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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The incredible shrinking Merrick Garland By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_incredible_shrinking_merrick_garland.html

Maybe Attorney General Merrick Garland is the modern Inspector Javert, the French policeman who chased poor Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.”  I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison, but it sure looks to me like AG Garland has become obsessed with former President Trump.  Or maybe the White House told him to get obsessed or else.

Maybe it’s better to go to legal scholar Jonathan Turley for a description of the man.   

This is how Mr. Turley sees it:  
In the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” the character Scott Stuart is caught in a thick fog that causes him to gradually shrink to the point that he lives in a doll house and fights off the house cat. At one point, Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

If one image sums up the incredibly shrinking stature of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is that line in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.
It looks like things have grown more complicated for AG Garland, as Mr. Turley further explains:  
It is not that Merrick Garland is absent but that his presence often seems immaterial.
That’s correct.  He is there, but we can’t see the shrinking man.

Mr. Garland seemed like a good choice with he was nominated for Attorney General.  I mean that he’d be an attorney general who would avoid politics and stick to the job.  Unfortunately, he just can’t control his department’s leftist impulses, from targeting parents at school board meetings to overlooking the Hunter Biden scandal altogether.

And now he authorized, or we understand that he did, sending the FBI to a former president’s home.   

Apparently, no one at DOJ advised him of the blowback from a such a decision.  He seemed totally lost when he read from the TelePrompTer and sort of explained what he did.

Yes, the AG is shrinking faster and faster.

DOJ Scrambles to Find Non-Existent Evidence of ‘Intent’ Desperation to prevent Trump from becoming the 47th President of the United States. Jonathan Emord

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/doj-scrambles-find-non-existent-evidence-intent-jonathan-emord/

Under pressure from President Biden to find a way to prevent Donald Trump from becoming America’s 47th President of the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland unleashed an army of FBI agents to scour Mar-a-Lago in search of something, anything that might fill in the enormous gap in DOJ’s case against the former president: The glaring absence of evidence of specific intent needed to bring any charge against former President Trump.  

While DOJ can snow a grand jury into believing lame evidence credible and succeed in indicting just about anyone (not difficult when the prosecution runs the show unopposed), it cannot be sure of a conviction from a court without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of the specific intent necessary to prove its case. That evidence rarely exists and proof of it is, indeed, a very tall order. Short of planting evidence or making things up (in other words committing the kind of government corruption and fraud as occurred in the deceitful manipulation of evidence by DOJ and FBI in support of the Russia hoax or, more recently, in the FBI fabricated Whitmer kidnapping plot), DOJ is destined to hit a very high, virtually impenetrable burden of proof that will dash its partisan dreams to pieces.

From the warrant released by Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt on August 12, we see in attachment B the legal predicate offered by Justice for the search: 18 USC §§ 793, 1519, and 2071. For want of evidence, each statutory section fails in Trump’s case when evaluated fairly, and never should have been accepted as adequate justification under the Fourth Amendment for the unprecedented issuance of the warrant against a former President on the eve of his announcement of a second candidacy for that office. That want of evidence, of course, did not stop DOJ because the entire unprecedented pursuit is one driven by political motivations, not objectivity.  DOJ is not investigating a crime for which it has probable cause; it is trying to discover fragments of proof that can be woven into a tale of criminality to, at a minimum, place a cloud over candidate Trump’s head or, in their ideal scenario, justify preventing him from becoming the 47th President of the United States.

Elie Mystal’s Guide to Trashing the Constitution A review of the MSNBC race-monger’s anti-American screed. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/elie-mystals-guide-trashing-constitution-jason-d-hill/

Elie Mystal is a professional hater. He hates the United States of America. He hates white people. He hates conservatives. He hates Republicans. Most of all, he hates the Constitution of our U.S. republic. He thinks it is trash. Allow me to let the man speak for himself as he writes in the first lines of the introduction to his book Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to The Constitution:

Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominancy, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share.

As a leftist he blasts liberals:

…[You] rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage. Why would I give a fuck about the original public meaning of the words written by those men?

And further:

Redeeming our failed Constitution from its bigoted and sexist sins does not require new amendments. It does not require a few new ornaments upon its crooked boughs. It requires the emerging majority in this country to reject the conservative interpretation of what the Constitution says and adopt a morally defensible view of what our country means. I’m here to tell you that the Constitution is trash. Conservatives are the ones who say it always has to be.

For most of the book it is not at all clear whether Mystal’s quarrel is with the contemporary society and its white inhabitants whom he despises, or with the Constitution which he refers to a few times as a “violent piece of shit.”

The Dobbs and Kennedy Rulings Intensify the Left’s War on Religion What the hysteria over those decisions is really about. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dobbs-and-kennedy-rulings-intensify-lefts-war-bruce-thornton/

“Finally, the great paradox is that these champions of reason and science are promoting unscientific ideas such as the notion that biological sex is really a fluid “gender” created in a child’s mind by mental states. These dubious ideas, passed off as science, are weaponized by the “woke” in service to their attempt to aggrandize power for themselves and their faction. Or they are the expressions of what can only be called a cult, true believers who passionately and uncritically accept bad ideas, and persecute or “cancel” heretics who challenge them––the same tyrannical behavior that has characterized political religions like fascism and communism.”

The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the states’ power to settle controversial issues upon which the Constitution is silent has the usual “woke” suspects hyperventilating over religion’s dangerous power to undermine “our democracy.” This war on religion, now in its third century, is predicated on dubious ideologies, ignorance of the role of faith in the Constitution and America’s Founding, and an evangelical faith in the power of “science” that lies at the heart of our progressive technocracy.

As such, the hysteria over Dobbs is really about the power and authority of progressives who are threatened by religion and institutions of civil society.

Two examples of the “woke” panic about faith allegedly driving the Supreme Court’s decisions appeared last week. As National Review’s Isaac Schorr reported, a Politico scribe managed to completely misunderstand and garble the Justices’ argument in Dobbs, which she claims “marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.” 

Merrick Garland, the Washington Post and the Nuclear Story If the threat is genuine, why didn’t the Justice Department treat it that way? James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-the-washington-post-and-the-nuclear-story-11660671636?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If papers in former President Donald Trump’s home represented such a grave threat to national security, why did the Justice Department take so long to act on it? Among the implausible details of this disturbing story has been that after a Justice official and several FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago in early June, Justice waited several days before merely requesting that a stronger lock be placed on the door of a storage room and then waited roughly two months before seeking a warrant. Now a new report makes the theory of a significant security threat even harder to credit.

The Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha report from Washington:

Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks over whether to approve the application for a warrant to search former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of his cautious approach that will be tested over the coming months.
The decision had been the subject of weeks of meetings between senior Justice Department and FBI officials, the people said. The warrant allowed agents last Monday to seize classified information and other presidential material from Mar-a-Lago.

Weeks of meetings strongly suggest a gray area, not a clear and present danger. Mr. Garland’s long period of pondering is completely incompatible with a news report that has been widely circulated since last week. In a story published on Thursday and updated on Friday, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Perry Stein and Shane Harris reported for the Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Their concern was so deep that they had to kick the issue around at meetings for much of the summer before trying to do anything about it? The Post report continued:

The people who described some of the material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

‘Those Who Pursue Self-interest through Politics’ by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18810/self-interest-politics

“Government is itself an art,” wrote the late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.”[1]

Of course a leader should be able to do both – “making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness” – but what if there are leaders or the people around them who are, as Frankfurter noted, “those who pursue self-interest through politics”[2]?

As previously asked on these pages, are union moguls, lobbyists and advisors, power players and profiteers trying to do end runs around US election laws (here and here) and the Constitution (here and here)?

Anonymous “dark money” groups are still trying to “shape” our elections without disclosing where the money is coming from.

According to Bloomberg News, “‘Dark money’ helped pave the way for the Biden campaign” – to the tune of $145 million.

Big Tech has just been found to have been acting as a “state agent” of the federal government in curtailing free speech with which the government did not agree. Twitter just settled a lawsuit by the journalist Alex Berenson after he showed the court that orders to Twitter to ban him had come from the White House.

The Politics of Gutting and Rebuilding America’s Institutions Winning elections is not enough. To restore America’s founding ideals, we must leverage political victory to gut and rebuild our hopelessly corrupt institutions. Bruce D. Abramson

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-gutting-and-rebuilding?utm_source=email

Wrap Up Time

It’s time to wrap up our gut-and-rebuild discussion.  I apologize for the delay, but August happens.  Also, before we get back to it, I published a column in yesterday’s Epoch Times that’s a small taste of what I’ve got coming.  Watch this space after Labor Day for an essay series on America’s spiritual crisis and the new religion of Wokeism.

To get back on track, our basic theme here is that America is in deep trouble.  We live in a world far too complicated and interconnected to navigate without relying upon experts and institutions.  Yet all of our important institutions and most of our experts are corrupt.  In other words, we have to trust them but we can’t trust them.   That’s bad.

As things stand, our corrupt institutions seem to be pushing us towards totalitarianism.  If that push generates enough of a backlash, we could end up with two violent factions—one fighting for the totalitarianism and one fighting against it.  That thought makes me—and I hope you—unhappy.  I’m not a fan of either thought control or violence.  I think both are worth avoiding.  These days, that sort of attitude can earn you a reputation as a hard-core right winger.  That’s bad, too.

The only workable remedy is thus to develop superior institutions and experts.  Given how badly most of them have already rotted, however, the only way forward is to gut them, reuse what we can, and rebuild from the ground up.  We’ve explored some of what that would mean in the public sector and some of what it would mean in the private sector.  Now we’re down to the last piece: The role of electoral politics.

Liz Peek: How Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act delivers five winning issues to the GOP

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-democrats-inflation-reduction-act-delivers-five-winning-issues-gop

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a reckless political stunt meant to show the left that Attorney General Merrick Garland will keep the heat on former President Donald Trump. It was unprecedented, seemingly unnecessary, and infuriating to the millions who saw the heavily armed agents’ 10-hour search vividly spotlighting our uneven application of justice.

The raid was also incredibly stupid. Among other things, the furor completely overshadowed passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats are hawking as President Joe Biden’s greatest legislative accomplishment.

Combined with photos of the Biden family – complete with compromised son Hunter Biden — jetting off  for a lavish vacation at a mansion owned by a rich Democrat donor, the White House political messaging machine appears, as usual, clueless.

If Biden couldn’t stick around to sign his big bill, how important could it be?

On the other hand, diverting attention from the Inflation Act could prove a blessing for Democrats, and for President Biden. The bill is riddled with pitfalls – at least five — for the president’s party, giving Republicans much campaign fodder for the months ahead. 

Double Standard by Civil Libertarians against Trump Endangers the Rule of Law by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18809/trump-double-standard

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has repeatedly challenged the constitutionality and applicability of the Espionage Act to anti-government activities by left-wing radicals, is strangely silent when the same overbroad law is deployed against a political figure whose politics they deplore.

Then there is the manner by which Trump loyalists have been treated when they were indicted. Several have been arrested, handcuffed and shackled, despite not having been charged with crimes of violence and despite the absence of evidence that they were planning to flee… [M]ost other comparable defendants are simply notified of the charges and ordered to appear in court. Yet despite this apparent double standard, the left has been silent.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland commendably stated that the Justice Department is dedicated to the “evenhanded application of the law.” But recent applications of the law suggest otherwise. “Due process for me but not for thee” seems to have replaced the equal protection of the law as the guiding principle.

Perhaps the most glaring manifestation of the double standard currently at work is the different approach taken to the alleged mishandling of classified material by Trump, on the one hand, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the other hand. No wide-ranging search warrants were sought for Clinton’s home, where private servers were apparently kept and subpoenaed material even possibly destroyed.

Equal justice for Democrats and Republicans must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. There must be one law, and one application of law, for all comparable acts and persons. There must also be one standard of civil liberties — and complaints about their violation — by principled civil libertarians.

This unacceptable double standard is so widespread that it endangers the rule of law and the historic role of neutral, non-partisan civil liberties that protect it from partisan weaponization.

Civil liberties require a single standard without regard to party, ideology or person. The right of Nazis to their despicable free speech must be protected with the same vigor as the right of Salman Rushdie. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in particular, and good civil libertarians in general, used to live by that creed. That is what makes them different from special pleaders who limit their advocacy to those who agree or identify with them. This great tradition — that led John Adams to defend the hated British soldiers who were accused of the Boston massacre and led the old ACLU to defend the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois — has not been evident when it comes to the treatment of Donald Trump. A double standard has been manifested in a number of ways.

The Fall of Faucism and the Return of Common Sense by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18779/fauci-common-sense

To insist that grown adults lack the ability to make consequential life choices is to insist that they be infantilized for the rest of their lives.

Parents have every right to balance the costs of missed educational opportunities for school-aged children against the risks of illness. American adults are entirely qualified to judge for themselves whether masks, gloves, or full body hazmat suits are necessary for day-to-day existence. And individual Americans are intellectually capable of determining whether they wish to be injected with novel mRNA vaccines. To insist that grown adults lack the ability to make consequential life choices is to insist that they be infantilized for the rest of their lives.

To believe Americans cannot, or should not, make their own health decisions is to steal from them their personal agency and render them completely dependent upon government directives. Such a system elevates bureaucratic authority and enslaves the citizen to the State. That type of total government control is the hallmark of authoritarian and totalitarian societies. It has absolutely no place, however, in any nation that regards itself as a bastion for personal freedom.

COVID-19 mitigation czar and mask scold Dr. Anthony Fauci recently bemoaned Americans’ increased reluctance to “adhere” to public health restrictions. Blaming “fatigue,” “political divisiveness,” and “social media misinformation and disinformation,” the good doctor seemed quite upset that Americans no longer readily comply with every policy recommendation coming from his office. Where officials command and citizens comply, however, “expert” opinion smothers personal choice. That is hardly the American way.