in the Obama camp, which is clearly enjoying the general’s fall from grace. And one can hardly blame them for bursting into “I told you so” mode over lapses in judgment by President Trump’s original (and short-lived) national-security adviser — e.g., taking money in his post-military security-consulting career from enterprises tied to the murderous Putin regime and the government of Turkey’s Islamist thug, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Flynn defenders will get only so far observing that the autocratic Erdogan was beloved of the Obama and Bush administrations, too, and that the haul from Flynn’s Russian speaking gigs was a bare fraction of the cool $500,000 Bill Clinton got from a Kremlin-tied investment bank shortly before his wife, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, signed off on a government ruling that gave Russia control of one-fifth of U.S. uranium supplies. I myself have pointed out that Flynn (with co-author Michael Ledeen) wrote a bestselling book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies, in which he describes the Putin regime as a determined enemy bent on America’s destruction, and radical Islam as the ideology that animates the terrorist threat against our country. Given the general’s awareness of these facts, if he couldn’t perceive the unseemliness of profiting off the Russian and Turkish despots, then Democrats surely can’t be faulted for questioning his fitness, or Trump’s judgment in retaining him. Such critiques can hardly be dismissed as baseless, even if they are hypocritical, motivated by politics rather than security concerns, and grossly incomplete in the portrait they paint of Flynn’s distinguished military career.

Three years after the 2014 Veterans Health Administration scandal erupted in headlines, outrage, investigations, and the resignation of then-secretary of veterans’ affairs Eric Shinseki, veterans still must contend with an agency that provides less than stellar service.

A government report issued in February found that the VA’s shift to using more private-sector care for veterans has its own problems. They include cumbersome authorization and scheduling procedures, inadequate provider networks, and the potential for veterans having to pay their own treatment costs. Plus wait times for care, the heart of the 2014 scandal, are still long: an average of 45 days for 53% of veterans.

Problematic health care, as well as the descent into homelessness for a growing number of our nation’s veterans, belies our posture of national pride in our troops. We label them heroes, and then we fail to properly provide for them.

The problems of inadequate health care began to surface in 2012 and 2013, when two doctors at the Phoenix VA Health Care System voiced concerns. The whistleblowers said they had witnessed substandard care, that VA officials had falsified health service wait times, and that 40 veterans died while waiting for health care. These claims were later verified by the Veterans Administration, and investigations began nationwide.

A 2014 General Accounting Office audit of 731 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics reported that roughly 100,000 veterans nationwide were experiencing long wait times for health care. Another VA report detailed specific techniques used to falsify wait times.

Still other allegations of mismanagement surfaced in 2014, when a congressional committee revealed that more than $380,000 in bonuses were awarded to directors and top executives of 38 VA facilities where falsification of records and delays in care were being examined. The money was part of $2.7 million in extra pay given in 2013 to top-ranking VA officials.

Further, a 2015 VA report found that the VA had such sloppy record keeping that 307,000 veterans out of 867,000 pending cases on the VA’s list of electronic records were actually deceased. VA officials could not conclude if the veterans had received care, were still waiting for care, or had even applied for care. Nonetheless, some concluded that those veterans had died while waiting for medical help.

If you’ve only followed coverage of the Republican health-care bill loosely in the media, you might believe that House Republicans, after much effort, passed legislation to deny people with pre-existing conditions health insurance.

The issue of pre-existing conditions has dominated the debate over the GOP health-care bill out of all proportion to the relatively modest provision in the legislation, which is being distorted — often willfully, sometimes ignorantly — into a threat to all that is good and true in America.

The perversity of it all is that the legislation is properly understood as doing more to preserve the Obamacare regulation on pre-existing conditions than to undermine it. The legislation maintains a federal baseline of protection in such cases, and says only that states can apply for a waiver from it, provided that they abide by certain conditions meant to ensure that no one is left out in the cold.

Since these provisions only involve the individual insurance market, a small slice of the overall insurance picture (about 18 million are on the individual market), and merely make possible state waivers, they are inherently limited.

You’re not affected if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You’re not affected if you live in a state that doesn’t request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and most red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you’re not affected if you’ve maintained insurance coverage continuously and not had a gap in coverage longer than 63 days.

By this point, we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. If you do have a pre-existing condition in a waiver state and haven’t had continuous coverage, you can be charged more by your insurer only the first year. The state will have access to $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to ease the cost of your insurance, and the state must further have a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for the sick.

Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn’t to punish people who are sick, but to create an incentive for people to buy insurance while they are healthy. (The Obamacare exchanges are failing because the law’s tangle of regulations drove up costs and made insurance economically unappealing to the young and healthy.)

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover, testified on Monday before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in connection with the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference with last year’s presidential election. There were no major revelations during over three hours of testimony. The saga of General Michael Flynn, whom served briefly as President Trump’s national security adviser before being dismissed for misleading Trump administration officials about his Russian contacts, was a recurrent theme of the hearing. Another was the unmasking of the names of Trump associates on whom information was incidentally collected during the course of surveillance focused on foreign targets, and the leaks to the media that followed.

Both Mr. Clapper and Ms. Yates said they had viewed classified documents in which the identities of Donald Trump or his associates had been unmasked, but declined to provide any details. Ms. Yates indicated that she herself had not asked for any such unmasking. Mr. Clapper said that he had at least on one occasion requested unmasking involving a Trump associate. Both denied having leaked any such information to the press. Moreover, neither was aware of any classified information relating to Mr. Trump or his associates being declassified and then shared with the media.

Mr. Clapper reaffirmed his conclusion that no evidence existed of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. He also confirmed that during his investigation he did not find a situation where a Trump business interest in Russia gave him concern during the course of the preparation of the intelligence communities’ assessment.

Ms. Yates refused to state where she stood on the collusion issue in the public subcommittee setting, falling back on a justification she used repeatedly in not answering any questions that she claimed “would require me to reveal classified information.”

Despite getting no support from either Mr. Clapper or Ms. Yates on the existence of supposed collusion, Democrats on the subcommittee nevertheless kept hammering away on their speculative conspiracy theories without any evidence to support them. That is one reason why they kept coming back to the Flynn story, in an effort to draw broad but unsupportable inferences of something even more nefarious at work.

Ms. Yates claimed to have warned the White House, in particular White House Counsel Don McGahn, during the very early days of the Trump administration regarding Flynn’s misleading statements on his prior contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. “The Russians also knew what Gen. Flynn had done and that Gen. Flynn had misled the Vice President and others…that created a compromise situation — a situation where the national security advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians,” Ms. Yates said. In addition to the concern that Flynn was compromised, she said “we felt like the Vice President was entitled to know that the information he had been given, and that he was relaying to the American public, wasn’t true.”

Mr. Clapper confirmed the role that British intelligence, along with other allies, played in sharing information they had with U.S. intelligence officials regarding purported links between Russians and Trump associates. He said the specifics were “quite sensitive.” Curiously, however, the former director of national intelligence claimed to have been in the dark about the FBI’s own investigation into the Russian-Trump campaign relationship.

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates took her turn before the Senate Monday, in a hearing focused on her role in the firing of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. As is now routine in any discussion of the Trump-Russia story, some important details were buried amid the speculation.

Mrs. Yates recounted in detail her unusual visit in January to White House Counsel Donald McGahn, when she said she’d warned that the Justice Department had evidence that Mr. Flynn had lied to White House officials and the public about certain “problematic” conduct.

Mrs. Yates, an Obama appointee, declined to specify the conduct to the Senate, but thanks to Obama-team leaks we know it involved Mr. Flynn discussing sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador though he had publicly said he hadn’t. Mrs. Yates said that because the Russians knew about his lying, Mr. Flynn had been “compromised” and was vulnerable to “blackmail.” Democratic Senators repeated the “compromised” line.

Yet the salient political fact is that President Trump then fired Mr. Flynn for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and the public. Moreover, Mr. Flynn was fired despite the lack of evidence that he conveyed any truly compromising information to the Russian ambassador.

All we know is that Mr. Flynn made a passing reference in his conversation with the ambassador to U.S. sanctions against Russia—a reference Mr. Flynn says he forgot. What was there to blackmail him over?

The important question is whether there was collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign, and on that score the Yates appearance turned up nothing new. For that matter, we’re still waiting for any such evidence from the House, Senate and FBI investigations. Maybe it exists, but no one has produced it.

So far the only crime we know about in this drama is the leak of Mr. Flynn’s name to the press as having been overheard when U.S. intelligence was eavesdropping on the Russian ambassador. Mr. Flynn’s name was leaked in violation of the law after he was “unmasked” by an Obama Administration official and his name was distributed widely across the government.

We don’t know who did the unmasking, but on Monday both Mrs. Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that while in office they had personally reviewed classified reports about “Mr. Trump, his officials or members of Congress” who had been “unmasked.” Both also admitted that they had shared that information with others in government, though they did deny leaking to the press.

We thought readers might like to know those details in case they go unreported anywhere else in the press. The unmasking of the names of political opponents is a serious concern, and the American people need to know how and why that happened here.

With Neil Gorsuch safely on the Supreme Court, the White House is turning its attention to the lower federal courts. President Trump took a major step Monday, naming five new nominees to the federal appellate courts and five to the district courts.

The five appellate nominees are Joan Larsen of the Michigan Supreme Court and John Bush of Kentucky to the Sixth Circuit, Kevin Newsom of Alabama to the 11th Circuit, David Stras of Minnesota to the Eighth Circuit and Amy Barrett of Indiana to the Seventh Circuit.

Judges Larsen and Stras were on Mr. Trump’s original list of 21 judges he said he’d consider for the Supreme Court, and the group has sterling credentials. Ms. Barrett is a law professor at Notre Dame who clerked for federal Judge Laurence Silberman, a giant of the appellate circuits, as well as the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Mr. Newsom is a former clerk to Justice David Souter and has argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court. Mr. Bush is a highly regarded lawyer in private practice who represented President Reagan during the Iran-Contra investigations.

It’s likely the left will pressure Democratic Senators like Al Franken (Minnesota) and Joe Donnelly (Indiana) to withhold their endorsements of the home state judges, known as “blue slips.” But White House Counsel Donald McGahn has put together impressive nominees who will be hard to obstruct for reasons beyond raw partisanship.

Prompt Senate action on the nominations is important—not least because the number of vacancies on the federal bench is around 129. After these latest nominees, that includes 14 on the appellate circuits. President Obama made 331 judicial appointments, and his nominees to the federal appeals courts now represent about a third of the judges.

According to the Brookings Institution, as of September 2016 there were 92 liberal appellate judges and 75 conservatives. It’s time to redress the balance in the 115th Congress while Republicans have a Senate majority.

We live in an age of identity politics, which is a misleading way of saying we are segregated – by race, religion, socio-economic positions and sex. Differences do exist, and highlighting them is a way to spotlight societal problems. But partition today is done, cynically, for political purposes – to compartmentalize voters for easy access. As a nation, we need debate but should focus on commonalities. However, in the matter of the sexes, it is the difference between men and women that is fundamental to our continued existence. After all, without procreation we would die off.

All agree, there is no excuse for sexual harassment and that there should be equal pay for equal work – that women should have the same opportunity as men in terms of education and careers. And – despite the above Wodehouse quote – intelligence is not confined to one gender. Respect should have no boundaries.

We are formed by our past. While I went to an all-boys high school and spent forty years on male-dominated Wall Street trading floors, I was fortunate to have been raised in a household, and in a family, where women were always considered equal to men. Of my parents, my mother was the more dominant, and certainly had more of a head for business than my father. While both were artists, he was quiet and reserved, interested in sculpture, nature and his children. My maternal grandmother was raised in the south and in Washington, D.C. She married at 18 and, with her husband, moved into the New Haven home of her widowed father-in-law, where she became the head of a large household. While she never went to college, she was, according to my father, as well-read as anyone he knew. My paternal grandmother married at age 31. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, she spent six years studying at M.I.T., which accepted her tuition, but refused to grant her a degree because of her sex. She always remembered that slight, but didn’t let it consume her. She lived to be 93, and maintained a life-long interest in public health, an interest nurtured at M.I.T.

The gender equality I encountered in my youth was accompanied with a chivalrous attitude toward women. I was taught to remove my hat and open doors for women, to pull out their chair when they came to the table. This was not because they were incapable of doing so themselves, but as a sign of respect. (If you had seen my mother on a horse you would know she wasn’t fragile.) Shortly after I met my wife, she and I drove out to Wellesley to visit my paternal grandparents. My grandfather had just turned 89 and Caroline was in her early 20s. When she walked into the room, he stood. Civility and manners that make for genteel behavior are neither condescending nor patronizing. They lubricate rules of civility.

The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified in August 1920, a hundred and thirty-one years after George Washington was inaugurated. Neither of my grandmothers could vote until they were middle-aged. When I was growing up most women did not go to college and careers open to men were not open to them. In high school, girls took “home economics,” while boys took “shop.” Ten years later, in the mid 1960s, opportunities for women were still limited. The feminist movement was well-timed. Women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem led marches for jobs, equal treatment and rights. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was passed by Congress in 1972, but only ratified by 32 States, so never became part of the Constitution. Phyllis Schlafly was, in part, responsible for its failure. Her argument: women bear babies, so must be cared for by the men who get them pregnant, an observation rooted in biology. Nevertheless, over time, most of what the ERA demanded has been enacted into law, and/or have become part of the accepted norm. There are more women in universities today than men. While not equally represented in government, business, law, academia and the military, they have made in-roads inconceivable to those of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation.

If you’re a Democrat, and your program is wealth redistribution—with a big cut for yourself as a ruling middleman—it turns out that racism is a much better rationale than inequality for robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul. Inequality, as New York mayor Bill de Blasio ruefully found, is too fuzzy a cause to fire up most people with righteous indignation, since American liberty has always meant that people free to use their different talents and virtues in their own way will arrive at widely varying outcomes. But racism—oh, racism is the original American sin. It is so obviously, wickedly, unjust as to get the blood boiling in blue states and cities across the land.

Trouble is, there isn’t that much racism festering in the nation any more. It was Barack Obama’s political obsession, perhaps bordering on political genius, to convince a majority of Americans that it pervaded everywhere, like phlogiston, seventeenth-century science’s imaginary substance—invisible but supposedly ubiquitous and providing our ancestors with an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of combustion.

Accomplishing this task, though, required a massive rewrite of the American history of the last half-century. As recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of people around for whom the civil rights movement had been a formative, firsthand experience. I don’t mean the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I mean ordinary people who had a deep commitment to ending racial segregation and discrimination and to winning equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless (as the mid-century slogan put it) of race, creed, or color. We had heard the speeches of Martin Luther King and yearned for the day when only the content of your character, not the color of your skin, would count; had known (or even been) Freedom Riders, rumbling south by the busload to help hitherto disenfranchised blacks register to vote; had seen Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor stand by while the Ku Klux Klan beat those demonstrators and later set his own police dogs and fire hoses on the next peaceful group; had seen Governor George Wallace stand in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama. We saw the moral force of that movement inexorably marginalize the racists, and the legal force of the federal government steamroll them, starting with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and gaining momentum when Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, flanked by federal marshals and national guardsmen, forced Wallace to step aside as the first black students entered his state university in 1963, and when Congress the next year passed the epochal 1964 Civil Rights Act.

My generation lived through decades of what seemed a world-historical liberation. Before our eyes, as we saw it, Jefferson’s dream of an America based on the idea that all men are created equal had solidified into a reality at last. So indelibly etched on our memories were those heady times that on 9/11, when my left-wing baby-boomer neighbors spontaneously assembled at the Firemen’s Monument on Riverside Drive, candles in hand, all they could think of to solemnize the occasion was to sing not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” If the Vietnam War was the shadow of our formative years, the civil rights movement’s success was the sunshine.

But like many admirable movements, even this one had its excesses. Equality of opportunity wasn’t enough, some insisted. We needed equality of results. Government and private institutions adopted numerical goals and quotas and tried to reach them through affirmative action—that is, through a supposedly beneficent discrimination by race, seemingly legal, since the Supreme Court, even in Brown v. Board of Education, had never repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson’s odious 1896 acceptance of racial discrimination. We got forced school busing to make student populations of each school mirror the racial composition of the region, and public education’s focus shifted from imparting knowledge to fighting racial disparity—or, as the progressive-ed schools put it, advancing social justice. Needless to say, the education of black kids improved not a whit.