RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/anatomies-of-the-2020-election/Impeachment, and then what?

I n the 20th century, no Congress brought impeachment proceedings against a first-term president facing a reelection. Both the Nixon and Clinton efforts were aimed at reelected presidents, perhaps on the theory that there was supposedly no other means of bringing them to account once they had been elected twice.

In contrast, Trump faces reelection in about a year. The prevailing mood may soon be just to let the voters adjudicate his purported sins and for a year allow the Congress to get back to — or begin — governing.

The makeup of the Senate matters. Nixon resigned before House impeachment because he feared that, if he were impeached, there might be enough Republican senators to give the Democratic majority a possible two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict him, given that the media hated his guts and the economy was souring and draining public support.

Bill Clinton knew that impeachment, facts aside, did not matter much, because the Republican Senate majority was never going to find the necessary votes to convict him, the media was on his side, and the economy was still robust.

In Trump’s case, there is little likelihood that a Republican Senate majority will lose control of its membership to render a two-thirds majority guilty vote. The economy is strong, and impeachment will become unpopular when the public knows that it will not, and cannot, remove a president. The Democrats are more likely seeking a symbolic 51 percent conviction vote, and a year of “the walls are closing in” anti-Trump chant in the press.

Polls matter. When the media and Democrats started impeachment stories and investigations, Nixon’s favorability was near 70 percent, after his landslide reelection and second inaugural. After twelve months of Watergate, he ended 1973 at about 30 percent approval. When he left office in August 1973 before impeachment, his approval was at about 24 percent.

Clinton, in contrast, enjoyed about 70 percent favorability when impeachment started and he went down only about 10 points — before rebounding and leaving office impeached but quite popular at 65 percent approval. The therapeutic Clinton lived in a pre-Internet age, and “I feel your pain” still resonated.

Three years’ worth of talk of Trump impeachment waxes and wanes. His polls accordingly slide to the low forties when “bombshells” and “turning point” frenzies flood the media, and then they inch back up to the middle forties when the bombast passes.

At this point in his presidency, Bill Clinton was gradually climbing back to near 50 percent approval; Barack Obama was right where Trump is now, at about 42-43 percent. It is hard to know whether impeachment helped or hurt Clinton because the economy was booming, he was seen as bipartisan, and the debt was finally declining. Impeachment was either irrelevant to his status or seen as a threat to it. Either way, Clinton was popular right before and after impeachment.

In Trump’s case, it may be that he ends up at about 44 percent favorability after the impeachment circus either fades or is realized, about where he was when the whistleblower hysteria commenced.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/time-for-the-white-house-and-congressional-republicans-to-get-serious-on-impeachment/

Democrats have tried to defend pursuing their impeachment inquiry behind closed doors by comparing it to a grand-jury inquest. I’ve given a bunch of reasons why this analogy is ill-conceived. There is one way, though, in which it is apt: With the grand jury as with politics, complaints that an investigative process has been flawed virtually always fail.

It is a lesson the White House and congressional Republicans had better internalize quickly.

Prosecutorial misconduct in grand-jury proceedings is almost never a basis to dismiss an indictment or throw out a conviction. The reason is straightforward: Even serious missteps by the investigators do not excuse or erase the serious misconduct that is under investigation. Consequently, if an accused ultimately receives a fair trial with sufficient due-process protections, a court will not throw out the case based on violations at the grand-jury stage.

That doctrine surely applies to impeachment. It is political, not legal, in nature. Unlike a criminal defendant, the president does not have an array of constitutionally mandated due-process protections. Our law vests the House with the whole of impeachment power. No court may tell the House how to conduct impeachment, and the House need only afford the president whatever minimal protections lawmakers think the public wants him to have if the proceedings are to be accepted as legitimate.

Moral of the story: Better get about the business of figuring out the best substantive defense to the charges that House Democrats are preparing to lodge. The president and his allies are not going to win this on process grounds.

On Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would finally hold a vote to endorse the impeachment inquiry that Democrat-controlled committees have been conducting by fiat for the past month. The speaker indicated that the measure will go to the floor this week, probably Thursday. It will outline the impeachment procedures going forward. Presumably, this will include granting the president and the Republican minority rights to cross-examine witnesses and present their own evidence, in hearings that will go public by mid November.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/467858-house-finally-will-vote-on-an-impeachment-inquiry-but-who-will-that-help

Well, it’s about time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reluctantly alerted House Democrats on Monday that a resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry they have been conducting for weeks will be introduced this week. This is a welcome step in terms of legitimacy. 

Before caving, the speaker’s note to her caucus mulishly maintains that the star chamber which Democrats have been running — mainly through Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) Intelligence Committee, with its closed hearings and selective leaking — has been perfectly proper. This throat-clearing is both telling and misleading. 

Pelosi purports to regard as “baseless” the Republican claim “that the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry” has not been authorized by a vote of the House. Ironically, she observes that the “Constitution provides that the House of Representatives ‘shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” That is the whole point — the Constitution vests the impeachment power in the House as an institution, not in the speaker or the majority party. The House only acts as an institution when it votes — exactly what Pelosi has sedulously avoided. 

The speaker relies on a dubious ruling issued last week by the federal District Court in Washington — specifically, by Chief Judge Beryl Howell, who was appointed to the bench by President Obama after serving for years as a top aide to the hyper-partisan Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.). Chief Judge Howell directed that grand jury materials from the Mueller investigation be made available to Congress despite the fact that the text of the governing rule limits disclosure to investigations attendant to judicial proceedings. The Trump administration is appealing the decision. 

According to Pelosi, in rationalizing her ruling, Howell “confirmed that the House is not required to hold a vote” authorizing an impeachment inquiry. That distorts what the judge said. Howell observed that the historical record on the matter was mixed — there have been inquiries into whether judges should be impeached that have occurred without a floor vote, while impeachment inquiries involving presidents have had them. But the court’s bottom line was that, because the Constitution puts the House fully in charge of impeachment, a court has no authority to tell the House how to proceed. That is not a judicial endorsement of the Democrats’ position; it is an acknowledgment that a judge is powerless in the matter.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/28/obama-successfully-hunted-trump-campaign-aides-instead-of-terrorists/

For more than a year, the leaders entrusted to protect the country and administer justice on behalf of Americans victimized by terrorists instead used their awesome reach against a domestic political rival.

The weekend raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker killed in Syria in 2015 while being held captive by the sadistic ISIS leader. During his Sunday morning announcement from the White House, President Trump twice invoked Mueller’s name in addition to the names of other Americans murdered under the Islamic State’s ongoing reign of terror. According to reports from some of his escaped victims, Baghdadi took Mueller as his secret bride in 2013. “We were told Kayla was tortured, that she was the property of al-Baghdadi,” her parents said in an August 2015 interview.

Mueller was raped repeatedly by the ISIS caliph, then killed in February 2015 during a coalition strike on the compound where she was confined.

After the U.S. confirmed Mueller’s death, President Obama issued a statement. “ISIL is a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla. No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”

Obama, however, did not bring those terrorists to justice; nearly five years later, it was Donald Trump who made good on that promise.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/28/kamikaze-schumer-wants-to-repeal-private-health-insurance/

The more voters know about the New York senator’s initiative and his heavy-handed efforts to push the agenda of the far-left wing of the Democratic party, they more vigorously they will reject it.

While the Democrats continue their impeachment pantomime war dance in the mirror-clad corner in order to keep up their spirits, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is ginning up a much more fateful danse macabre on health care. He has promised to force a vote this week on various Trump Administration directives that have injected flexibility into Obamacare. As The Hill reports, “Senate Democrats plan to force vulnerable Republicans to vote on legislation that would overturn a controversial Trump administration directive on ObamaCare.”

The idea is that Democrats can force besieged lawmakers such as Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Martha McSally (R-Arizona) to take a stand and make an unpopular vote on the issue that voters consistently identify as the most important: health care.

But just like that impeachment fracas taking place in the Romper Room, this ploy on healthcare threatens to recoil badly on Democrats.

Remember “if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan”? That was the rubric under which President Obama sold the American public the bill of goods we now know as Obamacare. Even Politifact called it the lie of the year. He promised premiums would go down. In fact, they have skyrocketed. Thanks to Obama, when it comes to health care, people have fewer choices, pay more, and have to wait longer to receive treatment, which is increasingly rationed by the bureaucrats in Washington.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/moral-idiocy-linguistic-segregation-bruce-thornton/

The Race Gestapo pounced on Donald Trump recently for comparing the House’s Constitutionally dicey attempt to impeach him to a “lynching.” Apart from the political motive of damaging Trump, the uproar illustrates once again how illiberal identity politics racializes language, turning words into ideological weapons that serve one faction’s own power and influence rather than the people it supposedly represents.

Much of the criticism of Trump was quickly exposed as hypocritical, morally incoherent, or just plain ignorant. The Associated Press, for example, faulted the president for “stirring up painful memories of America’s racist past.” Seriously? All we’ve been doing for more than half a century is “stirring up” racial grievances in politics, curricula, and popular culture. Historical racial offenses are repeated ad nauseam, even though many of them took place long before the end of legal segregation in 1964. And we know why. The race industry and identity politics are predicated on grievances over racists offenses for which white people must feel guilty.

And if such offenses are lacking, either they will be invented, like the myth that the police target black men for extra-legal assassination; or recycled from history, as in the current outrage over Trump’s use of the word “lynching.” Without grievances and the white guilt they provoke, activists and political factions have no leverage over lawmakers for getting regulations that privilege their interests.

What these ideological ploys actually reveal, though, is not the persistence of racism, but how much black lives have improved since even before the Civil Rights Act, and how discredited and ostracized old-school public expressions of racist attitudes have become. If these views still had widespread political and social power, nobody would have to invent racist hoaxes a la Jussie Smollett, or redefine racism into ever more subtle manifestations, or create psychological fictions like “implicit bias.” As any black man over the age of 60 can tell you, during segregation nobody needed such magnifying glasses to see racism in action. It was brutally obvious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/will-impeachment-change-opinions-of-trump/

Robert Samuelson’s latest column on impeachment brought to mind Lincoln’s remark during his first debate with Douglas: “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”

Samuelson notes that, if the House impeaches President Trump, at least 20 Republican Senators would have to vote with every Democrat to remove him from office. “For now,” he writes, “the Democrats have zero.”

That may be an overstatement. GOP senators criticize the impeachment process, while avoiding extended discussions of the president’s underlying behavior. Fifty of 53 Republican senators have joined Lindsey Graham’s call for the House to authorize its impeachment inquiry.

Republican opinion of Trump has to turn squarely against him for impeachment to succeed. What are the chances of this happening? Not great.

Samuelson acknowledges that public opinion is sticky. People don’t like changing their minds. “People define themselves by their beliefs. It’s who they are and want to be.” Their views of Trump are like hardened concrete. “At least for his core supporters, Trump has seemed remarkably adept at controlling the narrative of his presidency.”

Samuelson offers two examples of shifts in public opinion: same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. The public changed its mind about both. But advocates of impeachment shouldn’t get their hopes up. The comparison between cultural issues and political figures is misguided.

The timeline for cultural change is much longer than the political calendar. It took decades for the public to accept same-sex marriage and pot. The rising generation is responsible for much of the difference in attitude.

House Democrats hope to vote on impeachment by the end of 2019. Absent some technological breakthrough, there is not enough time for a pro-conviction GOP youth movement to be born, come of age, and displace Senate Republicans.

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The Democratic strategy, Samuelson writes, “is premised on the hope that further shocking revelations will alter the political climate. Trump’s image will be so shattered that Republican senators will feel free to join the revolt against him.” This assumes the aim of the Democratic strategy is Trump’s removal, and not simply weakening him ahead of reelection while putting at-risk Republican senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner in difficult positions.

The record is clear that not much Donald Trump does shocks conservative Republicans. They are prepared to tolerate a high degree of instability and dysfunction simply to prevent the Democratic left from gaining power. They would have to reject this bargain rapidly, wildly, stunningly, and decisively for the Senate to remove the president from office. As Lincoln said: Public sentiment is everything.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/there-is-no-basis-for-barr-to-recuse-himself-over-ukraine/

“Senator Feinstein’s claim, on behalf of Judiciary Committee Democrats, that Attorney General Barr should recuse himself is nonsense, both factually and legally. He should ignore it.”

Even if he did what the Democrats claim (which he didn’t), it would contain nothing to justify recusal.

Here’s a question: If Dianne Feinstein didn’t recuse herself from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, why should anyone ever be recused from anything?

Senator Feinstein is in the news, making the characteristically hyperpartisan and frivolous claim (on Twitter) that Attorney General Bill Barr should

recuse himself from matters related to Ukraine because of concerns about his role in President Trump’s efforts to damage a political opponent and undermine the Russia investigation.

Feinstein says she is speaking for Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, all of whom have signed a letter to the AG.

There is no basis for Barr to recuse himself.

First, before we ever get to the law, the Democrats’ claim is factually vacant. The AG has no role in President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Barr did not ask the president to intercede with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for the purpose of seeking assistance with the ongoing Durham probe of the Russia investigation. Despite the president’s reference to Barr in the July 25 Zelensky phone call, Barr did not communicate with Trump about Ukraine before the call. Barr did not follow up with the Ukrainians, nor did he discuss Ukraine with the president or the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Being mentioned on a phone call is not a basis for recusal.

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-future-of-the-federal-judiciary

To understand better the future of the federal judiciary—and why it matters—we should first look to the past. Let’s consider where our judiciary began and how it has gotten to where it is today.

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I begin where any judge should: with the text, of course. Article III of the United States Constitution established the federal courts and vested in them “the judicial Power of the United States.”[1] But, in contrast to the detail it provides for the powers vested in the other branches, the Constitution’s description of the judicial power effectively stops there. The Constitution identifies those categories of “Cases” and “Controversies” that will be subject to the judicial power of the United States.[2] But it says little about what such power is or how it ought to be exercised.

The concept was not novel to the framers of the Constitution, however. Rather, the general nature of the “judicial power” should have been well known to the founding generation from centuries of experience in England. This included, in the words of Professor Philip Hamburger, the central duty of English judges to “decide [cases] in accord with the law of the land.”[3] That the “judicial Power” was left largely undefined in the new Constitution may simply reflect the fact that its general meaning was already understood.[4]

The traditional conception of the judicial power embodied two related ideals. First, because judges would be deciding cases according to the law, they would not be deciding cases according to their personal values. The law alone was to supply the basis for decision. Legal historians have debated the degree to which this was true in England, disagreeing, for example, over the extent to which English judges would stray beyond the text of a law in the service of more ambiguous principles like equity.[5] But in Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton defended the proposed Constitution on the very ground that an independent judiciary would help ensure that “nothing would be consulted [in the courts] but the constitution and the laws.”[6]

This critical facet of the judiciary is derived from the unique structure of our government.