RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the hardest things to learn in politics is that just because you agree with someone and he is on “your team,” that doesn’t mean you can trust him, accept what he says at face value, or know for certain what’s in his heart.

Good character is often independent of ideology. Just as we must guard against temptation in our own lives, so too must we guard against blindly believing apparent allies. The fact that someone is being hunted down by your opponents doesn’t necessarily mean he’s worth defending.

Take two examples from this month, one from the left and one from the right.

The Justice Department’s inspector general (appointed by Barack Obama) has referred former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe for potential prosecution after establishing that he lied over and over to investigators about leaking to the media. James Comey, who was McCabe’s boss at the FBI, says he is certain that McCabe isn’t telling the truth about having kept him apprised of the press leak. But Comey himself cast doubt on the inspector general in an interview last week on NPR:

Even if the process was sound, and I’ve no doubt it was sound given the nature of the people involved in the inspector general’s office, there’s corrosive doubt about whether it’s a political fix to get Andy McCabe somehow.

By all evidence, McCabe is a staunch Democrat whose wife received $750,000 for her 2015 Virginia state-senate campaign from a top Hillary Clinton ally. (She lost the race.) Despite the conflict of interest, he declined to recuse himself from the FBI’s probe of Hillary’s emails until one week before the 2016 election. Liberal activists are setting up a legal defense fund for McCabe. Because he is seen as a Trump “resister,” he must be defended.

But blind loyalty on the left is matched by some on the right. This month, former GOP representative Steve Stockman of Texas was convicted on 23 felony charges. Stockman, a certified public accountant, used the prestige of his office to solicit $1.25 million from a pair of conservative donors for his campaign and various charities. But he wound up spending the loot on everything from hot-air-balloon rides and flights to Africa to an alcohol-rehab program for an aide and to a trip to Disneyland. He spent $24,000 to give his relatives “heirloom quality advent books.” All this was funneled through a web of 17 sham businesses and shell bank accounts in four states and the Virgin Islands.

The charge that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election was never serious. The Democratic National Committee’s civil suit in that regard makes the unseriousness transparent. “Obstruction of justice” is the charge Democrats want to use to remove him from office. And in fact, Trump’s campaign, his election, and presidency, have done a lot of obstruction. He has thwarted longstanding bureaucratic policies and has fired bureaucrats. Whether that has obstructed justice or favored it depends on the meaning of “justice.”

The following explains the “justice” that the Democratic Party and its ruling class retinue correctly accuse Donald Trump of obstructing. Their justice, however, is contrary to the one embodied in the U.S. Constitution; never mind Plato’s classic sense of justice on which America’s founders relied. This classical notion of justice begins with guarding that which rightly belongs to each, and is founded on a political order that reflects the proper order of souls.

America’s Founders, having revolted against a legitimate government that was justly reputed to be perhaps mankind’s most liberal, had to explain to themselves, to their contemporaries, and to posterity why what they were doing was just. All them had read and revered William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. But all the procedures described therein, of which the Americans approved, had been based on the idea that the sovereign power of the permanent state flows legitimately from the existence of the kingdom, which the king embodies. The easy part was to argue that King George III had forfeited that power by abusing it, and hence the regime’s legitimacy. The more significant challenge was to show that there is no such thing as a sovereign power that exists independent of the people.

James Wilson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, taken part in the constitutional convention of 1787, and served on the first U.S. Supreme Court, made this argument most fully in 1790 at the dedication of America’s first law school, to an audience of the founders, from Washington on down.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee went on the record yesterday on the latest issues surrounding the endless investigation of President Donald J. Trump and his associates. These comments from the chair of the House committee that conducted its own investigation of alleged Russian collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign (and concluded there was no collusion) came at the start of what promises to be another week packed with news about the ongoing efforts by opponents of President Trump, inside and outside of the government, to take him down.

From Fox News:

REP. DEVIN NUNES (R-CA) TELLS SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES WITH MARIA BARTIROMO “…THERE WAS NO INTELLIGENCE” IN REACTION TO THE FBI’S DECISION TO INVESTIGATE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

In an interview presented Sunday morning on FOX News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, discussed the intelligence behind the FBI’s decision to investigate the Trump campaign, former FBI Director James Comey’s memos that were recently released, and the Inspector General’s criminal referral against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Highlights are below.

Video (11 minutes):

In 1993, Jay Simkin and Aaron Zelman of the group Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership published a document titled “Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny,” which highlights the similarities between the Nazi Weapons Law of March 18, 1938 and the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968. Dedicated to the “tens of millions of victims of Nazi ‘gun control,” the book maintains that “the Nazi Weapons Law is the blueprint for ‘gun control’ in America.” The following is a synopsis of their points:

Access to ammunition and reloading components (bullets, gun powder, brass, and especially primers) will be controlled.
Police-issued ammunition and reloading components acquisition permits will be required..
A Firearms Owner Identity card issued by the federal government will be required. (In fact, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey already have such cards.)

Copper, copper alloys, brass, and steel bullets are now classified as armor-piercing “cop-killer bullets” and so prohibited, and these restrictions will be justified based on health or environmental grounds.
Bans on ammunition sales may be imposed. In fact, temporary bans occurred throughout the early 1990s in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Access to firearms will be taxed, and the penalties for evading this tax will be severe.
Those who do not renew their permits will have to surrender their firearms to the government or sell them at distress prices to those who can still afford the permits.
The term “sporting purpose” will be redefined to slash the right to own whole classes of firearms. Thus, the right to own firearms will depend on a bureaucrat’s whim. Certain military features such as pistol grips, bayonet lugs, and flash suppressors will be removed.

Is this hyperbolic fear-mongering, or are these type of restrictions being implemented?

The Democratically controlled New Jersey Assembly under Governor Phil Murphy has passed the following measures to tighten already stringent gun laws. Murphy asserts that “he supports these measures as “a public health matter” and wants legislation to encourage the sale of so-called “smart guns” which use technology to restrict who can fire them.”

Conservative writer and commentator Candace Owens earned some celebrity cheers and jeers Saturday after she posted a must-see video of herself smacking down a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who were trying to disrupt a Turning Point USA event at UCLA Wednesday night.

Owens, the communications director for TPUSA and frequent guest on Fox News, was having none of it, and let the protesters know in no uncertain terms what she thought about their “victim mentality.”

“It’s embarrassing!” she exclaimed.

“There is an ideological civil war happening,” Owens told the audience. “Black people that are focused on their past and shouting about slavery, and black people that are focused on their futures.”

“I can guarantee you, what you’re seeing happening is victim mentality versus victor mentality!

“I love that!” TPUSA co-host Charlie Kirk interjected.

Owens continued, saying that there was “no doubt” in her mind that the conservative blacks in the audience would be better off in twenty years than the BLM protesters because they don’t have BLM’s victim mentality.

“Victim mentality is not cool!” she declared. “I don’t know why people like being oppressed! It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. ‘I love oppression, we’re oppressed, 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow!’ — which by the way, none of you guys lived through. Your grandparents did and it’s embarrassing that you utilize their history — you utilize their history, and you come in here with more emotion then they ever had when they were living through it!”

“It’s embarrassing!” she repeated. “You’re not living through anything right now! You’re overly privileged Americans!”

Among those praising her were rapper Kanye West and actress Roseanne Barr. Detractors included rapper Azealia Banks and actor Don Cheadle.

“Avengers” actor Cheadle chastised Owens over her sarcastic jab at the Black Lives Matter protesters.

Owens immediately challenged Cheadle to a debate. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON – Malik Shabazz, former chairman of the New Black Panther Party and president of Black Lawyers for Justice, called on President Trump to provide reparations for slavery or designate territory solely for African-Americans.

“We must have reparations, full compensation for the theft of our land, the theft of our bodies, the theft of our people from Africa, the theft of our dignity; the desecration of our souls decade after decade after decade after decade. As I said, we don’t want your food stamps. We don’t want no government handout. We don’t want to be trying to fix up some paperwork so I can get Social Security. We want our own. Donald Trump, you don’t want us? You don’t want to be around us? Hot dammit, I don’t want to be around you,” Shabazz said during a “Save Our Sons: Stop the Killing” and “Condemn Donald Trump” National Black Men’s Convention march and rally outside of the White House on Saturday organized by the National Black Men’s Movement.

“We want land. We want our own. You don’t like us, Mr. Trump? Break us off some of this territory. You don’t like us, Mr. Trump? You don’t want to be around us? Then hand over the state of Florida,” he added. “You don’t want to be around us – make a trade. Give me Georgia. Give me Alabama. Give me South Carolina.”

President Trump promised to nominate judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia, and that thought was no doubt foremost in his mind when he chose Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s vacant seat. On Monday Justice Gorsuch and his colleagues will consider whether the hiring of adjudicators deciding cases within federal agencies will also be subject to the kind of accountability that making an appointment entails.

So-called administrative law judges are not “principal officers,” so they are not subject to Senate confirmation under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The question in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission is whether they are “inferior officers.” In that case, the clause requires them to be appointed by principal officers, such as commissioners acting collectively or a cabinet secretary, themselves appointed by the president. The alternative is that they are mere employees, who can be hired by lower-level managers with no presidential responsibility.

The dividing line, the Supreme Court has explained, is whether the position entails the exercise of “significant authority.” There shouldn’t be much doubt on which side of that line the SEC’s judges fall.

In this case, the commission’s Enforcement Division decided to bring fraud charges against investment adviser Raymond Lucia in its own administrative court instead of a judicial court. The SEC alleged that Mr. Lucia misled participants in his “Buckets of Money” seminars when he used slides showing hypothetical returns based in part, rather than in whole, on historical data (as the slides themselves disclosed). The SEC assigned the case to an administrative law judge, Cameron Elliot. According to the record, Mr. Elliot sided with the SEC’s Enforcement Division in every one of his first 50 cases.CONTINUE AT SITE