RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now it’s time for Democrats to sweat.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered on a key Trump campaign promise yesterday, brushing away an arcane procedural hurdle and in the process clearing the way for the swift Senate confirmation of originalist Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

It is also the first in what promises to be a long series of crushing major defeats for Democrats in the current Congress who are desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base.

The “nuking” of the filibuster rule yesterday bodes well for President Trump’s agenda. Trump is in a good position to remake the Supreme Court because so many of its members are elderly and are likely to vacate their seats over Trump’s four- or eight-year presidency. Three of the current eight justices are of retirement age. Left-wing Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are 84 and 78, respectively. Swing vote and occasional conservative Anthony Kennedy, who is 80, was appointed by President Reagan.

The senior Kentucky senator led the way as Senate Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option yesterday, voting 52 to 48 along party lines to abolish the filibuster for nominations to the Supreme Court. Rule changes supposedly require a supermajority vote – 67 senators voting aye – in the Senate but four years ago under then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the supermajority requirement was ignored and filibusters were disallowed for all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. Lowering the 67-vote requirement to that of a simple majority is the so-called nuclear option, also known as the constitutional option.

Although there was never a formal requirement that a Supreme Court nominee had to garner 60 votes to be confirmed, Democrats’ insistence that one had to be observed forced McConnell’s hand. The matter is now settled. Going forward, high court nominees, including Gorsuch, will need only a simple majority of senators to be confirmed.

It needs to be pointed out that the filibuster is entirely a creation of the Senate. The Constitution is silent on the matter. For those not versed in parliamentary arcana, under Senate rules any member is entitled to filibuster, that is, talk a bill to death or prolong debate indefinitely to prevent a matter from being voted on. A filibuster may be ended only if enough senators vote to invoke “cloture,” that is, vote to cut off debate.

McConnell denounced Democrats’ move to filibuster Gorsuch, saying it was part of a “much larger story” wherein the Left has been trying to politicize the judiciary and the confirmation process for years.

“It’s a fight they have waged for decades with a singular aim, securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution,” he said on the floor of the Senate. “It underlies why this threatened filibuster cannot be allowed to succeed.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) whined on cue about Judge Gorsuch for the media.

The pernicious lie that President Trump’s claim he was wiretapped by President Obama is “baseless” is being regurgitated in the mainstream media virtually nonstop in the 24/7 news cycle.

These people are so desperate to hang Trump that they embraced the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier promoted by political hack Ben Smith’s cat-video website Buzzfeed.

At the same time as we are assured by Never Trumpers that Trump is making things up, the so-called evidence of Team Trump’s allegedly nefarious connections and collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American electoral process is treated as Holy Writ. The Left and the mainstream media – but I repeat myself – gravitate to the evidence that hurts Trump, ignoring the rest.

It’s that simple. And there is an impressive evidentiary double-standard at work in the weighing of evidence, much of which apparently has been politicized.

But as far as I can tell, nobody has clearly pointed out the seeming arbitrariness in the media taking the word of one group of spies over the other.

We know that the evidence supporting both the anti-Trump and pro-Trump claims reportedly comes from unnamed sources within the same U.S intelligence community (IC). If anyone with direct personal knowledge of evidence backing either claim has gone on the record, I’ve missed it (and I spend all day long on the Internet).

Why should we believe one set of anonymous IC sources over another? We don’t know who these people are – on either side — and what axes they may have to grind. And we shouldn’t blindly trust these intel people, either. There may be plenty who are honest and honorable, but there are plenty who aren’t. (See McMullin, Evan, and Rice, Susan.) At this point at least, we’re in no position to assess the evidence. All we have so far is one set of faceless spooks anonymously providing evidence that contradicts what the other spook cohort reportedly said.

We’ve just come out of the roughest, nastiest presidential transition in my lifetime, made so by Barack Obama, the most despotic, overreaching president since the great proto-fascist Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat like Obama. While Obama smiled for the television cameras and pretended to be cooperating with the Trump people, behind the scenes he worked zealously to lay minefields to safeguard his destructive, anti-American legacy.

There is no parallel in American history for the Obama administration’s not-so-metaphorical war against the incoming Trump administration. Obama has even taken the extremely unusual step of staying behind in the nation’s capital to vex and harass his successor. He has rented an Embassy Row mansion not far from the White House, built a wall around it to keep prying eyes away, and arranged for his senior White House advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to live there. He is also using his well-funded nonprofit, Organizing for Action, to do his dirty work.

Obama’s strategy is working. The constant drumbeat about Russian meddling has helped to keep Trump’s approval numbers low enough that he can’t get his agenda through Congress.

But let’s go over how we got here.

We interrupt the Russia-scandal program to ask two simple questions of one of the nation’s top law-enforcement officers: What exactly is FBI Director Jim Comey doing about the only crime that has so far been revealed in this Russia probe? And is he too conflicted even to be doing it?

That crime is of course the leaking that toppled Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The media and Democrats have done their best to avoid covering this, for the simple reason that some of them were complicit. Yet in the entire speculative drama over Russian interference in American elections, so far this is the only crime that is beyond any doubt.

It’s a serious crime, too. Someone in the U.S. government obtained highly classified information about a conversation between an incoming presidential adviser and a foreign official. Someone then leaked Mr. Flynn’s name and the contents of that conversation to the press, resulting in his resignation. As even Mr. Comey recently confirmed, the leaking of such material is an “extraordinarily unusual event.” It is also a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.

Why? Because such leaks expose American intelligence sources and methods, putting national security at risk. Moreover, leaking the names of private citizens under surveillance (with the express intent to cause harm) is among the grossest violations of civil liberties. It is what police states do.

The Washington Post story about Mr. Flynn’s conversation cited as its sources “nine current and former officials” who “had access to reports from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” That means at least nine current or former Obama administration officials or bureaucrats should be looking at criminal charges.

Which brings us to Mr. Comey. Leaks are in the FBI’s purview, and this case ought to be a slam dunk. Unlike in some leak investigations, Mr. Comey has a trail of bread loaves to follow. Someone in the U.S. government had to take the first step of “unmasking”—requesting the identity of—Mr. Flynn. There are records of such requests, easily accessible by the FBI. CONTINUE AT SITE