RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/2024-invasion-southern-border/

Donald Trump crushed the New Hampshire primary, as every poll in Alpha Centauri predicted he would. Nevertheless, his sole remaining opponent for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley, “vowed to fight on.” Why? A cynical person might suggest the interaction of two volatile liquids: cash, on the one hand, and consultants, on the other. Haley is swimming in both. The cash is coming from two sources: brittle, establishment faux conservatives like the Kochs and wily Dem operatives like the billionaire Reid Hoffman who, in addition to shoveling gobs of money to Nikki Haley, is also funding such entrepreneurial activities as E. Jean Carroll’s bizarre lawsuit against Donald Trump.

In a sane world, the support of a malignant figure like Hoffman would be disqualifying for Haley. Will Haley have dropped out (“suspended her campaign”) by the time you read this? Maybe. I predict, though, that as long as there is cash in the kitty, Haley’s consultants will “advise” her to “fight on.” After all, consultants are people, too, and they have mortgages and therapy to pay for.

But whenever the money runs out and Haley disappears, one thing that is not going to change is the overriding issue of this campaign. People are worried about inflation, yes; the economy, of course; America’s overextension in the foreign wars that have started since Joe Biden’s tremulous hand lay on the Bible and he promised faithfully to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” you betcha.

But as Iowa and New Hampshire and every poll taken across the fruited plain remind us, the one overwhelming, all-absorbing, keep-you-up-at-night concern is the southern border, which is to say the lack of a southern border. People everywhere, in the trenches in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, as well as far-off Iowa and New Hampshire, are terrified by the hordes of trespassers pouring over the southern border.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/mayorkas-is-not-the-right-target-for-impeachment-over-the-border/

There is one official in the United States who has the undeniable statutory and constitutional authority to end the border catastrophe — for which that official is wholly responsible. That official is not Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It is President Joe Biden. This is not to say Mayorkas is undeserving of the impeachment that House Republicans approved on Tuesday — only after losing a similar, party-line squeaker last week in a fit of incompetent vote-counting. But since this is merely a gesture — since there is not the slightest possibility that the Democrat-controlled Senate is going to convict and remove high-ranking Biden administration officials for carrying out Biden policy Democrats support — why not aim the gesture at the right target?

Like many of us, I’ve been ambivalent about the Mayorkas-impeachment gambit. Notwithstanding the ill-informed insistence of Representative Ken Buck (R., Colo.) in a National Review column this week, there’s no real doubt that the willful failure to secure the border is an impeachable offense, and that Mayorkas has willfully failed to secure the border, his main job. Nevertheless, in my 2014 book on impeachment, Faithless Execution, in discussing the debates that led to the congressional impeachment power that Madison regarded as “indispensable,” I made much — because the Framers had made much — of the interplay between impeachment and the constitutional concept of the unitary executive.