RUTHFULLY YOURS

A radical group linked to rogue billionaire George Soros has been providing scripts containing anti-Trump talking points for constituents to read aloud during congressional town hall meetings.

One of the scripts distributed by the Revolutionary Love Project encourages town hall participants meeting with their member of Congress to accuse the Trump administration of – wait for it – “xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia.” Constituents are urged to use those precise words to “forcefully condemn” President Trump’s immigration and border security initiatives, Aaron Klein reports at Breitbart News.

Information about the scripts came as leaked audio from anti-Trump activists associated with the group Indivisible surfaced. Their target was a town hall hosted by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.). They planned to deploy an “inside team” to occupy as many seats as possible and an “outside team” to “give [the media] the coverage they want.” Activists were urged to “dress like conservatives” and avoid “any signifier that you’re a liberal” so they could dominate the meeting.

“Game plan number one is to fill as many seats as we can, right? If it’s all of us in there and the poor people of Breaux Bridge are sitting behind us, well then tough luck for them,” James Proctor of Indivisible reportedly said.

“If we can arrange it so he doesn’t hear one sympathetic question–great. That only magnifies our impact,” he added.

This is a standard, old-time organizing technique used by followers of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky.

It has another name in politics: astroturfing.

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Love Project states on its website that its supporters “resist all policies, actions, and rhetoric that put people in harm’s way,” and “fight for justice through the ethic of love — love for others, our opponents, and ourselves.” This language is reminiscent of communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s famous statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

It is rare that we get a glimpse at the guiding principles that motivate a president and his team, but White House senior adviser Stephen Bannon’s recent remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference may have provided unique insight into the Trump administration’s operations and goals.

For conservatives, it was a mixed bag. Bannon’s emphasis on economic nationalism raises concerns about autarky and statism. But as Rich Lowry observes, his pledge for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” was music to conservatives’ ears.

Regulatory sprawl and executive overreach have been the target of principled conservatives for some time. Efforts to tame the administrative state predate President Trump and even President Obama, whose proclivity for executive action has been subject of plenty of NRO commentary.

Conservative animus toward the administrative state is focused on more than just its economic costs, which come in the form of less investment and job creation. The principal objection is that it undermines the role of the legislative branch relative to the executive. As Bannon quipped: “The way the progressive left runs, if they can’t get it passed [by Congress], they’re just going to put it in some regulation.” This tendency to governance by regulation and executive rulemaking must therefore be reversed for both economic and political reasons.

What steps can the Trump administration and conservatives both agree to take toward reducing the size and scope of the administrative state? An obvious step would be to give Congress some way to review and scrutinize regulations and executive rulemaking, as has been done in other jurisdictions.

The U.S. Constitution indisputably places responsibility for lawmaking with Congress. The legislative branch promulgates and passes laws, and the president and his appointees implement and enforce them.

But that is not how the system of government has evolved. Many of the laws passed by Congress delegate authority to departments and agencies to produce rules and regulations to effectuate or administer them. These secondary or accompanying policies are sometimes called “delegated legislation,” because they have the full force of the law.

One good (or bad, depending on your perspective) example is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The 2,300-page statute covered a far-reaching set of issues — including financial instruments, executive compensation, mortgage lending, and government oversight — and established three new agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While comprehensive in its scope, the law was light on details. Federal agencies were granted considerable discretion to promulgate delegated authorities to accompany the statute, with no congressional role.

Vague drafting that agencies “may” issue rules or shall issue rules as they “determine are necessary and appropriate” give the executive branch tremendous power to define, broaden, and interpret the law. As the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth has put it: “In these cases, the agencies make the hard policy choices. They are the lawmakers.” The upshot is that, in 2016, Congress passed 211 laws and the federal government issued 3,853 rules and regulations. It is fair to say that this 18:1 ratio is not what James Madison had in mind.

Following the conventional wisdom on the Trump presidency is a little like taking a mind-altering drug while riding a roller-coaster. You know that you are being hurled up and down and around in a succession of dizzying revolutions, but somehow it doesn’t seem quite as normal an experience as that.

In the twelve or so hours after the State of the Union, the air was thick with the sound of second thoughts on the Trump presidency: The president had been “presidential.” He had spoken well, reading the teleprompter accurately, and not deviating into self-justifying asides. He had denounced bigotry and anti-Semitism. He had followed Nixon to China on immigration reform, hallelujah. His familiar themes of patriotic unity and rebuilding America were expressed in lighter and more optimistic language than in his “dark” and “divisive” Inaugural, with its grim talk of “carnage.” His tribute to the widow of the slain Navy SEAL had been an inspiring moment in an inspiring speech. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I don’t think anyone described the president as “the New Trump,” but it came pretty close to that. And this favorable impression was then reinforced by reports of polls that showed that the voters, maybe having listened to the pundits, liked it, too. One such poll showed that almost four out of every five Americans approved of the speech to varying degrees.

Politically speaking, that’s important. If the president is thought to be an impressive figure within the mainstream of presidents, so to speak, and to enjoy wide popular support, he will be in a better position to push through his political agenda.

Probably for that reason, pundits started having second thoughts about the second thoughts at around lunch time on the same day. They weren’t always the same pundits, of course. Some were responding critically to the first round of pundits who had had approving second thoughts; others were putting a more skeptical gloss on their own earlier-in-the-day approval. But the general effect was to explain that Trump’s speech had not been nearly as successful as the initial set of reactions had suggested. Not by any means. In fact, parts of it, like the curate’s egg, had been downright disgusting,

So what had produced this illusion of success? The answer that bubbled up from the collective subconscious of the punditocracy was that Trump had seemed to give a good speech because he was being compared favorably, indeed indulgently, to Trump who, as everyone knows, is impulsive, scatter-brained, given to plucking figures from the air or his last night’s television viewing, vulgar, credulous, hostile to every form of self-discipline, including logic, and wholly incapable of giving a good speech or a polished performance.

Establishment furor over the six-week-old Trump administration is growing.

Outraged New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared Trump’s victory to disasters in American history that killed and wounded thousands such as the Pearl Harbor surprise bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The New Republic — based on no evidence — theorized that Trump could well be mentally unstable due to the effects of neurosyphilis.

Talk of removing the new president through impeachment, or opposing everything he does (the progressive “Resistance”), is commonplace. Some op-ed writers and pundits abroad have openly hoped for his violent death.

Trump is in a virtual war with the mainstream global media, the entrenched so-called deep state, the Democratic-party establishment, progressive activists, and many in the Republican party as well.

The sometimes undisciplined and loud Trump is certainly not a member of the familiar ruling cadre, which dismisses him as a crude and know-nothing upstart who should never have been elected president. (Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and served a full term, a member of either the Bush or Clinton families would have been president for 24 years of a 32-year span.)

But who, exactly, makes up these disgruntled elite classes?

In California, state planners and legislators focused on things such as outlawing plastic grocery bags while California’s roads and dams over three decades sank into decrepitude. The result is crumbling infrastructure that now threatens the very safety of the public. Powerful Californians with impressive degrees also came up with the loony and neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal immigration law through sanctuary cities.

Sophisticated Washington, D.C., economists produced budgets for the last eight years that saw U.S. debt explode from $10 trillion to nearly $19 trillion, as economic growth sank to its lowest level since the Hoover administration.

For a year, most expert pundits and pollsters smugly assured the public of a certain Hillary Clinton victory — until the hour before she was overwhelmed in the Electoral College.

Rhodes Scholar and former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lied repeatedly on national television about the Benghazi debacle.

From the fabulist former NBC anchorman Brian Williams to the disreputable reporters who turned up in WikiLeaks, there are lots of well-educated, influential, and self-assured elites who apparently cannot tell the truth or in dishonest fashion mix journalism and politics.

They’ve taken down General Michael Flynn. The former Trump national-security adviser resigned under fire when a false narrative — his purported collusion with election-hacking Russians — was inflamed by criminal intelligence leaks, exacerbated by his poor judgment (or, at the least, poor execution of his duty to brief senior administration officials). Now, the swamp is after its next scalp, Sebastian Gorka, a White House counterterrorism adviser. If the White House is wise, they won’t get it.

Seb is a friend of mine. He is also an accomplished scholar of jihadist ideology and methodology. A series of transparently coordinated hit pieces against him has issued from the usual mainstream-media sources. They have been ably rebutted, among other places, here at National Review Online, in a column by Colin Dueck, and at the Washington Free Beacon, in reports by Bill Gertz and Adam Kredo. The notion that he is racist, “Islamophobic” (as opposed to anti-jihadist), or uninformed is absurd. I wish only to add a couple of observations to the mix.

First, Washington’s government-centric clerisy has forged its own counterterrorism industry over the years, consisting of former investigators and intel analysts, along with the academics who collaborate with them. Much of the work they have done is very solid. But some of it has been highly politicized — in the Bush years, when the powers that be took umbrage at any suggestion that Islamic culture and some mainstream currents of Islamic thought are inherently resistant to Western democracy; and in the Obama years, when any whisper of the nexus between classical, scripture-based Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims was a firing offense.

Gorka, an American citizen who grew up in London and holds a doctorate in political science from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration, is an outside-the-Beltway academic. His clear-eyed understanding of totalitarian ideology, as we shall see, is largely based on having experienced its wages. In short, he is a gate-crasher who does not share the industry’s presumptions. Worse, from the industry’s perspective, he is an extraordinarily effective speaker and writer, who connects well in the classroom, on the page, in the council hall, and at the television studio. He is anathema to an expert class that has spent years willingly putting itself in the service of such farce as “countering violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” “Arab Spring,” “religion of peace,” and other manifestations of willful blindness.

There is thus a target on his back. The Trump administration’s quick cashiering of General Flynn has convinced establishment Washington that it may not take much character assassination for the next guy to be thrown under the proverbial bus.

Second, Flynn was replaced as national-security adviser by General H. R. McMaster, a commendable warrior but one lodged firmly in the Bush/Obama see-no-Islam mindset, which is at odds with Trump’s oft-stated determination to recognize the connection between Islam and terrorism. General McMaster evidently objects to Trump’s naming of “radical Islamic terrorism” as the enemy. As I’ve contended, naming the enemy is necessary but not nearly sufficient; it is but a first step toward the real necessity of understanding the enemy. I have expressed my own reservations about the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” so I can hardly fault McMaster on that score. I can quarrel, though, with his reportedly Obama-esque position that the Islamic State is not Islamic. That is no more sensible than saying that the Islamic State is perfectly representative of Islam.

Nancy Pelosi says Republicans have accomplished nothing in 2017, and no doubt she wishes that were true. But the House has already voted to repeal 13 Obama-era regulations, and President Trump signed his third on Tuesday. Now the GOP should accelerate by fully utilizing the 1996 Congressional Review Act.

Republicans chose the damaging 13 rules based on a conventional reading of the CRA, which allows Congress to override regulations published within 60 legislative days, with simple (50-vote) majorities in both chambers. Yet the more scholars examine the law, which had only been used successfully once before this year, the clearer it is that the CRA gives Congress far more regulatory oversight than previously supposed.

Spearheading this review is the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Todd Gaziano—who helped write the 1996 act—and the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Larkin. Their legal findings, and a growing list of rules that might be subject to CRA, are on www.redtaperollback.com.

The pair argue, first, that the CRA defines “rule” broadly. The law relies on the definition in the Administrative Procedure Act, which includes any “agency statement” that is “designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy.” This includes major and minor rules as well as “guidance”—letters that spell out an agency’s interpretation of a law.

This matters because President Obama’s regulators often ducked the notice and comment of formal rule-making by issuing “guidance” to act as de facto regulation. Examples include the guidance requiring transgender bathrooms in public schools, which the Trump Administration recently withdrew, or the 2011 guidance dictating how universities must handle sexual assault. The latter is ripe for CRA repeal.

The second discovery is the law’s definition of when the clock starts on Congress’s time to review rules. The CRA’s opening lines require any agency promulgating a rule to present a “report” containing the rule’s text and definition. The CRA explains that Congress’s review period begins either on the date the rule is published in the Federal Register, or the date Congress receives the report—whichever comes later.

Thus any rule for which any Administration (going back to 1996) failed to submit a report is fair game for CRA review and repeal. The Trump Administration can begin the clock merely by submitting a report to Congress.

Our own search suggests past Administrations were fairly diligent about presenting reports for major rules. But a 2014 study by the Administrative Conference of the United States found at least 43 “major” or “significant” rules that had never been reported to Congress.

The study estimated a further 1,000 smaller rules a year that agencies had failed to report. The study focused only on formal rules—not “guidance” that also requires a report to Congress under the CRA. Redtaperollback.com is offering tools so citizens can examine whether past rules have reports.

That scene you saw at the moment President Trump ended his speech to a joint session of Congress was the Democrats abandoning the ship of state.

Like the progressive street demonstrations endured by the country the past four weeks, we may assume Congress’s Democratic delegation organized their post-speech bolt to the exits via the famous social-media hashtag #TheResistance.

During the speech’s most extraordinary moment, the tribute to Carryn Owens, wife of slain SEAL Ryan Owens, one notable Democrat who refused to stand was Rep. Keith Ellison, who just lost a close race for Democratic National Committee chairman to Obama Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, also a man of the left.

You’d have thought that at the two-thirds point, when Mr. Trump hadn’t self-destructed as expected, when instead he was looking less like Alec Baldwin and more like President Trump, that Chuck Schumer might have pulled out his smartphone to tweet the troops, “Walkout maybe not a good idea.” Not this crew. En masse, they went over the side, just as they’ve refused to attend hearings for cabinet nominees and voted as a bloc against virtually all of them.

Donald Trump extended an olive branch on key legislative issues, and the Democrats gave him the you-know-what. In fact, the party might consider making you-know-what its new logo because Mr. Trump has stolen their mascot, the Democratic donkey.

The donkey was the creation of Democrat Andrew Jackson, whose portrait hangs now in Republican Donald Trump’s Oval Office. Jackson’s opponents called him a jackass, which he transformed into a badge of honor by putting the jackass on his campaign posters.

Jackson served two terms. Eight years is going to be a long slog for Democrats if indeed they plan to conduct the nation’s business with the Trump White House from various street corners.

There is one other relevant image from the moments after the speech ended: Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin standing—alone—to shake Mr. Trump’s hand. CONTINUE AT SITE

A former Black Lives Matter activist claims his comrades planned to burn down the Minnesota state capitol in Saint Paul and the governor’s mansion if the police officer who fatally shot a black man during a traffic stop had not been prosecuted.

Trey Turner, who describes himself as half black and half white, said in a YouTube video dated Feb. 27 that BLM activists planned to go on a violent rampage if Saint Paul area police officer Jeronimo Yanez had not been charged in connection with the high-profile shooting July 6, 2016 of the late Philando Castile, which they claim was racially motivated.

The violence and advocacy of violence against white people by Black Lives Matter is well-documented.

In recent weeks, Yusra Khogali of the Toronto, Canada branch of BLM, said white people were “recessive genetic defects” and contemplated how whites could be “wiped out.” In Seattle a BLM supporter issued a profanity-rich call “to start killing people” including President Trump. The speaker also ranted against “white supremacy,” “capitalism,” “patriarchy,” and “anti-blackness,” dropping the F-bomb 55 times in the tirade.

Last July, Micah X. Johnson, a sniper sympathetic to the movement’s goals shot and killed five Dallas area cops before being killed. Johnson’s shooting spree took place the day after Castile died and some say it may have served as a catalyst for the mass murder which happened during a Black Lives Matter march.

FrontPage readers need to be cautioned that so far Turner’s statement is uncorroborated. It is unclear if authorities are even investigating Turner’s story. A telephone call and emails seeking comment from the U.S. Department of Justice had not been returned at time of writing.

Castile, 32 at the time of his death, was an elementary school cafeteria employee with a long list of traffic infractions but no criminal convictions. The sheriff of Hennepin County, Minn., issued a concealed-carry permit for a pistol to Castile in 2015. He had a handgun in his vehicle at the time of the traffic stop.

Big.

The Empire State Building was built in a year. During WW2, we built almost 100,000 aircraft in a year. The 1,700 mile Alaska Highway was completed in a year. Compare that to Obama’s California high speed train to nowhere which got its start in his stimulus plan in 2009 and whose deadline he had to extend to 2022. In the 19th century, railroad crews laid 10 miles of track in one day between sunrise and sunset.

It took a decade and billions of dollars for New York City to build a subway that runs 20 blocks.

But in a bold and courageous address, President Trump laid out a tremendous vision that runs from transforming our education and health care systems and rebuilding our military, to curing diseases, unleashing technological wonders and even, “American footprints on distant worlds.”

It is a vision of revitalized industries, rebuilt cities and thriving communities. It is the America that once was and might have been if history had taken a different turn on a cold fall night in Chicago.

And it can be ours again.

The President called for unleashing the potential of inner cities trapped under Democrat rule with school choice and gave a voice to the victims of illegal alien crime. He envisioned the rebuilding of our infrastructure and the end of ObamaCare. He defied the warnings of the appeasement lobby and spoke out firmly against Islamic terror. And he laid out a vision for making the nation great again.

“Think of the marvels we can achieve if we simply set free the dreams of our people,” the President urged.

We haven’t thought big or built big. Money pours through our hands and disappears into the pockets of a corrupt establishment. The dollar tip of a waitress in a small town in Ohio goes into the Georgetown mansion of an environmental consultant. The tax hike that wipes out the annual profits of a small business in Michigan disappears into a three billion dollar accounting error in Washington D.C.

And even this thievery, the theft of the billions and trillions that vanished under Obama leaving us deeply indebted to China and Japan, is small, mean and petty. The Clintons had rented out the Lincoln Bedroom when they were in the White House. Then they ran for office by charging half the dictators and lobbyists of the world rent on the Lincoln Bedroom on the assumption that Hillary would get the keys.

There was no vision to the miserable thievery. Just vultures picking over the bones of a great nation.

But in the election, tens of millions of Americans drove off the vultures circling over the Washington Monument. The Clintons roam the Chappaqua woods while a national vision returns to D.C.

A vision that is uniquely American in its optimism and its confidence.

“A new chapter of American Greatness is now beginning,” President Trump declared. “A new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp.”

“What we are witnessing today is the Renewal of the American Spirit.”