RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama is hitting the road and the airwaves trying to convince the nation that the Senate has a constitutional duty to consider his nominee, Merrick Garland, for the Supreme Court. On Thursday the president said at the University of Chicago that Republicans’ refusal to consider Mr. Garland threatens a “dangerous” politicization of the courts “that erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch.”

Not so fast. History and the wording of the Constitution teach otherwise. The framers expected that judicial nominations would be political matters—and even that the Senate sometimes might deliberately ignore a president’s nominee.

That is exactly what the upper chamber did after Associate Justice John McKinley’s death in July 1852. The political climate then was intensely partisan, as it is today, and a presidential election loomed that November. In August, President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, nominated Edward A. Bradford, a highly regarded Louisiana lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law School, to fill the vacancy.

But the opposition Democrats controlled the Senate and expected to win the presidency in a few months. The New York Daily Tribune acknowledged that Bradford was “deserving and qualified” but predicted that the nomination would fail. The Senate refused even to consider Bradford despite his outstanding qualifications. As expected, Democrat Franklin Pierce won the presidency and made his own nomination the following spring.

That wasn’t the only time lawmakers snubbed a Supreme Court nominee for political reasons. In the 1840s, President John Tyler also faced a hostile Senate. Four of Tyler’s five Supreme Court nominees were blocked, including one—Reuben Walworth—whose nomination the Senate completely ignored. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, couldn’t get the Republican-dominated Senate to consider his nominee, Henry Stanbery.

That is how the framers planned it. The wording of the Constitution and the decisions they made in the summer of 1787 show they wanted the Senate to control the confirmation process, free to consider or ignore a nomination. The Constitution directs that the president “shall nominate,” but he may appoint only with the advice and consent of the Senate. There is no direction that the Senate “shall” provide its advice and consent, no corresponding obligation on legislators to act. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Congress enacted the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 in the wake of revelations about bureaucratic dysfunction at the Veterans Affairs Department, the plan was to reduce wait times at VA hospitals, give veterans access to outside health care and allow the VA to quickly terminate problem employees.

How is the VA doing? For starters, government statistics show that hospital wait times are 50% longer than two years ago.

Trying to increase access to outside care also isn’t working. That’s no surprise. The law allows veterans to see outside doctors, but only for 60 days. Then it’s back to the VA queue. Congress is considering a bill that would undo time limits on outside care.

What about the law’s third aim, to address the VA’s chronic lack of accountability in the past? The law allows the firing of top-level VA officials with less notice and fewer appellate rights than government employees enjoy. The fired VA worker must appeal within seven days of the discipline; administrative judges must hear and decide the case within 21 days, or the department’s discipline stands; judges cannot mitigate penalties; and decisions are final. But that plan, too, has backfired. Judges instead appear to be more inclined to side with misbehaving VA officials.

Over the past month alone, judges at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals by federal employees, sided with three VA officials who challenged their disciplining. The MSPB reinstated all three. In each case the misconduct was severe.

One case involved the VA’s termination of a senior employee, Linda Weiss, for ignoring numerous complaints about an abusive nurse assistant. The judge agreed that the nurse assistant was abusive and the supervisor’s disregard was serious. But the judge ordered the supervisor’s reinstatement; he would have opted for mitigation, the judge said, but that’s not allowed under the 2014 law. CONTINUE AT SITE

Is this really the argument he wants to make?

The US domestic security chief on Wednesday compared current anti-Muslim sentiment to the anti-communist “Red Scare” of the 1940s and ’50s, suggesting that divisive statements by Republican presidential candidates are to blame.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who is black, noted that his grandfather was forced to testify in front of the House of Representatives in 1949.

“He had to, in the height of the Red Scare, to deny he was a member of the communist party, and went on to give an impassioned statement about how American negroes are patriotic,” Johnson said at a conference in Washington about countering violent extremism.

Those who don’t know history “are bound to repeat it,” Johnson added.

True.

Although El Niño has increased the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the Golden State’s historic drought isn’t over. Yet the Obama administration has decided to block a privately financed project that could supply water to 400,000 Californians, even though the project has been approved by an alphabet soup of state and local agencies. The result will be to trap vast amounts of a precious resource beneath the Mojave Desert. Is water the new fossil fuel?

This tale of political and regulatory obstructionism begins in 1998, when Cadiz Inc., a Los Angeles-based company, developed plans for a groundwater bank and well-field on 70 square miles of private land overlying the base of the Mojave’s massive Fenner Valley and Orange Blossom Wash watersheds. Over centuries the aquifers there have amassed as much as 34 million acre feet of water, enough to sustain all of California’s households for several years.

However, tens of thousands of acre feet percolate into salty dry lakes and evaporate each year. Cadiz proposed capturing and exporting the groundwater to Southern California residents. The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project could also help store occasional excess flows from the Colorado River that would otherwise drain to the Pacific Ocean.

Water experts such as those at the Public Policy Institute of California have recommended using groundwater banks to recharge aquifers during wet years and expand the state’s storage capacity. Relative to dams, storing water underground reduces evaporation and environmental harm.

None of this mattered to various green lobbies and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who complained that the water project would deplete mountain springs and harm wildlife. But environmental reviews by hydrogeologists confirm that the nearest spring—located 11 miles away and 1,000 feet above the aquifer—would not be affected. Nor would fauna, which don’t rely on groundwater. After an exhaustive review, the U.S. Interior Department approved the project in 2002, but Sen. Feinstein maintained her opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dannel Malloy: Fighting the Real Eneny By Matthew Hennessey —

Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy is a big fan of the meaningless political gesture. When it comes to virtue signaling, he prefers it to be as divorced from tangible consequences as possible. To the extent that his showboating can be timed to distract attention from Connecticut’s imbalanced budget and crumbling economy, all the better.

Last year, Malloy signed an executive order banning official travel to Indiana, which had just passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He did this in response to the demands of precisely no one in his state. Somehow it never got through to the former Stamford mayor that Connecticut has had a RFRA of its own on the books since 1993. Turns out that Nutmeggers enjoy even sturdier religious-freedom protections than Hoosiers do.

Malloy must have enjoyed the afternoon of attention that the Indiana incident brought, because last month he leapt at another juicy opportunity to grab the mic and advertise his pristine virtue. This time it was North Carolina’s democratically elected legislature that no one in Connecticut was demanding be punished. Tar Heel State lawmakers drew the ire of righteous liberals everywhere when they passed a bill requiring that people use bathrooms and changing facilities according to their biological gender.

You could practically taste Malloy’s joy as he again reached for his executive pen and signed an order banning official travel from Connecticut to North Carolina. “This law is not just wrong,” he said. “It poses a public-safety risk to Connecticut residents traveling through North Carolina.” That’s right — a public-safety risk.

RELATED: Connecticut’s Progressive Nutmegs: Liberals Policies Are Driving a Great State to Economic Suicide

This week — just because why not — Malloy also banned non-essential official travel to Mississippi, because of a law passed there under the principle known as representative democracy. Conveniently, Mississippi is a state that no Connecticut official really needs to visit, and about whose legislature no Connecticut resident gives a flying finger sandwich.

These invitations to empty gesture couldn’t come at a finer time for Governor Malloy. You may think of Connecticut as a wealthy place, and you’re not wrong. It is the state with the highest per capita income in the country. But it’s also a basket case. Here’s a little rundown on just how well Connecticut is faring under Malloy’s leadership.

Connecticut has a $900 million, union-shaped hole in its budget that some Democratic state lawmakers would like to fill by seizing part of Yale University’s massive endowment. Malloy has been slashing services and warning that the milliony deficit will very shortly become a billiony one. The state’s ravenous public-pension system is only half funded. It swallows up $1.5 billion annually in public money, a figure my colleague Steven Malanga projects could double within a decade.

The de facto immigration policy of the United States is to rapidly increase the number of Muslims in this country. I doubt very much that this has been articulated, but it is what is happening, beneath the radar. Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim entry has riled the elites but received majority support in every poll that I have seen. The plain fact is that Islam is a political ideology that requires its adherents to support the imposition of sharia law, which is deeply antithetical to our Constitution.

Now comes a report from the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest that the Daily Caller News Foundation has gained access to:

From 2009 to 2013, the U.S. issued 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim countries, more than twice the approximately 270,000 green cards issued to migrants from European countries. Green cards entitle migrants to legal permanent residency in the country and work authorization, federal benefits, and the chance to apply for citizenship.

The numbers are illustrated in a chart below by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. If laws are not changed, the U.S. is expected to issue another 680,000 green cards in the following five-year period.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-civil-illiberties-union-targets-a-yeshiva-1460069202

Rabbi Aharon Kotler arrived in the U.S. on April 10, 1941, having escaped Lithuania as the Nazis approached. Even as the Holocaust proceeded to destroy Jewish life in Europe, Rabbi Kotler declared that he would rebuild it in America.

He convinced 13 students to join him in Lakewood, N.J., where in 1943 he founded Beth Medrash Govoha. Today, BMG enrolls more than 6,800. Another mark of its success is that the school now has become caught up in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2013 the state of New Jersey decided to give grants to colleges and universities to promote business and job opportunities. BMG was awarded $10.6 million to help build a new library and improve other of its facilities.

But the ACLU filed a lawsuit against New Jersey, objecting that the grant violates the state constitution. It is also offended that BMG is an all-male school, even though that is perfectly legal. After years of procedural wrangling, the lawsuit will be heard in a New Jersey appellate court on Monday—75 years, almost to the day, since Rabbi Kotler debarked in San Francisco and set about to transform Jewish life in America.

If that isn’t a sufficient good omen, there is also Harvard Law School Prof. Noah Feldman’s prediction, in a Bloomberg article shortly after the lawsuit was filed, that the ACLU’s challenge “is on shaky constitutional grounds and will probably fail.”

Let’s start with a stated purpose of the grants, which were intended to help spur economic development. BMG’s primary achievement is as an academic institution, but along the way it has transformed its hometown. Thousands of its alumni have purchased homes, raised families and created businesses in Lakewood and across New Jersey.

A 2015 report commissioned by the school shows that its alumni have created more than 3,000 businesses and employ about 11,000 people in Lakewood alone. The report credits the BMG community with paying more than $100 million in annual property and other local taxes. All of which is to say that the yeshiva fits the profile to be eligible for the grant. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton is good at imagining partisan plots, and to listen to her team, no less than several inspectors general, the intelligence community, and the entire Republican ecosphere are colluding to turn her home-brew email system into a fake scandal. To this conspiracy, she must now add the federal judiciary.

In recent weeks, not one, but two, esteemed federal judges have granted an outside group—Judicial Watch—the right to conduct discovery into the origins and handling of her private email system. It’s a reminder that Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem this election isn’t Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Her problem is a 1966 statute known as the Freedom of Information Act, and the judges who enforce it.

The judges have taken unprecedented steps to resolve this case. It is exceedingly rare—almost unheard of—for a judge to allow discovery in a FOIA proceeding. This is a testament to how grave Mrs. Clinton’s email problem is. In the usual course of things, an outside group demands documents, a judge requires a federal department to hand them over, and the public learns something.

In this case—as we all know—the problem is that the State Department doesn’t have the documents. Or rather, it can’t confirm that it has them all, because State left it to Mrs. Clinton and her aides to possess them, and then to unilaterally decide what to hand over. To Judge Royce Lamberth, this is cut and dry “evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith,” and the law demands a full accounting of how this situation came to be, what records exist, and where they are now.

Speaking of the judge’s words, they too are a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s mess. Judge Lamberth was unplugged in his order, calling the former secretary of state’s email set up “extraordinary,” and slamming “constantly shifting admissions by the government and former government officials” about the setup. Judge Emmet Sullivan, the first to allow discovery, referred in his own hearing to Mrs. Clinton’s “totally atypical system” and noted that it “boggles the mind that the State Department allowed this circumstance to arise in the first place. It’s just very, very, very troubling.”CONTINUE AT SITE