RUTHFULLY YOURS

While it’s commonly known by now that the new spending bill that Congress and the Trump administration agreed to funds mostly Democratic priorities, and doesn’t fund President Trump’s border wall, what’s not widely known is that the new legislation goes even farther than this. Not only does it not fund the border wall, but it prevents the government from constructing a border wall with any funds.

This is important because the government is already authorized, under a 2006 law, to build the wall. It was just a question of funding. Before this bill, the President could conceivable reallocate border security funding from things like “technology” to the border wall because the wall was authorized. Now, when the president signs this bill, he will no longer have the option to build the wall by reallocating funds. Even if Donald Trump somehow got the Mexicans to pay for it, this legislation would still prohibit him from building the wall. Trump has incredibly agreed to give up the authorization already on the books to allow him to build a wall.

And what is Trump’s reaction to this? The president says he’s “very happy” with the pending legislation and plans to sign it.

This legislation funded all the Democrats’ priorities–Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, and a big bailout to Puerto Rico. Furthermore, the president, who wanted to cut the EPA by a third, has to settle for a tiny 1% cut. He got less than half of what he wanted for the military, and all of the environmental regulations he wanted to cut were rejected by Democrats. Democrats were incredulous that they, out of power in all branches of the government, got everything they wanted and Trump got nearly nothing. They are now emboldened to demand even more when the next spending bill comes up in September. Just look at this WaPo headline:

Democrats confident they can block Trump’s agenda after spending-bill win.

Jews are sadly accustomed to becoming collateral damage in disputes in other peoples’ civil wars. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House official, is one of the few gentile victims of a Jewish civil war. Dr. Gorka, long a Fox News commentator on counter-terrorism, will speak at the Jerusalem Post’s annual New York conference in May and at this year’s Zionist Organization of America Gala. But a left-leaning Jewish website, the Forward, has published 39 articles alleging that Gorka has neo-Nazi ties in Hungary, the country of his parents’ birth where he was active in politics during the 2000s.

American media have been carrying unconfirmed reports that Gorka will leave the White House, where he works in the Strategic Initiatives Group, perhaps for another post in the government. It is not clear whether he will leave, much less whether his possible departure was motivated by the campaign against him. The bigger issue for the Jewish world, though, is whether we can contest our differences without resorting to mendacity and slander.

Gorka’s supporters in the Jewish world are playing whack-a-mole with the Forward, refuting each charge as it appears while the Forward staff devises new ones. The exchange reached a depth of absurdity when the Forward posted a heavily spliced and truncated video clip of a 2007 interview with Gorka on Hungarian television. The Forward claimed April 4 that Gorka endorsed the proposal of anti-Semitic political parties for a popular militia. The next morning, the Hungarian-speaking Jewish journalist David Reaboi posted an unedited version of the same video on the Redstate website, showing that Gorka had denounced the militia plan that the Forward claimed he had supported.

The merits of the Forward’s claims and Reaboi’s rebuttal can be verified by any reader who takes the time to watch the two clips. Riots instigated by supporters of the discredited Communist regime had stormed Hungary’s National Television Station in 2006, injuring 141 policeman in a pitched battle on the Budapest streets. In response the explicitly anti-Semitic Jobbik Party proposed to create a popular militia. Gorka, a leader of the New Democratic Coalition (UDK), was asked to respond. Choosing his words carefully, Gorka stated he had no objection to the principle of a popular militia, but that Jobbik sought to exploit fears of civil unrest, and the notionally respectable FIDESZ party (which has ruled Hungary since 2010) was using Jobbik for its own purposes.

The Forward’s heavily-edited segment cut Gorka off in mid-sentence, at the moment he said that he had no objection to militias in principle, and just before he denounced the specific proposal in question. The Forward left out what Gorka said next: “And the most important thing of all, and I stress, the most important thing of all is that this isn’t anything to do with the UDK [Gorka’s party], but with Jobbik and that FIDESZ is really behind them and supporting it from the sidelines.”

Some Jewish leaders, including Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein, repudiated the Forward’s charges as a smear. Writing in PJ Media April 4, I abhorred the Forward’s spliced video as the most transparent falsification I had seen in forty years of journalism.

Insurance coverage for pre-existing health conditions can be confusing, as President Trump and a journalist showed in a television interview over the weekend. Allow us to explain how the GOP reform would work in practice and why pre-existing conditions have been exaggerated as a political problem.

Mr. Trump told CBS ’s John Dickerson that “I watch some of the news reports, which are so unfair, and they say we don’t cover pre-existing conditions, we cover it beautifully.” Mr. Dickerson seemed surprised: “Okay. Well, that’s a development, sir. So you’re saying it’s going to be pre-existing to everybody?” Mr. Trump said the House bill had “evolved” but as usual didn’t explain how.

House conservatives rebelled over the original version of the American Health Care Act, which only partially deregulated insurance markets. The bill maintained the rule known as guaranteed issue, which requires insurers to cover all applicants regardless of medical history. It also relaxed community rating, which limits how much premiums can vary among beneficiaries.

The media and the left thus claim that conservatives want to allow insurers to charge sick people more, and some conservatives agree, which spooks the moderates. But the latest compromise between conservatives and centrists doesn’t repeal guaranteed issue or community rating. It keeps these regulations as the default baseline, and states could apply for a federal waiver if they want to pursue other regulatory relief.

But the waivers aren’t a license to leave cancer survivors without insurance. States can only receive a waiver if they avail themselves of the bill’s $100 billion fund to set up high-risk pools. These state-based programs, which were run in 35 states until they were pre-empted by ObamaCare, subsidize coverage for older and sicker patients. This helps these individuals and keeps coverage cheaper for everyone else.

Why might a Governor prefer such an arrangement over the ObamaCare status quo? Well, the law’s price controls are a raw deal for most consumers, which leads to a cycle of rising premiums and falling enrollment. Average premiums rose by 40% or more in 11 states this year, and insurance markets in states like Tennessee, Kentucky and Minnesota are in crisis.

Community rating and guaranteed issue also punish the sick by degrading quality. When insurers can profit by being the best plan for, say, cancer or diabetes, they invest in such care. When both the healthy and sick pay the same rates, the incentive is to load up on healthier people and discourage people with expensive ailments or chronic conditions from enrolling by using higher copays, narrow provider networks or tiered prescription drug formularies.

If Donald Trump were a liberal Democrat, some of the media’s descriptions of “chaos” and “disarray” in the White House probably would be replaced with stories about “creative tension” among a “team of rivals.” As it is, the struggle between “nationalists” like Steve Bannon and “globalists” like Gary Cohn is characterized in near-apocalyptic terms. Yet as Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal last week, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist.” That is good news: Mr. Trump and the Republican Party should be weaving nationalist and globalist themes together rather than picking them apart.

Nationalism—the sense that Americans are bound together into a single people with a common destiny—is a noble and necessary force without which American democracy would fail. A nationalist and patriotic elite produces leaders like George Washington, who aim to promote the well-being of the country they love. An unpatriotic and antinationalist elite produces people who feather their nests without regard to the common good.

Mr. Trump is president in large part because millions of Americans, rightly or wrongly, believed that large sections of their country’s elite were no longer nationalist. Flawed he may be, but the president bears an important message, and Trump-hating elites have only themselves to blame for his ascendancy. A cosmopolitan and technocratic political class that neither speaks the language nor feels the pull of nationalist solidarity cannot successfully lead a democratic society.

The president symbolized his nationalist commitment by hanging a portrait of Andrew Jackson in a place of honor in the Oval Office. Now Mr. Trump must stay true to that commitment or he will lose his political base and American politics will spin even further off balance. But life is rarely simple. Jacksonian means will not always achieve Jacksonian goals. Sometimes, they even get in the way.

Jackson learned this when his populist fight against the Second Bank of the United States ultimately led to a depression that turned the country over to his hated Whig rivals. As Mr. Trump comes to grips with the tough international economic reality, he is realizing that not everything the Jacksonians think they want will actually help them. The president has already discovered that ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement won’t help the middle-class voters who put him in office.

Jacksonian voters don’t want North Korea to have the ability to threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons. They also don’t want a second Korean War. Reaching the best outcome on Korea could mean giving China a better deal on trade than many Trump voters would desire. Populists like to rail against globalization and world order. Yet the security and prosperity of the American people depend on an intricate web of military, diplomatic, political and economic arrangements that an American president must manage and conserve.

Mr. Trump is learning that some of the core goals of his Jacksonian program can be realized only by judiciously employing the global military, diplomatic and economic statesmanship associated with Alexander Hamilton. Bringing those two visions into alignment isn’t easy. Up until the Civil War, the American party system revolved around the rivalry of the Jacksonian Democrats with the Hamiltonian Whigs. Abraham Lincoln fused Jacksonian unionism with Henry Clay’s Hamiltonian vision when he created the modern Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan revitalized the party of their times by returning to the Jacksonian-Hamiltonian coalition that made the old party grand. CONTINUE AT SITE

On the matter of the 2016 election, why is there an investigation into Russian meddling but no investigation of Justice Department meddling? The latter effort was more extensive. And it sure looks like it would be a lot easier to prove.

This week, courtesy of Judicial Watch, we learned that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI did, in fact, use the grand jury in the Clinton e-mails probe. Or, to be more accurate, they fleetingly used grand-jury subpoenas, which were issued to BlackBerry service providers at the tail end of the investigation — a futile attempt to recover e-mails sent to and from then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton right before she transitioned from BlackBerry to her homebrew server.

That’s a story unto itself, which we’ll get to in due course.

The news of grand-jury involvement contradicts prior reporting, at least at first blush. As we shall see, to say a grand jury was “involved” does not mean there was a real grand-jury investigation. It does, however, reinforce what we have said all along: The main subjects of the investigation could easily have been compelled to provide evidence and testimony — which is what investigators do when they are trying to make a case rather than not make a case. There was no valid reason for prosecutors to treat criminal suspects to an immunity spree. They could, for example, have served grand-jury subpoenas on Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, demanding that they surrender the private computers they used to review Clinton’s e-mails, including classified e-mails it was unlawful to transfer to such non-secure computers. The Justice Department did not have to make promises not to use the evidence against the suspects in exchange for getting the evidence.

Mrs. Clinton’s friends at the Justice Department chose not to subpoena Mrs. Clinton’s friends from the State Department and the campaign. The decision not to employ regular criminal procedures — i.e., the decision not to treat the case like other criminal cases — was quite deliberate.

No need to ‘convene’ a grand jury

When it comes to the grand-jury aspect of this affair, confusion has been caused by the inside-baseball manner in which legal beagles discuss it. I try to avoid that sort of thing, since the point is to clarify things for the non-lawyer. I must confess error, though, in at least once using the shorthand expression “convene a grand jury.”

Let’s reverse angle. The president’s first 100 days in office have been analyzed, dissected, evaluated. Not much left to say about them. What about the opposition? What do the Democrats have to show for these first months of the Trump era?

Little. Trump’s defeats have not come at the Democrats’ hands. Those setbacks have been self-inflicted (over-the-top tweets, hastily written policies, few sub-cabinet nominations) or have come from the judiciary (the travel ban, the sanctuary cities order) or from Republican infighting (health care). Deregulation, Keystone pipeline, immigration enforcement — Democrats have been powerless to stop them.

Chuck Schumer slow-walked Trump’s nominations as best he could. In fact his obstruction was unprecedented. But the cabinet is filling up, the national security team in place. On the Supreme Court, Schumer miscalculated royally. He forced an end to the filibuster for judicial appointments, yet lost anyway. If another appointment opens this summer, and the Republicans hold together, the Democrats will have zero ability to prevent the Court from moving right. No matter what he says in public, Schumer can’t possibly think that a success.

The prevalent anti-Trump sentiment obscures the party’s institutional degradation. Democratic voters despise the president — he enjoys the approval of barely more than 10 percent of them — and this anger and vitriol manifests itself in our media and culture. So Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert enjoy a ratings boom, the women’s march attracts a massive crowd, the New York Times sells more subscriptions, and Bill Nye leads a rainy-day “march for science.” The desire to ostentatiously “resist” Trump leads to better-than-expected results for Democratic candidates in congressional special elections. But the candidates don’t win — or at least they haven’t yet.

Democrats feel betrayed. The Electoral College betrayed them by making Trump president. Hillary Clinton betrayed them by running an uninspiring campaign. James Comey betrayed them by reopening the investigation into Clinton’s server 11 days before the election. Facebook betrayed them by circulating fake news. This sense of resentment isn’t so different than the sort Democrats attribute to Trump supporters: irritation at a loss of status, vexation at changed circumstances. The despondence of a liberal is alleviated when he sees throngs of protesters, hears Samantha Bee, scrolls through Louise Mensch’s tweets.

Makes him feel better. But his party is in tatters, reduced to 16 governors, 30 state legislative chambers, a historically low number of state legislative seats, 193 members of the House, 46 senators. The Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, held together only by opposition to Trump. The most popular figure on the left refuses to call himself a Democrat while sitting alongside the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. That chairman, dirty-talking Tom Perez, represents a professional, technocratic class that supports Wall Street and globalization as long as there is room for multiculturalism and social liberalism. That is a different strategy from both the 50-state approach of Howard Dean, Rahm Emanuel, and Schumer that brought Democrats control of Congress in 2006, and the anti-Wall Street, protectionist, single-payer Left of Bernie Sanders. Perez fights with Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi over whether there is room for pro-lifers in the party — Perez thinks not. Pelosi enjoys the distinction of being an American political figure less popular than Donald Trump.

WASHINGTON – Stretched thin after 15 years of continued conflict, the U.S. is not currently capable of maintaining a modern and effective military against the Islamic State, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Wednesday.

“To address these threats, to maintain the peace, and fight if we must, we have to maintain a capable, ready, and modern military, and the truth is, we’re not ready,” the majority whip said during an appearance at the Wilson Center. “And while I believe America will always rise to the challenges, once roused from our national complacency, it makes a dangerous world even more dangerous.”

President Trump in March proposed a $54 billion hike in defense spending, which would support forces against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Last week, the president freed the Pentagon from Obama-era troop limit restrictions imposed on conflicts in Syria and Iraq, potentially opening the door for troop increases. U.S. strategy has been to support local military units against ISIS.

Cornyn said the military has been bogged down by blanket restrictions on discretionary defense spending and a lack of a coherent national security strategy, with military modernization suffering from a myopic view on financial challenges and deferred investment.

“You better believe our enemies, not hamstrung by red tape and regulations, take full advantage of our reluctance to deal with this on a bipartisan basis,” Cornyn said.

Even if ISIS is pushed backed in Iraq, Cornyn said the group’s “ideology spreads like a contagion through their so-called ‘cyber-caliphate,’ and continues to permeate the West and attract the vulnerable and disillusioned.”

U.S. military and partner forces this week carried out 18 strikes on ISIS targets in Syria and nine strikes on ISIS in Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. The attacks in Syria destroyed eight ISIS fighting positions, while efforts in Iraq resulted in the destruction of two enemy fighting positions and various weapons and vehicle caches, according to a department announcement.