RUTHFULLY YOURS

What would William F. Buckley do?

Conservative icon William Buckley promulgated what has become known as the Buckley rule: “Nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable.” Among the current candidates the only one who passes that test is Marco Rubio.

Donald Trump and some in the media have tried to characterize Marco Rubio as the “establishment” candidate. How does that square with reality?

Recall that the election of Rubio was hailed as a Tea Party hero when he knocked off the serial party-shifter and establishment candidate Charlie Crist. Has he retained his conservative credentials since being elected?

As Jim Geraghty wrote in late December, Marco Rubio is “plenty conservative” and has an indisputably conservative record as a senator :

This is a man who has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 out of 100. A man who has a perfect rating from the NRA in the U.S. Senate. A man who earned scores of 100 in 2014, 100 in 2013, 71 in 2012, and 100 in 2011 from the Family Research Council. A “Taxpayer Super Hero” with a lifetime rating of 95 from Citizens Against Government Waste. A man Club for Growth president David McIntosh called “a complete pro-growth, free-market, limited-government conservative.”

Across the board, Rubio’s stances, policy proposals, and rhetoric fall squarely within the bounds of traditional conservatism.

Rubio’s the guy who earned a 100 from National Right to Life in two straight cycles, and a zero rating from NARAL. He supports an abortion ban after 20 weeks, opposes exceptions for rape and incest (although he’s voted for legislation that includes those exceptions), and opposes embryonic stem-cell research. In the first Republican debate he declared, “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

Rubio opposes gay marriage and has said that “we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.” He recorded robo-calls for the National Organization for Marriage.

Since 2010, Rubio has proposed freezing government spending for everything but defense and veterans’ care at 2008 levels. He supports a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution and the line-item veto. He voted against funding for the Export-Import Bank, even though Florida receives the second-largest amount of money from the bank.

His initial tax-reform plan, co-authored with Utah senator Mike Lee, cuts the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and would reduce the current seven brackets to two: a 15 percent rate for individuals and a 35 percent rate for families. (Rubio later adjusted it to create a 25 percent tax bracket for couples making between $150,000 and $300,000.) It creates a new $2,500-per-child tax credit. Conservatives disagree about the best way to simplify the tax code and reduce the tax burden on Americans, but it’s hard to dispute that changes such as these would move the system in the right direction.

Mr. Sanders could muster a mere 26% of South Carolina Democrats. The exit polls say Mrs. Clinton won an almost unbelievable 86% of the black vote, suggesting that she will also sweep the other southern states with heavy African-American populations on Tuesday. Mr. Sanders will presumably win in Vermont, and maybe another state or two, but that won’t be nearly enough to stop Mrs. Clinton from cruising to the nomination.

The Democratic contest thus returns to the normalcy of recent decades, which is that a progressive insurgency invariably fails against the establishment favorite. Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean and Mr. Sanders were all favorites of the white gentry left. They lost because they couldn’t defeat the government unions or persuade enough African-Americans. Barack Obama was the exception because he could compete for the black vote.

Mrs. Clinton continued to underperform among younger voters, and underlying economic anxiety should concern Democrats going into November. Some 84% of Democrats in South Carolina said they are either very or somewhat worried about the U.S. economy. But the Clinton juggernaut shows that, unlike the GOP, there really is a Democratic establishment composed of powerful interest groups that determine the nominee. Those forces are rallying to defeat Mr. Sanders, whom they view as unelectable. READ MORE AT SITE

David McIntosh has been fighting for economic freedom for 30 years, and he is convinced the battle has reached a hinge moment. “The stakes really are that high,” says the president of the Club for Growth. “If we don’t do this, it’s all at risk. This is the moment.”

By “this” he means denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination. The club is one of America’s most effective free-enterprise advocacy groups, and for months it has tried to alert voters, often without much other support, to the risks of a Trump nomination.

With the primary race now at a decisive moment, Mr. McIntosh is trying to rally support for a sustained anti-Trump push leading up to the winner-take-all primaries on March 15. With Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally confronting the front-runner, Mr. McIntosh is convinced that the billionaire can still be defeated with the help of a sustained TV and social-media assault.

“We’ve got people on our side still saying, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ Or ‘maybe we can fix this in a brokered convention,’ ” says Mr. McIntosh. “My message is that’s too late. It’s got to be now.”

When Mr. McIntosh took over the Club for Growth presidency more than a year ago, the former Indiana congressman had no idea his first real fight would be trying to stop a TV celebrity from hijacking the Republican Party. The club usually plays in House and Senate campaigns, and it is backing no presidential candidate. “We’re neutral on the other candidates. We’ve said that both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are gold standards—either would be great on economic issues. This is about stopping Trump.” READ MORE AT SITE

Donald Trump has run a nasty, vicious, and loathsome campaign. His views, ideas, and policies are, for the most part, the complete antithesis of what small-c conservatism represents, or should represent, in a modern democratic society.

There’s no denying, however, that he has been incredibly successful.

Trump’s personal appeal, tough stances, and populist positions have clearly resonated with voters. He’s won three states (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) and finished second in Iowa. If current poll numbers are accurate, he’s easily going to win most of the states on Super Tuesday.

Unless Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz get together before, say, March 1 — and bring John Kasich and Ben Carson along for the ride — this contest could almost be mathematically over within a few weeks’ time. (Just a thought, gentlemen.)

Win or lose, the brash billionaire businessman has certainly had a huge impact on modern-day American politics. In fact, his tactics could ultimately be emulated by like-minded political candidates down the road. Here’s something I firmly believe will survive well past Trump’s candidacy.

Trump has thrown out the traditional political playbook so many times on the campaign trail, it could make your head spin. At the same time, he has used ideas, concepts, and lines (both written and speaking) that are completely foreign to most political strategists, communicators, and speechwriters.

Flashy plays better than methodical in prime time, so Marco Rubio was beaming like a big winner after Thursday night’s debate in Houston. In Ted Cruz, though, I’m happy to have the candidate who looks best the morning after.

The rival senators, both attractive, articulate and wicked smart, have been frequent conservative allies. Hostilities became inevitable when they fixed their eyes on the same prize. On Thursday night, though, they were frenemies. Finally, and hopefully not too late, the pair figured out that the only sensible target for their mutually assured destruction is the real MAD man, Donald Trump — not each other.

The tag team was effective. The Donald limped away revealed for what he is, a fraud — a liberal Democrat posing as the Republican savior. For example, his ballyhooed crackdown on illegal immigration is, in reality, an amnesty plan that conveniently goes unmentioned in the position paper touted by his campaign. The real plan — as implausible for law enforcement and gratuitously burdensome for aliens as it is Iraq-like expensive for taxpayers — is to hunt down and deport 12 million people, only to . . . yes . . . bring them back into the country legally – i.e., with amnesty.

How many aliens will be brought back? Like most fraudsters, Trump gives different answers to different audiences. When he (or one of his sons) speaks to groups sympathetic to illegals, we’re led to believe they’re all returning: essentially, Americans would provide paid vacations for several million illegals before Trump welcomes them back to compete for American jobs. But Thursday night, before a crowd of Texans who live with the damage illegal immigration does, we got stingy Trump: Only “the best of them will come back” (however many that may be), but rest assured it’s going to be “through a process.” Well, yes . . . the process is called amnesty.

Can Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump get knocked off their respective monorails to the Democrat and Republican nominations? These front-runners are not necessarily unstoppable.

Clinton’s rival needs to paint a picture. Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vt.) should ask Democrats and their media allies to imagine that it’s October 20. Clinton is locked in a competitive battle with Republican standard bearer Marco Rubio. Her campaign jet zips among Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other swing states. Early voting already has begun.

But Hillary cannot focus solely on the crowds that greet her. “What do you think Huma will say in court today?” one journalist shouts at her. Another yells: “Will the accusations against you disappear before Election Day?”

The next morning, Clinton herself is ordered to appear in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was named to the bench by none other than Clinton’s husband. She is scheduled to answer questions in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. After Judge Sullivan granted discovery to the conservative watchdog group, and State’s inspector general subpoenaed the records of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, it’s no surprise when Clinton becomes ensnared in this burgeoning legal thicket.

Clinton suddenly vanishes from the hustings, huddles with criminal-defense attorneys, and calculates what to say in a federal courtroom on October 25 — a fortnight before Election Day.

Sanders should ask his massive crowds: “Is that how you want to spend the fall campaign?”

There’s still time to turn it around, of course. But now that many conservatives are moving from the bargaining phase to the depression phase of the Kübler-Ross model, we can begin to grapple with the prospective reality of a Trump-versus-Hillary general election.

Whether you’re an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government, or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn’t think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates. Rather, you should ask yourself which scenario would be more damaging. I’m pretty sure you’d find that Donald Trump is the form of the Destructor.

But Hillary Clinton is the worst, most evil liberal ever!

Yes. You can count on it. Clinton, as you may have noticed, does not have the charisma of Barack Obama. Not only would she be divisive and ethically compromised, but she would also galvanize the Right. Republicans would almost certainly unite against her agenda, which would be little more than codifying Obama’s legacy: a collection of policies that half the country still hates.

She won’t be able to pass anything substantial. The most likely outcome is another four to eight years of trench warfare in Washington, D.C., giving conservatives a pass for a number of winnable, state-level issues. There will probably be, if historical disposition of the electorate holds, a Republican Congress. (Who knows what happens to Congress if Trump is elected?) Hardly ideal. But unless you believe that an active Washington is the best Washington, gridlock is not the end of the world.

The myth that Democrats get everything will persist. But despite plenty of well-earned criticism, the GOP has been a more effective minority party than constituents give it credit for. People are frustrated, but the conservative idealists have been gaining ground since the tea party emerged. The tea party’s presence has put a stop to an array of progressive reform efforts that the pre-2010 GOP would surely have gone along with.

Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one.

First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.”) Cue lawsuits.

Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits — two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN’s New Day in 2013: “We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university.”

Trump U “students” say the same. In his affidavit, Richard Hewson reported that he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the [organization’s] free seminar and three-day workshop.” But “the whole thing was a scam.”

In fact, $20,000 is only a mid-range loss. The lead plaintiff in one of the California suits, yoga instructor Tarla Makaeff, says she was “scammed” out of $60,000 over the course of her time in Trump U.

How could that have happened? The New York suit offers a suggestion:

The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the “Gold Elite” program costing $35,000.

At the “free” 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495.

The Atlantic, which got hold of a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook from Trump U, has attested to the same:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-agonistes-1456531598

The Republican presidential race entered its blitzkrieg phase Thursday as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally turned their fire on Donald Trump instead of playing for second place. The brawling was entertaining if often ugly, but the debate was important in surfacing the vulnerabilities that Democrats are sure to exploit if Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee.

The debate marked the first competitive vetting of the businessman, who had remained untouched as the other candidates vied to become the last non-Trump standing. Or as Mr. Trump would put it, “losers.” Messrs. Rubio and Cruz had to take on Mr. Trump, and now we’ll find out if the New Yorker can take the same mockery he dishes out.
***Start with his policy knowledge, which is thinner than topsoil and not as rich. Mr. Rubio challenged Mr. Trump to go beyond his stock line that he’d replace ObamaCare by allowing competition across state lines, which is a good idea but hardly sufficient as a reform. Yet Mr. Trump couldn’t come up with another specific idea to expand private health coverage.

This is typical of Mr. Trump, who told us in November that the voters don’t care about policy details. But Americans want a President to know something about the biggest problems, and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t let him get away with a simple soundbite. The exchange revealed that Mr. Trump doesn’t like to work all that hard to learn anything new. He gets by on instinct and insult.

Speaking of which, in Texas Friday Mr. Trump took his attacks on the press corps to a new level by promising to change the libel laws. “We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” he said, sounding like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. READ MORE AT SITE

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who was elected to Congress with the help of conservatives such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and talk show host Mark Levin, ripped Trump on Twitter for attacking press freedom. Sasse has not endorsed any candidate, but campaigned against Trump with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in Iowa.

A freshman senator whose endorsements included Sarah Palin is going after Donald Trump for talking about changing libel laws so he can more easily sue news organizations.

At a rally today in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump railed against major newspapers and said if he wins the presidency he’ll “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

“We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” Trump said.

The WaPo’s editorial board has published editorials on the opinion page advocating that Trump be stopped, including one this week criticizing RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “If Mr. Trump is to be stopped, now is the time for leaders of conscience to say they will not and cannot support him and to do what they can to stop him,” the editorial board wrote.

“You see, with me, they’re not protected, because I’m not like other people but I’m not taking money. I’m not taking their money,” Trump said. “We’re going to open up libel laws, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”