RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just this morning, CNN reported that President Trump plans to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, in defiance of immense pressure from the left not to. There is similar pressure on Trump in regards to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Supposedly, America is legally and morally bound to remain part of these pacts.

Conservative critiques of these deals have typically focused on the agreements’ contents and effectiveness. The nuclear deal allows Iran to continue to pursue nuclear-weapons-related technologies while it is in effect — and despite a recent State Department certification that Iran has complied with this agreement, the truth is Tehran has failed to fully meet the requirements of this deal and has cheated on it. Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement has come under strong criticism as a costly, ineffective, and economically harmful approach to addressing alleged global warming.

But there’s something else these agreements have in common: Both are treaties, but were deliberately negotiated by the Obama administration in a way that enabled it to evade the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that treaties be ratified by the Senate.

America’s Founding Fathers placed a high threshold to ratify treaties: two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favor. The reason is that treaties are major international agreements that legally bind our nation and its presidents long into the future. No president should have the power to make such commitments with just the stroke of his pen.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explained this in an April 2015 NRO article, writing that the Constitution “does not empower the president to make binding agreements with foreign countries all on his own — on the theory that the American people should not take on enforceable international obligations or see their sovereignty compromised absent approval by the elected representatives most directly accountable to them.”

Supporters of the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement argue that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a treaty. They also note that presidents frequently enter into major international agreements without submitting them for ratification by the Senate.

While these arguments have merit, they do not apply to the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement, because these are important pacts that have been treated like treaties by most other states. The Iranian Parliament ratified the JCPOA. The legislatures of over 128 Paris Agreement signatories have ratified that agreement, including those of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the U.K.

Both houses of Congress were permitted to vote on a resolution of disapproval of the JCPOA (the Corker-Cardin bill) in September 2015. But this process did not follow the Constitution’s rules for treaties. Instead of requiring supporters to win two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the agreement, it required opponents of the JCPOA to get veto-proof and filibuster-proof majorities to kill it. Although a majority of Congress voted against the JCPOA, including Senator Chuck Schumer and the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it was not disapproved because of a filibuster by Senate Democrats.

The Average American Family Pays More Money in Regulations Than in Taxes

Anyone who has ever traveled to Washington, D.C. knows that as majestic as the White House and the U.S. Capitol are, they are a mere fraction of the federal government. Alphabet soup departments like the EPA, IRS, VA, HHS, DOE, and others most Americans have never heard of, take up space in the capital and amount to a hidden regulatory tax on all Americans.

In fact, a new report estimated that if the costs of federal regulation flowed down to U.S. households, the average American family would pay $14,809 annually in a hidden regulatory tax. That’s $14,809 in addition to income taxes, state taxes, and Social Security. $14,809 in addition to sales taxes, property taxes, and even estate taxes — where the government taxes you for being dead.

“That amounts to 21 percent of the average income of $69,629 and 26.45 percent of the expenditure budget of $55,978,” wrote Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in the report “Ten Thousand Commandments” released Wednesday.

The average American family would spend more on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, and apparel. Only housing costs more.

Crews analyzed federal government data, past reports, and newer studies to estimate the economic impact of federal regulatory compliance at $1.9 trillion each year. When numbers get that big, it becomes hard to understand them. But a hidden tax that costs each family roughly $15,000 per year, that makes sense.

Liberals and others would point out that no family specifically pays this price, and that is indeed true. But regulations hold back economic progress and make wealth creation harder to come by.

How many entrepreneurs give up on new business opportunities because it is too complicated to hire someone? How many small businesses fail because compliance costs exceed their profit margins? Then there are the increased costs to the larger firms which won’t go out of business when the government adds red tape, but will make ordinary goods just that much more expensive.

Regulation is a silent killer, and it grows even when Americans didn’t vote for it. In 2016, for example, Congress enacted only 214 laws, but federal agencies issued 3,853 rules. The lack of public accountability — when was the last time you voted for the EPA secretary? — means these bureaucrats aren’t held accountable in the same way as members of Congress. So they can issue 18 rules for every law enacted by the people’s representatives.

Hillary and Bill Clinton were a proud, progressive power couple who came into big-time state politics on promises of promoting “fairness” and “equality.” It did not matter much that very little in their previous personal lives had matched such elevated rhetoric with concrete action. And so the ironies and tragedies that followed were not altogether unexpected.

The theme that united the subsequent tawdry reports about the Clinton cattle futures scam and Whitewater was an overweening lust for money. The Clintons seemed to feel entitled, in the sense that their education, sophistication, and taste deserved the sort of peace of mind, enjoyment, and security that only comfortable circumstances could provide, and which was taken for granted among the rich progressive environments in which the Clintons increasingly navigated. They had arrived and they “deserved” it.
In 2001, we are supposed to believe, the Clintons left office “dead broke” as the result of their sacrifices as first family. In Hillary’s words, they were scarcely able to afford the various mortgages on their homes with which they had been encumbered (“we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses”).

Given an ever greater need for cash beyond a mere government pension, given that from 2001 onward they had something to sell beyond Bill as a “wise-man” president emeritus (i.e., Hillary’s New York Senate career as a springboard to a second Clinton presidency), and given their innate characters (or perhaps their hamartiai), the next years were predictable. After 2001, the long arc of their moral universe bent toward personal aggrandizement through the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play State Department favors, and $10,000-20,000-a minute rah-rah speeches to rich people eager to leverage the next episode of Clinton influence peddling.

Such smart, capable, self-assured, and haughty people are the stuff of Greek tragedy, and its warnings about the descent from hubris (overweening arrogance) to atê (unhinged madness) to nemesis (divine retribution and downfall).

At the denouement of most tragedies. the figures who survive the wrath of the gods—and who are not themselves beheaded or slain by their own hands—are sometimes enlightened by their destruction, rediscover some purpose, acquire an appreciation of pathei mathos (wisdom through pain) and find peaceful redemption.

People like the Clintons—or for that matter Euripides’s characters such as Jason (Medea) or King Pentheus (Bacchae)—are oblivious to the ultimate and preordained trajectories of their fates. Hillary Clinton has ended up a two-time failed presidential candidate, stained with money grubbing scandals and chronic deceit, who blew huge leads in 2008 and 2016, despite being the beneficiary of unprecedented cash, campaign consultants, and party endorsements. She has sacrificed her health, her reputation, and her very life to do everything politically right, which was not only ethically wrong but also proved, in good Athenian tragic fashion, politically disastrous. (Tragic figures, remember, do anything and everything they can to pursue an ambitious sense of self—and thereby only ensure that they can never obtain it.)

A gaunt Dorian Gray-like Bill Clinton in his twilight is indeed tragic. He may have the sins of the flesh written all over his face, but he had also convinced himself at one point in his life that his undeniable political cunning, education, and folksy charm could be put to use for noble purposes beyond the tawdry sex, chronic lying, and narcissism that were his brands. But after the scandals, the impeachment, the pardons, the Foundation miasma, the quid pro quo speaking fees, the Lolita Express, the disastrous campaign interventions for Hillary from 2008 to the tarmac scene with Loretta Lynch, the petty rivalries and double-dealing, optics reflect that there is nothing much left of a once dynamic president but an empty shell.

At the denouement of most tragedies. the figures who survive the wrath of the gods—and who are not themselves beheaded or slain by their own hands—are sometimes enlightened by

Here’s the good news.

It’s 2017 and Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House and more statewide offices than you can shake a big bundle of fake news papers at. And, potentially soon, a Supreme Court that takes its guidelines from the Constitution not Das Kapital and the National Social Justice Party.

Here’s the bad news, Republicans are still Republicans.

Whether it’s Flynn, Bannon, Gorka, Kushner, Clarke, they are all too eager to fall for the latest left-wing scandal. The media throws some chum in the water and watches the bloody fun as Republicans go after Republicans. Scandals are manufactured and strategically aimed to divide and conquer Republicans.

But the real target is the conservative agenda. Bogging down the White House in scandals keeps it from dismantling more of Obama’s regulations and orders. Every milligram of oxygen that foolish conservatives give the left’s narratives is a milligram taken from the lungs of the conservative agenda.

At the National Review, Jim Geraghty, who has loathed Trump since Day 1, seizes on the latest scandal targeting Jared Kushner. In recent days, the National Review has run four pieces on the fake scandal.

That’s an odd preoccupation for a conservative publication that ought to be more concerned with conservative policy priorities than parsing the shibboleths that the left is firing at President Trump.

But the National Review occupies a peculiar space between the Never Trumpers who have found cushy jobs on MSNBC and at the New York Times and mainstream conservative support for President Trump. It isn’t ready to leave the movement, but instead it insists on echoing media criticisms in a softer tone.

The Review takes the tone that it’s just asking questions. Those questions just happen to be the same ones that the media keeps on asking. If the mainstream media reads like an angry partisan blog, then the National Review sounds the way that the media used to when it was just biased instead of fake.

It just so happens that the Review is full of innumerable stories and posts about every media scandal. And its preferred pose is innocence. Like the rest of the media, it’s just asking questions.

What’s the big deal?

“What I don’t get is any reflexive defense of . . . Jared Kushner. Trump earned your vote, and presumably, some amount of trust. What did Kushner ever do for you?” Geraghty protests.

Presumably. In Geraghty’s world, winning the votes of conservatives, shouldn’t necessarily earn trust.