RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/disregarding-separation-of-powers-has-real-life-consequences/

The rule of law is undermined, and liberty diminished.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from Neil Gorsuch’s book A Republic, If You Can Keep It, which will be published this month.

The separation of powers and its role in protecting individual liberty and the rule of law can sound pretty abstract. I confess it seemed that way to me in my high-school civics class. I came to appreciate the genius of the Founders’ design more fully only years later, when as a judge I saw what happens to real people in real cases when the separation of powers goes unattended. Let me share with you a few of their stories, some of which you will see laid out more fully later. They’re just a sampling of so many that came across my desk.

Caring Hearts. Caring Hearts is a small business in Colorado that provides Medicare nursing services to the elderly. One year, the government performed an audit and concluded that Caring Hearts had improperly billed hundreds of thousands of dollars of services, so it slapped a fine of over $800,000 on the company. The trouble was, the government applied the wrong rules. Instead of applying the regulations in effect during the time Caring Hearts provided its services, it faulted the company for failing to abide more-onerous rules that the agency adopted only years later. How did the government get its own rules so wrong? Every year, the executive agency administering Medicare has used the legislative authority delegated to it by Congress to issue a river of legally binding regulations and thousands more “sub regulatory guidance documents” to explain those regulations. The agency had apparently written so many new legally binding rules that even it had lost track of all the changes.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/judge-jeanine-drops-bold-new-book-radicals-resistance-and-revenge/

“Donald Trump.”

The mere mention of the name makes liberals go apoplectic. It makes the media lose its collective mind. It’s like Voldemort in Harry Potter combined with Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 – to the left, Trump’s the name that must not be mentioned, but when it is it must be scorned and hated. “Orange man bad!”

The very thought of a Trump presidency drove some Americans mad. It sparked FBI agents to create an “insurance policy” that now looks very much like a conspiracy against an American presidential candidate and – after he won – the sitting President of the United States. That “Russia Russia Russia!” conspiracy cost millions of taxpayer dollars and spilled billions of pixels, and in the end proved to be a hoax.

There was no collusion between Donald Trump, or anyone in his orbit, or any American at all, and the Russians to impact the 2016 election. None.

Judge Jeanine Pirro is out with a blockbuster of a book that investigates the Russia hoax. Radicals, Resistance and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America blows up Russia gate with a deep dive into the deep state.

Pirro opens with a crushing blow: Russiagate came up empty!

“So, the special counsel comes out with its thirty-four indictments and a final report. None of the indictments involved Donald Trump, his family, the Trump campaign, or any American, for that matter, colluding with Russia. There was full cooperation by the White House, which never claimed executive privilege and handed over more than one million documents…If after two years, 19 prosecutors, 40 investigators, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, several grand juries, and $34 million spent there was not a scintilla of evidence to the collusion claim, whose idea was it to start the investigation and why?”

https://freebeacon.com/issues/tom-cotton-discusses-his-new-book-sacred-duty/

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) discussed his new book Sacred Duty about his time serving in “The Old Guard” and honoring fallen American soldiers during an appearance on Fox News’s Fox & Friends on Monday.

“One of the most meaningful things I’ve done is serving in the military, and if I wasn’t serving in Iraq or Afghanistan leading troops in combat, I can’t think of anything more meaningful than serving at Arlington National Cemetery with The Old Guard honoring our nation’s fallen heroes and everything they mean to America,” Cotton said.

Created in 1784, The Old Guard is the oldest regiment in the army and has been the army’s official ceremonial unit since 1948. The regiment sometimes performs more than 20 funerals per day. They also jumped into action after the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.

“On 9/11, when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, funerals continued to go on, but The Old Guard also rushed down to the Pentagon to help provide military aid and security on that site. In a way it became the first army unit to deploy to a new battlefield in the war on terrorism,” Cotton said.

“For the first 170 years before The Old Guard came to Arlington in 1948, they were serving on the front lines of almost every war, all the way up to World War II. The story of The Old Guard’s history is kind of the story of America as a nation,” Cotton added.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-bogus-story-that-launched-collusion-probe/

A minor functionary’s farcical encounter with a self-promoting schemer provided the excuse for an investigation.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the fourth in a series of excerpts; the first can be read here, the second here, and the third here.

The George Papadopoulos Origin Story has never added up. It has been portrayed as the Big Bang, the Magic Moment that started the FBI’s investigation of “collusion” — a suspected election-theft conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime. But if the young energy-sector analyst had actually emerged in early 2016 as the key to proving Trump–Russia espionage, you would think the FBI might have gotten around to interviewing him before January 27, 2017 — i.e., a week after President Trump had been inaugurated, and six months after the Bureau formally opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe.

You would probably also think Papadopoulos, Suspect One in The Great Cyber Espionage Attack on Our Democracy, might have rated a tad more than the whopping 14-day jail sentence a federal judge eventually imposed on him. You might even suppose that he’d have been charged with some seditious felony involving clandestine operations against his own country, instead of . . . yes . . . fibbing to the FBI about the date of a meeting.

That, however, does not scratch the surface. We are to believe that what led to the opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, and what therefore is the plinth of the collusion narrative, is a breakfast meeting at a London hotel on April 26, 2016, between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic we are supposed to take for a clandestine Russian agent. We are to take Papadopoulos’s word for it that Mifsud claimed Russia possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton.” We are further to believe that “the professor” elaborated that, in order to help Donald Trump’s candidacy, the Kremlin would release these “emails of Clinton” at a time chosen to do maximum damage to the Democratic nominee’s campaign.

The story is based on no credible evidence. If it were ever presented to a jury, it would be laughed out of court.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-election-legitimate-only-if-democrats-win/

Democrats scoffed at charges of ‘election rigging’ until they needed an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the third in a series of excerpts; the first can be read here and the second here.

‘Horrifying!”

As we’ve seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception. What “horror” had her inveighing so? The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.

Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn’t budge. He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori. Okay, no, Trump didn’t use the phase a priori. But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.

First, he reaffirmed an allegation for which he’d already been roundly condemned: Foreigners could swing the election — specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, an allusion to illegal immigration, the piñata of Trump’s campaign. Second, he complained about the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage: scathing when it came to him, and between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Third, he claimed there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run, given the evidence of felony misconduct uncovered in her email scandal. Instead of prosecuting her, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her, conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than like investigators searching for the truth.

A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked — horrified — to hear Trump “talking down our democracy” this way. This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.