RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lack-of-house-intelligence-1490742032

Devin Nunes is refusing Democratic calls to resign as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and rightly so. If Mr. Nunes is going to step down for speaking out of school to the White House about his probe, then ranking Democrat Adam Schiff should also resign for spreading innuendo without evidence across the airwaves.

Mr. Nunes blundered when he informed the White House about some information he received without first telling committee Democrats. The intelligence panel is one of the least partisan on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Nunes handed Democrats an opening to cast doubt on his fairness. He should protect his own credibility more than he protects the White House, which has nothing to worry about if President Trump’s claims about his lack of Russian ties are true.

But the main reason Democrats are mad at Mr. Nunes is because he’s raising an issue they’d rather avoid—to wit, that he’s seen documents showing that U.S. intelligence agencies may have “incidentally” collected information about people connected to Mr. Trump.

We know from leaks to the media that one of those people was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who lost his job over the news. These columns have been asking since the Flynn news broke whether there was a proper FISA court order for this eavesdropping, or why if it was incidental was it spread widely enough to leak? Such information is supposed to be “minimized” and not widely shared so innocent Americans are protected if they happen to speak to a foreigner who is surveilled.

Mr. Trump was wrong to claim that Mr. Nunes has vindicated his famous tweet of three weeks ago that President Obama had wiretapped him in Trump Tower. Mr. Nunes has said he’s seen no evidence of that. But the issue of whether and why the Obama Administration was listening to Trump officials is important for the public to know. The U.S. government must have a very good reason for eavesdropping on political opponents, and civil libertarians would be shouting if Mr. Flynn were a Democrat.

Which brings us to Mr. Schiff, who while posing as a truth-teller is becoming more partisan by the hour. The California Democrat started out telling everyone that there is “circumstantial evidence of collusion” between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. He later escalated to claiming “there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” without providing any such evidence. If Mr. Schiff is so confident of the Russia-Trump connection, why not wait for the evidence to come out?

Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff evinces no interest in discussing, or even investigating, what happened to Mr. Flynn and why. Maybe he’s shouting so much about Mr. Nunes because he doesn’t want to know the answers to the questions the Republican is asking.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266261/democrat-filibuster-judge-gorsuch-matthew-vadum

Desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base, ethically-flexible Senate Democrats are planning to launch a filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee for the first time in a half-century and only the second time in American history.

Their insistence on this course of action could very well lead to the abolition of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) said a few days ago that his Senate colleagues will not allow President Trump’s nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia to be voted on because he’s not a left-winger who views the Constitution as an endlessly malleable social-justice plaything.

“After careful deliberation I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” Schumer said on the Senate floor after Gorsuch’s marathon confirmation hearing wrapped up.

“Judge Gorsuch was unable to sufficiently convince me that he’d be an independent check on a president who has shown almost no restraint from executive overreach,” Schumer said with a straight face after compiling a near-perfect record of supporting President Obama’s overreaches over the last eight years.

“Second, he was unable to convince me that he would be a mainstream justice who could rule free from the biases of politics and ideology,” added the senior senator from New York.

It was just four years ago that Schumer voted to exercise the so-called nuclear option by changing the rules of the Senate by a simple majority vote instead of the usual supermajority. The rule approved at that time banned the use of the filibuster against all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court.

But that was then and this is now. Schumer is now opposed to changing the rules by a simple majority vote.

“The answer isn’t to change the rules, it’s to change the nominee,” he said last week.

As part of their strategy, Democrats are now trying to convince Americans that Gorsuch cannot be confirmed unless he garners 60 votes in the Senate, as opposed to a simple majority.

Gorsuch “should have a hearing and he should meet the voting standard that Supreme Court nominees are held to of 60 votes, a standard that was met by Elena Kagan as well as Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s choices,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said last month.

This idea that a Supreme Court nominee must receive 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster is both passé and pure fantasy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446210/devin-nunes-investigation-chairman-house-intel-committee-michael-flynn

Let us stipulate that it would be difficult for House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) and the Trump White House to have handled a critical intelligence matter any worse.

Still, the questions Nunes has raised are more important than the fact that he shot himself in the foot while pursuing the answers.

The chairman says he was invited by an unidentified intelligence official to review classified documents on the White House grounds — at the Old Executive Office Building, it appears, where the National Security Council has secure facilities for that purpose. These documents purportedly show that communications from Trump transition officials, and perhaps Trump himself, were intercepted during intelligence-agency monitoring of foreign powers; and Nunes says the monitoring in question appears unrelated to Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election.

Nunes reports that the documents he was shown suggest that the Obama administration may have been using its foreign-intelligence powers to shadow the incoming Trump team. Though the communications in question were lawfully intercepted, Nunes suggests that the identities of Trump officials should have been “masked” (i.e., concealed) under standard minimization rules that guide the dissemination of classified foreign intelligence throughout the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies. Instead, the identities of the Trump officials were revealed and widely transmitted to people with no apparent need to know about the officials’ communications — some of which, in Nunes’s description, had “little or no apparent foreign-intelligence value.”

Nunes’s account cannot be verified because the documents he reviewed have not been disclosed, nor reviewed by anyone else who is talking. Meanwhile, rather than first sharing what he learned with members of the important committee he chairs, Nunes went to the White House to brief President Trump.

This is bizarre for two reasons. First, the classified information Nunes reviewed belongs to the executive branch, which the president leads. Trump does not need to be briefed by a member of Congress; he can direct the appropriate intelligence officials to brief him — and could then declassify and publicize any information he believes the public should have (redacting any information that could compromise critical intelligence secrets, methods and sources). Second, Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, leads a committee responsible for getting to the bottom of both alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and the executive branch’s potential abuse of its foreign-intelligence collection power. By opening himself up to the charge that his first loyalty is to the White House rather than to his committee’s investigation, Nunes damages both his own credibility and the perception that his committee can conduct a reliable investigation.

In an anti-climactic finish to a legal saga that has dragged on far too long, the case of the United States versus Rasmea Odeh has finally come to an end. Under the terms of a plea agreement worked out between justice department officials and Odeh, the terrorist fraudster who lied when filling out her naturalization papers will be required to plead guilty to violating 18 U.S.C §1425(a) which criminalizes knowingly procuring naturalization contrary to law. She will also be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported but will not have to serve jail time.

In 1969, Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the U.S. State Department. In February of that year, Odeh, acting in concert with additional members of the terrorist PFLP gang, planted two bombs in a Jerusalem supermarket and additional explosive devices at the nearby British consulate office.

The bombs at the consulate office caused only minor property damage but one of the bombs at the supermarket claimed the lives of two Israeli university students – Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22 and injured nine others. The second explosive, insidiously timed to go off upon arrival of first responders, was miraculously detected and diffused by security personnel.

On March 1, 1969 Odeh and the other members of the terror cell were apprehended. She confessed to her role almost immediately. There was also an abundance of physical evidence linking her to the crime. Odeh received a life sentence but was released in a prisoner swap after serving just 10 years – five years for each life she took.

After living in Lebanon and then Jordan, she made her way to the United States, joining her father who was already in the country. In 1995, Odeh filled out an application for an immigrant visa and alien registration and falsely checked off “no” when asked if she was ever convicted of a crime.

In 2004, she applied for U.S. citizenship and fraudulently filled out naturalization papers in connection with her application, lying about her membership in the PFLP and her past arrest record and incarceration. She orally repeated the lies to a Department of Homeland Security officer.

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Plucky couple Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner reportedly giving marriage another shot By Thomas Lifson

It’s the feel-good story of the day for naïve people: Huma and Tony “working hard” on their marriage. The New York Post (of course!) has the story:

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool Huma Abedin four times, and she’ll still take you back.

After years of public humiliation by her sext-a-holic husband, Anthony Weiner, 40-year-old Abedin finally separated from the former congressman in August, one day after The Post reported that he had sent yet another explicit photo to a woman — this one showing his toddler son asleep beside him.

But sources tell The Post that Hillary Clinton’s righthand woman is now giving the marriage another try.

“Huma has been working hard on her relationship with Anthony,” said a source close to the Abedin family. “He has been spending 80 to 90 percent of his time at the [Irving Place apartment] they share . . . If there is a disagreement, he goes to his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn.

Huma had to jettison Tony because of the negative impact his sexting scandal on the Hillary campaign, where Huma was the highly visible right hand girl of Hillary Clinton. It was always a bizarre matchup that reeked of political convenience and cover, even if there were some spark of attraction between the two very, very odd people.

If anybody is working hard, it is Tony, who has little bargaining leverage on Huma. She has signaled a shift in personal strategy, toward celebrityhood:

Lately, though, Abedin has been embracing the spotlight like never before. She was in the front row at the Prabal Gurung and Oscar de la Renta/Monse shows this past New York Fashion Week. She was spotted accompanying Clinton to the John Barrett Salon last week for a paparazzi-friendly glam session. And this past week, she has been gallivanting around Los Angeles with a big smile on her face. She made a very public visit to Disneyland with actor Tony Goldwyn — who played the president on “Scandal.” She also attended the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star ceremony for film producer Haim Saban on Wednesday with famous womanizer and composer David Foster.

During last week’s confirmation hearing for Judge Neil Gorsuch, some of my Senate colleagues heard from teachers who were using the occasion as an educational tool. Indeed, Supreme Court confirmation hearings can be a civics lesson for the nation. They offer unparalleled insight into the Constitution and the proper role of judges in our system of government.

I have participated in 14 of these hearings during my four decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The nominees are typically highly talented lawyers and judges. The Senate’s role is to probe their qualifications and judicial philosophies. At its best, the process is removed from the pettiness of partisan politics.

I take this duty seriously. Although I am a committed conservative, I have voted for the Supreme Court nominees of both parties—even those I might not have chosen myself—as long as I have been assured of their fitness for office. I helped shepherd through President Clinton’s nominees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Both had shown themselves to be honorable, capable jurists with reputations for careful, nonideological work on federal appeals courts.

What sort of civics lesson were the American people treated to last week? Judge Gorsuch’s performance was outstanding. Enduring more than 20 hours of questioning over two days, he displayed an impressive command of the law and an intellect befitting someone with his stellar credentials. He showed that he understands the proper role of a judge in our system: to apply, not make, the law. Throughout, his demeanor was serious, thoughtful and humble. These qualities have defined his judicial service for the past decade and will serve him well on the Supreme Court.

In stark contrast was the astonishing treatment Judge Gorsuch received from many of my Democratic colleagues. Whatever their motivation—be it the outcome of President Obama’s lame-duck nomination during last year’s election, an unwillingness to accept the November results, or the desire for judges to push a liberal political agenda—they have apparently decided to wage a desperate, scorched-earth campaign to derail this nomination, no matter the damage they inflict along the way. We are now watching the confirmation process through the funhouse mirror.

Consider the Democrats’ demand that Judge Gorsuch answer politically charged hypotheticals about future cases. For decades, Supreme Court nominees of both parties have rightly refused to comply with such demands. To offer an advisory opinion is inconsistent with the Constitution, which gives judges the authority to make a decision only within the legal and factual context of an actual case. Judges should be neutral arbiters, and asking them to prejudice themselves raises serious due-process concerns for future litigants, who deserve the opportunity to make their arguments in full.

When Judge Gorsuch politely explained his inability to answer such questions—often while giving an extensive rationale for demurring—he was lambasted by some of my Democratic colleagues. Yet these senators have gladly embraced the very same answer from nominees in the past. It is hard not to interpret their attacks as hypocrisy.

Consider also the way some of my colleagues misrepresented Judge Gorsuch’s record. Their attempts were so formulaic that they read like a recipe: First, cherry-pick one of the judge’s opinions in which a sympathetic victim lost. Next, gloss over the legal issues that informed his decision in the case. Then fail to mention that his opinions were often joined by colleagues appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. After that, ignore the many times that Judge Gorsuch ruled in favor of similar litigants. End with a wild assertion about how Judge Gorsuch must be biased against “the little guy.”

Republicans are consoling themselves that after their health-care failure they can move on to tax reform, and they have little choice. The large complication is that the Freedom Caucus’s ObamaCare preservation act has also made a tax bill much harder politically even as it makes reform more essential to salvaging the Trump Presidency and GOP majorities in 2018.

President Trump campaigned on breaking Washington gridlock, increasing economic growth and lifting American incomes. The health collapse undermines those pledges. The legislative failure is obvious, but less appreciated is that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reform included a pro-growth tax cut and major improvements in work incentives. The 3.8-percentage-point cut in taxes on capital income would have been a substantial increase in after-tax return on investment, nearly half of the eight-point cut in the capital-gains tax rate that helped propel growth after 1997.
Now that’s dead, and so is the replacement for the especially high marginal-tax-rate cliff built into ObamaCare’s subsidies. These steep tax cliffs as subsidies phase out are a major hindrance to work, as University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has shown. The Ryan bill would have been a significant boost to economic growth and labor participation. The critique that it would not have helped “Trump voters” was willfully false coming from the left and uninformed on the right.

This lost opportunity now makes tax reform even more important as a growth driver, but the health-reform failure also hurt tax reform in another major way. The Ryan bill would have reduced the budget baseline for tax reform by some $1 trillion over 10 years. This means that suddenly Republicans will have to find $1 trillion more in loopholes to close or taxes to raise if they want their reduction in tax rates to be budget neutral.

That means picking more fights with industries that fear they’ll be tax-reform losers. Take the irony of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He trashed the House health bill far and wide, but he also represents Wal-Mart, which hates the House GOP’s border-adjustment tax proposal that would raise some $1 trillion in revenue to pay for lower tax rates. By helping to kill the Ryan health bill, Mr. Cotton has now killed $1 trillion in tax and spending cuts that would have made it easier to pass a tax reform without the border-adjustment fee. We look forward to seeing the Senator’s revenue substitute.