RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lawmakers in the Golden State are so worried about the future actions of President-elect Donald Trump that they have recruited a former U.S. attorney general to help deal with them. Incredibly, the California Legislature has chosen former Attorney Gen. Eric Holder “to serve as outside counsel to advise the state’s legal strategy against the incoming administration.”

Via the L.A. Times:

The unusual arrangement will give Holder, leading a team of attorneys from the firm Covington & Burling, a broad portfolio covering potential conflicts between California and the federal government.

“He will be our lead litigator, and he will have a legal team of expert lawyers on the issues of climate change, women and civil rights, the environment, immigration, voting rights — to name just a few,” Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said in an interview.

It’s not clear why California’s new attorney general, Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra, has not been deemed fit for the job, as it would normally fall under his purview. Becerra is replacing former Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, who now serves in the U.S. Senate.

It’s also not clear why the California legislature thinks they’re going to get any sound legal advice from a guy whose record with the Supreme Court was historically abysmal.

As Obama’s attorney general, Holder racked up twenty humiliating 9-0 losses in the Supreme Court, and even more if you include cases in which the administration filed an amicus brief.

“Typically, the Justice Department does very well before the Supreme Court. Holder has made that a losing record,” John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky wrote in The New Yorker in July of 2014 after Holder had reached that dubious milestone.

That’s because, as legal scholar Ilya Shapiro says, the administration has “relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power.”

Holder and Obama have argued that we as Americans don’t have the right to free speech, the right to privacy, the right to due process or the freedom of religion.

Apparently, this failed record of government overreach is exactly what California Democrats are looking for.

Here’s a Washington Free Beacon “Supercut” of Holder’s finest moments as Obama’s attorney general:

Here’s a Washington Free Beacon “Supercut” of Holder’s finest moments as Obama’s attorney general:

Is it that there’s a new sheriff in town, here to save the GOP from its penchant for self-destruction – or at least to stop the bleeding earlier than usual? Is it an incoming Republican administration versed in the art of Clintonian triangulation against its own party in Congress? These questions will be answered in due course after January 20. For now, suffice it to say that President-elect Donald Trump induced House Republicans to reverse their politically inept decision to trim the sails of an independent ethics panel.

Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted out his displeasure at the GOP conference’s unilateral decision, on the eve of the new Congress, to rein in the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics, an unelected in-house watchdog. Or as the New York Times hyperbolically put it, to “gut” the OCE. Though the tweeted rebuke was mild by Trump standards, it helped raise the volume of hysteria already pouring out of the Left, portraying the Republican move as a harbinger of unprecedented corruption. Following Trump’s tweet, House leaders scrambled to convene an emergency conference meeting, at which the ethics proposal was scrapped before the new session commenced.

Before the story dies a welcome swift death, it is worth pointing out that the GOP’s bad politics was actually good policy, and certainly not corruption.

To be sure, one can only shake one’s head at the GOP’s all too familiar ham-handedness. Republicans have an ambitious agenda now that they control both chambers of Congress and the White House. Yet, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as prioritizing – over the repeal of Obamacare, tax reform, and a host of significant initiatives – a watering down of ethics protocols ostentatiously adopted in 2008, when Democrats were making hay over Republican corruption scandals. Monday night’s OCE gambit – pushed over the objection of Speaker Paul Ryan by a bloc led by Judiciary Committee Chariman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) – was a unilateral GOP move, taken in the course of voting on rules for the new session. Naturally, the media-Democrat echo chamber pounced, accusing Republicans of meeting in secret to grease the wheels of graft.

“On Tuesday, January 10,” President Obama said Monday in Hawaii, “I’ll go home to Chicago to say my grateful farewell to you, even if you can’t be there in person.” The president sees his remarks “as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here.”

Since 2009, the president added, “we’ve faced our fair share of challenges, and come through them stronger. That’s because we have never let go of a belief that has guided us ever since our founding—our conviction that, together, we can change this country for the better.”

The president’s chosen venue of Chicago certainly isn’t much better. In 2016 a full 762 homicides took place in Chicago, up from 485 in 2015 and the biggest increase in 60 years. The 762 homicides, an increase of 57 percent, are more than New York and Los Angeles combined. In Chicago, shootings also jumped 46 percent to 3,550, and most of the victims lived in poor and minority neighborhoods. True to form, on this president’s watch, the entire nation has become a more dangerous place.

The president supports the Black Lives Matter narrative that racist cops are out to gun down African Americans. The president has hosted leaders of this hatemongering group, which celebrates the killing of police officers. In 2016, at least 64 law enforcement officers have been shot and killed, the most in five years. In July, Micah Xavier Johnson assassinated five police officers in Dallas, Texas.

President Obama wants to admit more Islamic refugees, whether or not they are sufficiently vetted, and this has made universities more dangerous. Last November Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a Muslim refugee from Somalia, rammed his car into a building at Ohio State University then began stabbing people, injuring 13.

American nightclubs are also more dangerous, as Omar Mateen killed 50 people at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history, but not the only one. In December of 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik gunned down 14 innocents at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California.

As police learned, Farook and Malik had plans to attack schools and motorists on the freeway. In similar style, sporting events have also become a target-rich environment for terrorists. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar.

On President Obama’s watch, even U.S. military bases have become sites of terror attacks. At Ford Hood in 2009, self-described “Soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” Nidal’s attack claimed twice as many casualties as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The Fort Hood victims included private Francheska Velez, 21, pregnant and preparing to go home.

President-elect Donald Trump expressed skepticism over reports that Russia hacked the U.S. election. It is well-known that Russia — and China, and various of our friends and allies — spend a lot of time and effort trying to access American military and industrial secrets, as the U.S. does theirs. But in the case of altering the election, Trump’s skepticism appears warranted.

How did we get here?

An attempted hack into Georgia’s voter registration database was traced back to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to The Wall Street Journal last month. It was a criminal act and possibly an attempt to interfere in an election. Even worse, DHS appears to have outsourced the hacking activity. One might think the breach of a state voter registration system by the Federal government would be a big story. But it was quickly replaced by the Obama administration’s claims about Russian cyber attacks on American political institutions. The FBI and DHS (yes, that DHS) then produced the Joint Analysis Report under the seal of its National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

It should be noted that the report was prepared without input from the National Security Agency (NSA), Cyber Command, the Pentagon, or the CIA. Wonder why? The answer most likely is that they declined to endorse a report that fails to deliver proof and makes accusations unsupported by evidence. If a college student turned this report in as a research paper, he would flunk the course.

The report claims to provide an analysis of the “tools and infrastructure” used by the Russian intelligence services to “exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election” as well as a “range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.” The report calls this “malicious cyber activity” and aggregates it under the code name Grizzly Steppe.

The notion of “malicious activity” is scary and meaningless. If information is stolen, it is theft; it is a crime. But the report cannot demonstrate theft, or even describe the activity any of the identified organizations actually engaged in, so it uses non-legal “term of art.” But grizzlies from the steppe sound pretty malicious.

Equally problematic is that the report cannot tie any of the “known” Russian-located hacking activities directly to the Russian intelligence services in respect to the hack of the email systems of the Democratic National Committee or personal email accounts, such as those of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, to name a few of the leading targets. There is plenty of notional information that the Russian intelligence services have used private entities to carry out hacking against various Western targets. And there is some important proof that on a number of occasions the Russians have carried out sophisticated cyber attacks against foreign countries. The cases that are clear-cut include Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and there are surely others. But in direct attacks like those (hitting everything from power plants, banks, government agencies, military organizations, air defense systems, and communications), it does not appear that the Russians used third parties. Rather, those attacks were launched mostly by the Russian military.

Among President Obama’s ironic legacies will be how frequently this former teacher of constitutional law has been called out by the federal courts for his aggressive abuse of executive power.

The latest rebuke came on the last day of 2016 in federal court in Texas. Judge Reed O’Connor sided with eight states and three private health-care providers that sued to block a new Health and Human Services rule. This rule defines the Affordable Care Act’s prohibitions against sex discrimination in a way that plaintiffs say will force doctors, hospitals and insurers that take federal funds to cover or perform abortions and gender-transition procedures even when this runs against their best medical judgment or religious beliefs.

The HHS rule rests on a bureaucratic redefinition of sexual discrimination and the deliberate dropping of religious protections Congress included in Title IX. As Judge O’Connor noted, the Title IX prohibitions against sex discrimination passed by Congress “unambiguously” referred to the biological distinction between men and women. The HHS redefinition, he found, deserved no deference because it was not grounded in “a valid grant of authority from Congress.”

The other part of this injunction had to do with the claims by the religious plaintiffs—including a Catholic hospital system and a Christian society of doctors—that the rule violated their rights. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the government can infringe on religious exercise—but only where it has a compelling interest. Even when it does have a compelling interest, it has to choose the least restrictive way of pursuing it.

Judge O’Connor conceded that a preliminary injunction is “an extraordinary and drastic remedy, not to be granted routinely.” But he noted that Congress had not granted HHS the authority to redefine sex discrimination the way it had, and that the religious plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits.

In sum, another federal court has found the Obama Administration guilty of imposing its policy choices by fiat rather than doing the hard work of democracy and persuading the elected representatives of the American people. Donald Trump, please take note.

The 115th Congress flopped into Washington on Tuesday with House Republicans proposing and then dropping marginal changes to an internal ethics office. The reversal is an unforced political error, but the GOP is right that the investigative body has the power to destroy reputations without due process.

By the way, Paul Ryan was re-elected Speaker Tuesday with one GOP defection, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi lost four Democrats. But that news was dwarfed as the House considered rules for the new Congress, and Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte offered an amendment to restructure the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The office is composed of political grandees, often former Members, and it has no prosecutorial power. But it conducts investigations into Members or staffers and makes recommendations to the House Ethics Committee. The proposal limited what information can be released to the public and barred the committee from having a press secretary. Also banned: anonymous tips.

Mr. Ryan and other House leaders opposed the rule as badly timed. But the rank and file adopted the idea Monday night anyway, only to dump it on Tuesday after denunciations from the Democratic-media complex. The left rounded up callers to deluge Republican switchboards for “gutting” the outfit. Donald Trump couldn’t resist piling on with a pair of tweets: “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and priority.”

The reality is that the office is at best redundant and perhaps worse. Democrats created the office in 2008 to deflect attention from a crush of corruption scandals, including charges against at least three Members. The left is pitching the place as an essential institution of self-government, but the Senate manages to function without a similar office.

As it is, the ethics office is a roving investigator that can publish reports with details that may not be accurate and can damage a reputation with little or no proof of guilt. Evidence of wrongdoing in travel, campaign finances and other matters can be handled by the House Ethics Committee, and if necessary law-enforcement agencies. Both are politically accountable, unlike the independent office.

Anonymous complaints are especially insidious, as subjects of an investigation may not know who is accusing them—and the accuser may never have to press his case. Nixing the communications director is also worthy: A press secretary is nothing but a designated leaker. The office is a great tool for government “watchdog” groups that are progressives posing as transparency enthusiasts, which renders the proceedings even less fair. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Huffington Post’s headline, Minneapolis Jewish Community Defends Rep. Keith Ellison against Anti-Semitism allegations, indicated that Ellison (D-Minn) was making his bid to head the Democrat National Committee. But are such allegations against Ellison implausible?

Consider that the Democrat Party has been sloping further to the left for some time, relying on a voter base that has been under-informed, spoiled, weakened, and entitled. The ugly result is a nation divided by political party, race, financial success, gender and religion, a society consumed with bigotry and disorder. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that an anti-Semite could take the stage from which liberals abandoned their traditional values of Judaism and Christianity in favor of the creed of multiculturalism and its deceptive liturgy of peace and ecumenism.

Enter ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been diligently marketing a false similarity between the so-called “three great Abrahamic faiths.” Jewish congregations, guided by leaders unaware of the unalterable nature of Islamic dictates and their incompatibility with western values, welcome the interfaith programs, hoping for a dialogue of peace with the Islamic world.

The rabbis are irresponsibly under-informed about Islam’s resolve to dominate the entire world – through violence when in the majority and by deception when not. They are either oblivious or unwilling to acknowledge the history of Islam and, specifically, Jewish history under Islam, and its current bloody manifestation across the globe; therefore, they are unqualified to so advise their congregations. They are the blind leading the blind, both doomed to blunder.

If the rabbis have ever heard of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) or of the Jewish students who must defend themselves across our campuses, they remain silent. Neither do they deliberate the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The invading Muslim migrants who behead and rape the host populations, create no-go zones, and generate a fear that prevents the innocent from wearing religious symbols are also off the table. I speak from experience; I have attended such events.