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Trump Adopts Robust Approach Toward America’s Enemies On everything from UNESCO to Iran deal, Trump delivers on campaign promises. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

Last week the Trump administration initiated a series of hard-hitting measures aimed at putting the enemies of the United States on notice that it would no longer be business as usual at the White House. No longer would the United States allow itself to be subjected to indignities with impunity. There would now be a heavy price to pay for attempts to subvert the interests of the United States and its allies.

On October 10, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism Nathan A. Sales, announced that the United States would be placing bounties of $7 million and $5 million respectively on the heads of two senior Hezbollah members Talal Hamiyah and Fu’ad Shukr. Hamiyah is the organization’s commander for overseas terror operations which target U.S. and Israeli interests. Shukr is a senior Hezbollah commander who has taken an active role in perpetrating atrocities in Syria and was also involved in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which resulted in the deaths of 241 service members.

Sales also directed criticism against countries which absurdly make distinction between Hezbollah’s political and military wings. He bluntly stated that Hezbollah has no political organization and the group in its entirety is “rotten to its core.”

The new robust approach vis-à-vis Hezbollah is refreshing and stands in marked contrast with the way the Obama administration dealt with the notorious terrorist organization. In its zeal to strike a bargain with Iran and maintain détente with the world’s premier state sponsor of international terrorism, the Obama administration treated the Iranian proxy terror arm with kid gloves.

In September 2016, former secretary of state John Kerry met with Syrian opposition members and tried to convince them to focus their energies on ISIS while steering clear of Hezbollah. During the exchange with the oppositionists he blurted, “Hezbollah is not plotting against us.” It was a shocking display of abject ignorance underscored by the fact that barely nine months later, the U.S. Justice Department announced the arrest of two Hezbollah operatives in New York and Michigan, who were plotting to carry out terror attacks against the United States.

Two days after Sales’ press conference, the State Department announced that it would be withdrawing from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The decision was made only after UNESCO, led by its Muslim bloc, passed a series of ludicrous and pernicious resolutions aimed at severing the Jewish (and Christian) nexus to holy sites in Israel and territories administered by Israel.

The multiple resolutions Islamicized Jewish and Christian holy sites. They referred to Jerusalem as “occupied territory” while the Rachel’s Tomb, a site revered by Jews world over for over 3,000 years, was referred to as the “Bilal Ibn Rabah Mosque” and a “Palestinian site.” This despite the fact that even Muslims had always historically regarded Rachel’s Tomb as a revered Jewish site. But UNESCO’s outrages and historical mendacity didn’t end there. In July, the body designated the burial site of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah – the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs – as an endangered “Palestinian Heritage Site” ignoring the fact that while the site was under Muslim rule, Muslim guards refused Jewish worshipers entry beyond the seventh step leading to site’s entrance.

The July resolution was particularly egregious because it disregarded a recommendation issued by the International Council of Monuments and Sites highlighting a number of problems with the proposed UNESCO resolution.

The move to withdraw from UNESCO was spearheaded by Nikki Haley, Trump’s indefatigable U.N. ambassador. Unlike her Obama-appointed predecessors, Haley has taken a proactive approach in dealing with UN’s inherent anti-Israel, anti-Western biases. In the short span that she’s been at her post, she has scored impressive results and changed the tenor at the body. In fact, the U.S. announcement to withdraw from UNESCO may have had a positive influence on a crucial vote for the leadership of UNESCO the following day.

After several voting rounds, two candidates for UNESCO’s Director-General spot emerged – France’s Audrey Azoulay, who is also of Jewish descent, and Qatar’s rabidly anti-Semitic Hamad Bin Abdulaziz al-Kawari. Azoulay was a dark horse but surprisingly prevailed over her anti-Semitic rival by a vote of 30-28. Divisions within the Arab world no doubt worked in Azoulay’s favor; the Saudis and their allies despise Qatar. Nevertheless, the State Department’s announcement likely jolted some of UNESCO’s members into voting for the saner choice. It is too early to tell what effect, if any, Azoulay will have on UNESCO but the U.S. decision to withdraw does not go into effect until the end of December giving the State Department some time to assess whether UNESCO will alter its mendacious, anti-Israel, agenda-driven trajectory.

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The Beginning of the End of Progressive Domination? The overreach of the Left’s response to Trump’s victory — and its consequences. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

For over forty years the left has been successfully reshaping American culture. Social mores and government policies about sexuality, marriage, the sexes, race relations, morality, and ethics have changed radically. The collective wisdom of the human race that we call tradition has been marginalized or discarded completely. The role of religion in public life has been reduced to a private preference. And politics has been increasingly driven by the assumptions of progressivism: internationalism privileged over nationalism, centralization of power over its dispersal in federalism, elitist technocracy over democratic republicanism, “human sciences” over common sense, and dependent clients over autonomous citizens.

But the election of Donald Trump, and the overreach of the left’s response to that victory, suggest that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the left’s cultural, social, and political dominance.

The two terms of Barack Obama seemed to be the crowning validation of the left’s victory. Despite Obama’s “no blue state, no red state” campaign rhetoric, he governed as the most leftist––and ineffectual–– president in history. Deficits exploded, taxes were raised, new entitlements created, and government expanded far beyond the dreams of center-left Democrats. Marriage and sex identities were redefined. The narrative of permanent white racism was endorsed and promoted. Tradition-minded Americans were scorned as “bitter clingers to guns and religion.” Hollywood and Silicon Valley became even more powerful cultural arbiters and left-wing publicists. And cosmopolitan internationalism was privileged over patriotic nationalism, while American exceptionalism was reduced to an irrational parochial prejudice.

The shocking repudiation of the establishment left’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, was the first sign that perhaps the hubristic left had overreached, and summoned nemesis in the form of a vulgar, braggadocios reality television star and casino developer who scorned the hypocritical rules of decorum and political correctness that even many Republicans adopted to avoid censure and calumny. Yet rather than learning the tragic self-knowledge that Aristotle says compensates the victim of nemesis, the left overreached yet again with its outlandish, hysterical tantrums over Trump’s victory. The result has been a stark exposure of the left’s incoherence and hypocrisy so graphic and preposterous that they can no longer be ignored.

First, the now decidedly leftist Democrats refused to acknowledge their political miscalculations. Rather than admit that their party has drifted too far left beyond the beliefs of the bulk of the states’ citizens, they shifted blame onto a whole catalogue of miscreants: Russian meddling, a careerist FBI director, their own lap-dog media, endemic sexism, an out-of-date

Electoral College, FOX News, and irredeemable “deplorables” were just a few. Still high on the “permanent majority” Kool-Aid they drank during the Obama years, they pitched a fit and called it “resistance,” as though comfortably preaching to the media, university, and entertainment choirs was like fighting Nazis in occupied France. The bathos and ridiculous hyperbole of their whining exposed for all to see their rank egotism and lack of discernment and judgment.

This childish behavior came hard on the whole “snowflake” and “microagression” phenomenon in colleges and universities. Normal people watched as some of the most privileged young people in history turned their subjective slights and bathetic discontents into weapons of tyranny, shouting down or driving away speakers they didn’t like, and calling for “muscle” to enforce their assault on the First Amendment. Relentlessly repeated on FOX News and on the Drudge Report, these antics galvanized large swaths of American voters who used to be amused, but now were disgusted by such displays of rank ingratitude and arrogant dismissal of Constitutional rights. And voters could see that the Democrats encouraged and enabled this nonsense. The prestige of America’s best universities, where most of these rites of passage for the scions of the well-heeled occurred, was even more damaged than it had been in the previous decades.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Letters of Love to Jerusalem By Harold Goldmeier

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

MY JERUSALEM: The Eternal City
Ilan Greenfield, Editor
Ziv Koren, Photography
Published by Gefen Publishing House and
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, 2017/5778

I love Chicago. It’s the city in which I lived from birth into retirement. I can describe the skyline on Lake Michigan, with its majestic sunrise and sunset. Every neighborhood is its own architectural marvel crowned with lush greenery. But I will never describe Chicago or Boston or New York or Sedona as eloquently as Matthew Bronfman does in My Jerusalem: The Eternal City. Bronfman’s romance with Jerusalem is in “its breathtaking glory.” Bronfman is one of 48 contributors proffering letters of love to Jerusalem, enriching its reputation by juxtaposed elegant and rich photographs.

On the dust jacket, the name Jerusalem is embossed in gold set against a night-lit orange photograph of the Tower of David (or Jerusalem Citadel). This touch epitomizes its sobriquet, The City of Gold, Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, popular in Hebrew verse and song, the words to which appear on the first page. It is the place, writes Shimon Peres, where “every morning, at the moment when the sun rises … it is as if heaven and earth have met.”

At first glance, I looked forward to an emotion-filled experience through a magical photographer’s eye. Ziv Koren’s works of art do not fail me. But the book is so much more. My Jerusalem is a compendium of personal love letters assembled by Ilan Greenfield’s selection of Jewish and Christian leaders to a city built by a king of the Jews. She is a city under siege for some 2,000 years but endowed as the holiest of holy places on Earth for three monotheistic religions.

Most contributors know her only as a city rebuilt and designated the capital of modern Israel. But Ilan Greenfield has assembled My Jerusalem contributors spanning generations. President Rivlin and Prime Minister Netanyahu recall childhood memories of growing up in war-torn and divided Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967. The P.M. describes the city divided by barbed-wire fences laden with land mines and a garbage dump “with snipers on the walls.” “[S]trangled, it was withered, it had no future” until its liberation in 1967. Then there is a heartwarming picture of the president hiking his old pacified trails in the hills of Jerusalem.

Editor Greenfield complements the romantic without giving short shrift to the controversies Jerusalem inspires, as any beautiful maiden does among anxious suitors. Greenfield declares in the publisher’s note that she is mine, My Jerusalem, “the eternal capital of the Jewish people,” not only an eternal city. The book’s dedication is “[t]o the land and people of Israel with deep gratitude for a life of meaning and the privilege of being part of the wondrous Zionist enterprise.”

“Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” written by Naomi Shemer, is a wildly popular complement to Israel’s national anthem. Is it coincidence that the melody is based on a Basque lullaby, from a province of Spain, fighting for generations for independence? Moreover, her sister province, Catalonia, is enduring armed, club-wielding, anti-freedom repressors concomitant to the release of My Jerusalem, which daily faces threats to her independence and Jewish heritage from international world bodies and foreign former oppressors of the Jews.

The introduction from Alan Dershowitz, a political raconteur, wastes little time reminding readers that Jerusalem is “one of the most divisive political hot spots in the world.” We all know that. I might have placed a born and raised Jerusalemite like President Rivlin to introduce the book. Rivlin gives authenticity: “The history of Jerusalem in the early years of the state is also my personal and family history.

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Yes, Trump is Winning By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

Last week, I went to a dinner event at social club of which I am a member but rarely patronize. You will guess why when I tell you I ran into a friend of longstanding—someone I know well, but hadn’t seen in a couple of years—and she greeted me with the exclamation, “Here’s a Trumpster!” I could see that that was partly for the benefit of the gents she was talking to, a sort of tribal-marking announcement (“He’s one of those, boys”) but I couldn’t immediately tell whether the glint in her eye was friendly or otherwise. She soon cleared up that ambiguity. I said something about “our president.” “He’s not my president,” she snapped, adding that Donald Trump was deeply unpopular and would probably be driven from office soon.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/15/yes-trump-is-winning/

“Actually,” I offered, “his approval ratings are on the rise.”

“So were Mussolini’s,” came the icy rejoinder.

Got it. At least I knew where we stood.

One is encouraged to leave politics at the front door of this particular club (unlike London’s “Other Club” where Rule 12 stipulates that “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics”). But so thoroughly pink is the majority of the membership that the issue rarely arises. For the herd of independent minds, unanimity is a consoling patent of authenticity. “We all believe this, ergo it must be true—indeed, it is invisible. It simply is.”

Hence a defining irony of the contemporary progressive (one cannot truthfully call it “liberal”) dispensation: convinced that their opinions represent not their opinions but, on the contrary, that they mirror a virtuous state of nature, they regard dissent not as disagreement but as either heresy or insanity. The former calls for condemnation or ostracism, the latter for pity tinctured by contempt.

Donald Trump has introduced several novelties into this dynamic. From the point of view of my (I suspect former) friend, Trump is both (never mind the contradiction) an impossibility and an affront. Everyone she talks to knows this.

And yet on the ground, in the real world, Trump is methodically pushing ahead with the agenda he campaigned on. That includes:

Nominating judges and justices who can be counted on to interpret and enforce the law but do not endeavor to use the law to promote their social agenda;
Addressing the problem of illegal immigration and securing the borders of the United States;
Developing America’s vast energy resources;
Rolling back the regulatory state, especially the administrative overreach of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency;
Pursuing policies that put America, and American workers, first, not to the detriment of our relationships with our international partners but through a recognition that strength and sovereign independence make nations more reliable actors;
Restoring the combat readiness and morale of the United States military;
Simplifying the U.S. tax code, making it more competitive for U.S. businesses and more equitable for individuals;
Getting a handle on the unconstitutional and shockingly inefficient monstrosity ironically called the Affordable Care Act;
Putting a stop to the obscene violation of due process that Title IX fanatics brought to college campuses across the country.

EDUCATION, MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Associated Press and the Pronoun Wars Sohrab Ahmari

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

The transgender movement is at war with the English language. With a new set of style guidelines, the Associated Press has joined the trenches—on the transgender side.

With its precision and plain beauty, English has long posed an obstacle for activists who insist that there is no biological basis to gender and who seek to overturn the gender binary. Unfortunately for these activists, the gender binary is built into the structure of English, with its gender-specific pronouns and many gendered expressions. Most people speak a gendered English, moreover. When we hear that one of our friends or relations is pregnant, we naturally ask: “Boy or girl?”

We speak this way because our language mirrors the natural and inseparable bond between gender and sex. For transgender activists, however, this is merely evidence of how entrenched the oppressive gender binary is. By their lights, gender is completely fluid and open to individual choice. As one overexcited activist argued in Slate in 2014: “With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby’s life is instantly and brutally reduced from . . . infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes.” If the movement has its way, asking “boy or girl?” would become as unacceptable as smoking—or maybe even legally proscribed.

Already among “woke” media types there is a taboo against “dead-naming” transgendered people. It is verboten to remind readers that Chelsea Manning was once named Bradley (there, I did it). A Canadian bill passed this summer restricts “discrimination” on the basis of gender “expression.” That provision, proponents hope, will lead to “monetary damages, non-financial remedies . . . and public interest remedies” for those who dare use a non-preferred pronoun. (And yet, they insist, the bill won’t trample free speech.) California has enacted similar legislation.

Now comes the AP’s gender rewrite. In a series of tweets on Tuesday explaining the changes first promulgated earlier this year, the AP’s editors contended that “gender refers to a person’s social identity, while sex refers to biological characteristics” and admonished writers to “avoid references to being born a boy or girl.” The venerable news agency also endorsed the language- and prose-disfiguring use of “they/them” as a singular pronoun. It even left open the door to more exotic made-up pronouns such as “ze” and “zir.”

Tuesday also saw the AP introduce a new rule: Instead of the expressions “sex change” or “transition,” writers are to use “gender confirmation.” This was a deep kowtow to the transgender movement, which believes that physicians don’t alter anything essential or fundamental when they perform a sex-change operation: Caitlyn Jenner was always Caitlyn Jenner. The operation merely confirmed this ontological fact.

You needn’t agree with social conservatives on transgender ideology to see that this is wrongheaded. The editors are using the AP’s style authority to declare the transgender debate over. News articles on the transgender question—still the subject of heated scientific and political debate—will now reflect the assumptions and ideological preferences of one side. Given the ongoing debate, AP’s move can’t but appear as an effort to delegitimize the other side, which includes not just orthodox Christians but also secular psychologists, social scientists, and many others.

The AP and its defenders will say that the move is necessary because journalistic prose should reflect evolving norms and usages. And they will argue that adhering to trans pronoun preferences is a matter of respect. But social norms are only “evolving” among a narrow progressive cohort. Most AP readers still use “he,” “she,” “sex change,” and the like. Most people “dead-name.” The AP is actively pushing norms in a certain direction and calling it evolution. As for respecting individuals, surely there are ways to do that without violating journalism’s core truth-seeking function. To suggest that Jenner was never “born” male is absurd and illogical.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s Sirens Are Already Hinting Our Culture Wars Will End In Another Civil War By John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

The radicalization of the Democratic Party is transforming everything that happens in America into another battle in our unending culture war.

Is there anything left in American public life that isn’t an occasion for political rancor and division? NFL games are now nothing more than crude pieces of political theater. On Sunday even Vice President Mike Pence got in on the act, showing up to a Colts-49ers game then leaving after a few players knelt during the national anthem. Next day was Columbus Day, which the cities of Los Angeles and Austin decided this year to replace with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” because Christopher Columbus is apparently the new Robert E. Lee. And it’s only Tuesday.

It should be obvious by now that our culture wars will henceforth be constant and unending; the next battle could be triggered by almost anything. Whether it’s the reactions (or non-reactions) of Hollywood celebrities to the unsurprising news of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misdeeds or the outraged calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment the instant news broke of the Las Vegas massacre, very little can happen in America now without it being an occasion for an appeal to one’s own political tribe. No matter how tawdry or horrifying the news, there is vanishingly little room for solidarity because there is no appetite for it. Not even late-night comedy shows with their shrinking audiences can resist the urge to devolve into partisan political rants.

For all his eagerness to wage the culture wars in his improvised, bombastic style, this didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It didn’t begin with Barack Obama, either, but a recent study by Pew Research Center found that divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values reached record levels during the Obama administration. You don’t need a Pew survey to tell you that, of course, but the data helps illuminate an otherwise vague feeling that American society is coming apart at the seams, and has been for years.
Right and Left Are Moving Farther Apart, And Fast

The Pew study measures responses to issues Pew has been asking about since 1994, things like welfare, race, and immigration. On almost every count, the gaps between Republicans and Democrats held more or less steady up until around 2010, when they began to widen. Today, “Republicans and Democrats are now further apart ideologically than at any point in more than two decades,” with the median Republican more conservative than 97 percent of Democrats and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 percent of Republicans. Here’s what that looks like in a chart:

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U.S. Officials Back Trump’s Stance on Iran Nuclear Accord Technical compliance with the pact shouldn’t preclude a better deal, they say By Eric Morath in Washington and Asa Fitch in Manama, Bahrain

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

U.S. officials defended President Donald Trump’s refusal to certify the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, saying the country threatens global stability even while technically complying with the accord itself.

Iran is “the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday on NBC. “You look at the ballistic missile tests that they continue to do. You look at the arms sales. When you look at all the trouble they’re causing around the world, what the president is saying is, ‘It’s not proportionate. We need to look at this.’”

Ms. Haley stopped short of saying Iran had violated the terms of the agreement, however. “No one is questioning…they are in compliance” with inspections to determine if they are developing a nuclear weapon, she said, but that shouldn’t prevent Mr. Trump from seeking a better deal.

The comments by Ms. Haley and other senior officials Sunday followed Mr. Trump’s Friday speech at the White House where the president reiterated his fierce opposition to the terms of the deal—under which Iran agreed to put limits on its disputed nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions—after denouncing what he called a “rogue regime” run by radicals.

Mr. Trump on Friday took Iran to task for a number of destabilizing behaviors, including its missile program. He said his administration would aim to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to address the other threats the country poses.

He also cited Iran’s history with America dating back to 1979, the year of the country’s Islamic revolution, pointing to attacks on American diplomatic properties and targeting American service members, as well as Iran’s support for extremist groups, alluding to al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

“Given the regime’s murderous past and present, we should not take lightly its sinister vision for the future. The regime’s two favorite chants are​‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel,’” Mr. Trump said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Death Toll Tops 200 in Weekend Bombings in Somalia Two blasts in Mogadishu came hours apart; Somalian president calls for more international support to fight Islamic militants By Nicholas Bariyo

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

The death toll from twin bombings in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu climbed above 200 over the weekend, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the country since an Islamist insurgency started a decade ago.

A truck bomb exploded at a busy intersection on Saturday, ripping through several buildings, including hotels and government offices, the African Union Mission in Somalia said.

Hours later, a second explosion hit the suburb of Medina, setting dozens of vehicles on fire.

The two blasts killed at least 231 people, Abdirizak Mohamed, a member of Parliament and former minister of international security, said in a message on Twitter, citing the number of dead counted at two local hospitals he said he visited.

Officials said some 275 people had been injured in the attacks, which followed several months of relative calm in the capital.

The attacks came amid a renewed push from the U.S. to rid Somalia of al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab militants.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo declared three days of mourning and called for more international support to fight the Islamic militants.

“Terrorism seeks to stop the light of our government,” Mr. Farmaajo said on Sunday, as he inspected the carnage at the scene of the first blast. “We must stand together and oppose terror.”

Emergency workers and police were digging through the rubble of flattened buildings in search of more victims. Hundreds of people waited in the hope of getting news about missing relatives, witnesses said.

At least five Red Crescent volunteers were among those killed in the blast.
People in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, on Sunday walked through the scene. Photo: mohamed abdiwahab/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The International Federation of the Red Cross warned the death toll could rise.

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Scalias All the Way Down While the press goes wild over tweets, Trump is remaking the federal judiciary.By Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

Ask most Republicans to identify Donald Trump’s biggest triumph to date, and the answer comes quick: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. That’s the cramped view.

The media remains so caught up with the president’s tweets that it has missed Mr. Trump’s project to transform the rest of the federal judiciary. The president is stocking the courts with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors. Mr. Trump’s nastygrams to Bob Corker will be a distant memory next week. Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett’s influence on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could still be going strong 40 years from now.

Mr. Trump has now nominated nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year. There are another 160 court openings, allowing Mr. Trump to flip or further consolidate conservative majorities on the circuit courts that have the final say on 99% of federal legal disputes.

This project is the work of Mr. Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Every new president cares about the judiciary, but no administration in memory has approached appointments with more purpose than this team.

Mr. Trump makes the decisions, though he’s taking cues from Mr. McGahn and his team. The Bushies preferred a committee approach: Dozens of advisers hunted for the least controversial nominee with the smallest paper trail. That helped get picks past a Senate filibuster, but it led to bland choices, or to ideological surprises like retired Justice David Souter.

Harry Reid’s 2013 decision to blow up the filibuster for judicial nominees has freed the Trump White House from having to worry about a Democratic veto during confirmation. Mr. McGahn’s team (loaded with former Clarence Thomas clerks) has carte blanche to work with outside groups like the Federalist Society to tap the most conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn has long been obsessed with constitutional law and the risks of an all-powerful administrative state. His crew isn’t subjecting candidates to 1980s-style litmus tests on issues like abortion. Instead the focus is on promoting jurists who understand the unique challenges of our big-government times. Can the prospective nominee read a statute? Does he or she defer to the government’s view of its own authority? The result has been a band of young rock stars and Scalia-style textualists like Ms. Barrett, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice David Stras.

Senate Republicans have so far blown their major agenda items, but they’ve remained unified on judges. They agreed to kill the Senate filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so as to confirm Justice Gorsuch; have confirmed six other judicial nominees; and stand ready to greenlight dozens more. This is a big shift from divisions the party had over the Bush 41 and Bush 43 nominees.

Because Mr. Trump’s picks have largely spent their careers focused on administrative law and constitutional questions, few have gotten bogged down by controversial cultural rulings. They do have paper trails, but mostly on serious and technical issues. This helps reassure Republicans even as it deprives Democrats of the fodder they’d need to stage dramatic opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Rest of the Russia Story Justice shouldn’t protect the FBI and Fusion GPS from House subpoenas.

Posted By on October 16th, 2017

The Beltway media move in a pack, and that means ignoring some stories while leaping on others. Consider the pack’s lack of interest in the story of GPS Fusion and the “dossier” from former spook Christopher Steele.

The House Intelligence Committee recently issued subpoenas to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that paid for the dossier that contained allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and ties to Russia. The dossier’s details have been either discredited or are unverified, but the document nonetheless framed the political narrative about Trump-Russian collusion that led to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Democrats and Fusion seem to care mostly that House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes issued the subpoenas, given that he temporarily stepped aside from the Russia probe in April. But only the chairman is allowed to issue subpoenas, and Mr. Nunes did so at the request of Republican Mike Conaway, who is officially leading the probe.

The real question is why Democrats and Fusion seem not to want to tell the public who requested the dossier or what ties Fusion GPS boss Glenn Simpson had with the Russians in 2016. All the more so because congressional investigators have learned that Mr. Simpson was working for Russian clients at the same time he was working with Mr. Steele.

Americans deserve to know who paid Mr. Simpson for this work and if the Kremlin influenced the project. They also deserve to know if former FBI director James Comey relied on the dossier to obtain warrants to monitor the Trump campaign. If the Russians used disinformation to spur a federal investigation into a presidential candidate, that would certainly qualify as influencing an election.

The House committee also subpoenaed FBI documents about wiretap warrants more than a month ago but has been stonewalled. There is no plausible reason that senior leaders of Congress—who have top-level security clearance—can’t see files directly relevant to the question of Russian election interference.

Justice Department excuses about interfering with Mr. Mueller’s investigation don’t wash. Mr. Mueller is conducting a criminal probe, while Congress has a duty to oversee the executive branch. Both investigations can proceed simultaneously. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mr. Mueller, needs to deputize specific Justice officials to handle Congress’s requests.

The media attacks on Mr. Nunes for issuing the subpoenas are a sign that he is onto something. He recused himself in April after complaints about his role bringing to light Obama Administration officials who “unmasked” and leaked the names of secretly wiretapped Trump officials. Mr. Nunes has since been vindicated as we’ve learned that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power did the unmasking. Yet Democrats on the House Ethics Committee have refused to clear Mr. Nunes—trying to keep him sidelined from the Russia probe.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has also pursued the Fusion GPS trail, but he could use House backup. Speaker Paul Ryan needs to call on the Ethics Committee to render a quick decision on Mr. Nunes or allow him to resume his Russia investigation. Mr. Ryan should also prepare to have the House vote on a contempt citation if the Justice Department doesn’t supply subpoenaed documents.

Mr. Mueller will grind away at the Trump-Russia angle, but the story of Democrats, the Steele dossier and Jim Comey’s FBI also needs telling. Americans don’t need a Justice Department coverup abetted by Glenn Simpson’s media buddies.