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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Want More Unity And Freedom? Try Returning To Constitutional Federalism Gary M. Galles

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/want-more-unity-and-freedom-try-returning-to-constitutional-federalism/

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.

Michael Brendan Dougherty:American Life under Liberal Conformism

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/american-life-under-liberal-conformism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

News organizations are actively engaging in exactly the practice carried out by Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory-holing their previous publications to fit the new party line. Kamala Harris was never a border czar; that’s right-wing disinformation now. All previous references to her being the border czar, an unofficial title and real role given to her by Biden and his close advisers to humiliate and embarrass her, have been duly erased. And while we’re at it, how about a round of applause for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the astounding unity of the Democratic Party! We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.

If you were a faithful believer in what the New York Times says and fell into a coma just one month ago, you went unconscious thinking that Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos. One of the reasons you knew you had to believe this is because Kamala Harris is a political joke who “has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls” and “the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president” since such measures had been taken. That was the party line: Biden’s just fine, Kamala’s terrible. Believing anything else is stupid. Less than four weeks later: Biden’s terrible. Kamala’s amazing! And if you say different, you’re a dummy.

VP STAFF “ROCKED” BY 92% TURNOVER THE LAST THREE YEARS!

We’ve been investigating the Office of Vice President under Kamala Harris for the last two years…

And today our findings were positively cited in the New York Times by columnist David Brooks, who gave Harris a poor grade on the administration and management of her office.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Our findings have been seen at: FOX News in primetime: The Ingraham Angle, Hannity!, Jesse Waters Primetime, and on Varney and Co. National Review, Real Clear Policy, Real Clear Investigations, Breitbart, Just The News, The Federalist, Instapundit, and many other online major news platforms.

Major television coverage at The National Desk at Sinclair Broadcast Group, The Tomi Lahren Show on Outkick, Newsline with Bianca Del Garcia at Newsmax TV, The Weekly Briefing with John Hines at One American News, Chanel Rion’s Fine Point on One American News, and soon to air the Eric Metaxas podcast.

OUR INVESTIGATION

Under Harris the Office of Vice President has had a stunning 91.5% staff turnover rate since her first year in January 2021.

J. D. Vance and the Emerging Counter-Elite How a second Trump administration could avoid some of the pitfalls of the first. Christopher Rufo

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Former president Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio senator J. D. Vance as his running mate has generated much commentary. The mainstream media has tried to frame Vance as a postliberal “threat to democracy,” while Trump’s supporters have celebrated him as a bridge to a new generation.

But there is a deeper story here. The Vance selection is not a gambit to secure a particular demographic or region—white men are Trump’s base; Ohio is a safe red state—but an effort to cultivate an emerging counter-elite that could make the second Trump administration substantially more effective than the first.

This story is built into J. D. Vance’s biographical arc. He was the all-American kid who rose from humble beginnings to make his way in the world: the Marines; Yale Law; venture capital; a best-selling book. He learned the language of the prestige institutions, cultivated powerful patrons, and quickly climbed the ladder in academia, finance, and business. He had made it.

Then, his story takes a turn. Having entered the ranks of America’s elite, Vance became disillusioned and disenchanted with it, correctly identifying it as a force of hypocrisy and corruption. He defected—first, by parting ways with the respectable conservatism of the Beltway, and then by embracing Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris Should Not Have Snubbed Bibi The VP missed an important opportunity to show Americans where she stands on Israel. Eli Lake

https://www.thefp.com/p/kamala-harris-netanyahu-washington-dc-july-24

When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, his fourth such speech, the new leader of the Democratic Party was missing. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was busy delivering an address to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority’s Grand Boulé in Indianapolis. 

In normal times, Harris’s snub of Bibi would be expected. Democrats still sting from Netanyahu’s campaign in 2015 against former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. When Netanyahu spoke before a joint session that year to make his case, many Democrats boycotted. Things have only gone downhill since then: Bibi’s relationship with President Joe Biden has been strained in recent months; Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Bibi from the House floor in March; the Squad, along with lots of left-wing activists and many Arab American groups, have decried Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.” 

But Harris effectively won her party’s nomination within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement Sunday that he would not seek reelection. In other words: she does not need to please the anti-Israel base of her party in order to win a primary.

Instead, what Harris needs to do is spend the precious 100 days before the election defining herself before the nation. Simply sitting behind the rostrum as the leader of the Jewish state delivered a stirring address about how his country’s enemies were also America’s would have neutralized the Trump campaign’s efforts to paint the vice president as a San Francisco socialist who is out of touch with everyday people. 

“Nobody knows where Kamala Harris stands on Israel,” former GOP foreign policy adviser Dan Senor told The Free Press. “She’s a blank slate. This was a high-profile opportunity to define herself on this issue, and she took a pass.” 

Judge Glock: Kamalanomics The presumptive presidential nominee is no moderate.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/analysis-of-kamala-harris-economic-record

While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.

Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.

In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.

Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.

No J6 Treatment for Pro-Hamas Rioters At the same time Chris Wray testified that “political violence” is on the rise and the FBI investigates all incidents regardless of politics, Hamas sympathizers tore up the nation’s capital–again. Julie Kelly

https://www.declassified.live/p/no-j6-treatment-for-pro-hamas-rioters

As expected, House Democrats used Wednesday’s appearance by FBI Director Christopher Wray as an opportunity not to denounce the attempted assassination of Donald Trump but to exaggerate the threat of “political violence” in America.

“Political violence of any kind is dangerous, unlawful, and unacceptable,” Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) lectured during the House Judiciary Committee hearing intended to press Wray for details about the events of July 13. “I understand the increased tenor of political violence that is racking the country. It has been on the rise, fomented by dehumanizing rhetoric by top officials including the former president.” (In some circles, that is known as “blaming the victim.”)

Wray himself said he has observed an “alarming phenomenon” in recent years of political passions turning to violence. We don’t care what an individual is mad about, Wray warned, “when it turns to violence, that’s when we draw the line, that’s when we get engaged.”

This is part of the “both sides” blarney Joe Biden and the media have attempted to promote since the shooting on July 13. In other words, neither side is more responsible that the other for random incidents of political violence.

Which, of course, is a lie.

This is the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it Joe Biden’s withdrawal will open the floodgates to unrestrained California-style progressivism. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/22/this-is-the-end-of-the-democratic-party-as-we-knew-it/

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency also signals the demise of the old Democratic Party, with its roots in liberal ideals and advocacy for ‘the common man’. Although Biden, to his own detriment, chose to adopt the progressive views now dominant in the media and political apparat, he remained, at least superficially, a man of the old Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrats.

With the ascension of Kamala Harris, the Democrats have made a full break from their historic roots as the party of workers and have gravitated towards the decidedly post-industrial politics of California-style progressives. Rather than worrying primarily about lifting up living standards, the party’s emphasis will now be on issues like climate change, abortion, reparations and trans advocacy.

Arguably the biggest winner will be identity politics. After all, Harris’s career was made possible by both traditional femininity – most evident in her career-boosting affair with a much older man, former California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown – and her identification with feminist causes. Her mixed-race background has been – forgive the expression – her trump card.

It’s highly unlikely that a politician of such modest gifts would have had such a meteoric career if she had been a man or a plain vanilla woman. Clearly, her elevation to vice-president was entirely based on her identity as the product of West Indian and South Asian parents, as well as her XX chromosomes. If elected, she would be America’s first DEI president.

The Art of Democratic Democracide The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-art-of-democratic-democracide/

Democrats are destroying democracy by engineering a veritable coup through forcing out Biden from the race—but not from the presidency.

Here are ten of their new rules of American democracy that they have now bequeathed to us.

1) The Democrats have decided that Biden is technically mentally unfit to run as their nominee for president—but fit as fiddle to continue for six months as our president. Thus, the Democratic primary winner turns out today to be the loser. And it is far more important to be mentally fit as a Democrat candidate than as an American president.

2) So, primaries and delegates won by popular vote now mean zilch. They are erasable at the whim of the back-roomers in the darkness. Will Democratic primaries cease to exist? If not, why would anyone take the time to vote in them?

3) Remember the same coup plotters today in 2020 engineered the sudden abdications of all of Biden’s socialist primary rivals to ensure that he would be a suitable veneer for their own extremist agendas. In that now infamous Faustian bargain, Joe and Jill got the ceremonial White House spotlight. In exchange, the team of Barack and Michelle ran things stealthily. So did Joe live by the coup, and then die by the coup?

4) The donors and politico grandees (did anyone vote for these people?) determine who runs and who doesn’t—not the people who vote in the primaries.

5) The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden.

6) Barack Obama set a new precedent that the ex-president stays put in Washington, implants his team onto his successor’s administration, and runs the country covertly through a puppet president.

Coup Upon Coup Upon Coup In 2020, covert actors manipulated the Democratic primary to ensure Joe Biden’s nomination and later controlled his presidential agenda, ultimately forcing him to step down in favor of Kamala Harris. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/25/coup-upon-coup-upon-coup/

In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina.

Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply evaporated.

The fear of a front-runner Sanders’ socialist victory and nomination—and thus an enviable landslide loss to incumbent Donald Trump in the general election—had prompted the donor class and shadowy political insiders to act.

And they did so by choosing a perceived moderate, old Joe Biden from Scranton. That required the coerced departures of all his far-left rivals, who had hitherto performed much better than Biden in the primaries.

Now front-runner Biden still displayed obvious symptoms of serious cognitive decline that had only seemed to mount through the 2020 campaign. And his dementia continued to accelerate during his first three years as president.

Biden had deceitfully promised to conduct a healing campaign and a unifying presidency. But once in the White House, his extreme agendas proved the most divisive and far-left in nearly a century.

Rumors of that prior March 2020 Faustian bargain emerged. The Bidens got to serve as useful moderate veneers. So, they enjoyed the ceremonial functions of the presidency while outsourcing the real operations to former Obama officials, consultants, and advisors.

Indeed, Obama did not, as most ex-presidents do, exit Washington upon leaving the White House. Instead, he bought a mansion and stayed close by.