Please watch AG Bill Barr in a speech before the Federalist Society deliver a civics lesson to the functionally illiterate mainstream press (NYT, WaPO, Mother Jones, Slate, etc.) and the entirety of the Democratic Party.
Particularly galling for them was Barr’s recognition of the Constitution’s construction of a “unitary executive”. During his confirmation hearings, he invoked the words and Democratic senators in their ignorance tried to demote the idea to a mere “theory”. It isn’t a theory. As Barr says, and he’s right, it’s a word-for-word reading of Article II. “Unitary executive” encapsulates Article II. That this has to be stated speaks volumes about the state of education and politics in modern America.
He goes further by describing the “Resistance” as, in essence, a rebellion against the Constitution. The goal of the “Resistance” is to prevent the lawful (meaning Constitutional) functioning of the executive branch. No peaceful transfer of power for them. Conducting themselves in this way, they have much in common with the Taliban and every other insurgency that we’ve faced over the past 50 years. The “Resistance” has yet to embrace terrorism, but if Trump gets a second term, Katie bar the door.
Again, take the time to watch and listen to the speech and see what the press and our textbooks are ignorant of.
Check out Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) questioning of Marie Yovanovitch from last Friday.
Pay special attention to the start of the segment. Yovanovitch professes that she has no knowledge of bribery or any other crime committed by the president. So what, then, is this all about? Will the House Dems impeach over over a comparatively mild request (mild when compared to the Obama administration’s 2016 dirty tricks) for Ukraine to investigate the possible corruption of one of Trump’s political rivals? If so, there will be no conviction in the Senate. So why the political burlesque show? It’s about the 2020 election. The Dems have a two-track strategy of feeding red meat (impeachment) to the red-revolutionary base of the party while muddying and bloodying Trump for the general.
They tried branding Trump as an asterisk president with “Trump, the Manchurian candidate”. That didn’t work. They tried parading about the emoluments clause. That didn’t work. They’d like to get their hands on his tax returns and sift those for any dirt. But that’ll take too long. Then 2018 gave them the control of the impeachment half of Congress. Like an excited bloodhound, they have their nose in the air for the scent of anything that could be shoehorned into an impeachment charge.
So, here we are. Forget about “peaceful transfers of power” or a “honeymoon”. The Resistance was formed on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Trump placed his hand on the Bible. It had agent provocateurs scattered throughout the bureaucratic bowels of DC. Large mainstream media was fully on-board. All elements are present for the reversal of an election that politically entrenched classes never accepted. So much for popular sovereignty.
William Taylor, left, and George Kent prepare testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019, during the first public impeachment hearing. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP)
Has a mental smog descended on certain socio-political tribes in the American population? It’s a kind of groupthink, and each group with shared interests and much else in common is smothered by it. Is it present at National Review, both online and print? The editors and many of the contributing writers seems to have taken for granted that “impeachment is political”, as if it is “only” political. But is it? I think not.
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru (l) of The National Review join Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour to discuss the week’s political news, Oct. 4, 2019
Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor, in his piece , “Rush from Judgment” in the October 28 issue, repeats the boilerplate. If we accept impeachment as being political, I recoil in horror for its vicious consequences.
Impeachment wasn’t always considered such. It mustn’t have been since there were so few, and only 3 presidential ones in 230 years. “Political” impeachments would have to be, by necessity, partisan in nature, especially since the onset of political parties nearly at the gitgo (Federalist, Democrat-Republican). Still, the fact is, we didn’t have our first presidential impeachment till 1868 and it was under freak circumstances. The 40th Congress in the wake of the Civil War was awash in Radical Republicans waving the bloody shirt (Republican campaign tactic to remind voters of Southern and Democrat perfidy). 45 of the 53 Senators were Republican. The R’s dominated the House 143 to 45.
“The Situation”, a Harper’s Weekly editorial cartoon shows Secretary of War Stanton aiming a cannon labeled “Congress” to defeat Johnson. The rammer is “Tenure of Office Bill” and cannonballs on the floor are “Justice”.
Yeah, the episode was political in a narrow sense but even the firebrands, chomping at the bit to get Andrew Johnson, had to pay heed to statutory violations, all emanating from the recently passed Tenure of Office Act, over Johnson’s veto. Certainly, the Act was an impeachment trap, but even they couldn’t rely on Johnson’s alleged drunkenness and overall instability in office to remove what they considered to be a huge political obstacle. There’s something about impeachment that Ponnuru and company miss. Our current chattering classes omit an earlier and widespread understanding that politics wasn’t nearly enough.
It can’t be boiled down to Ford’s specious dictum: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Ford was foolish, and so would we be to take it seriously.
Today, it’s become fashionable to reduce impeachment to politics, the easier for our social betters, deeply entrenched in our cultural centers and DC, to get Trump. If you think about it, the “politics” of impeachment stare at you in the face. The two political houses of the first branch get to pass judgment on the second political branch. They are political in nature, with their political parties and partisan fights, and are given the power to remove a president. The situation lends itself to political shenanigans; however, there’s more to the story.
Government cannot avoid “politics”, despite the progressives’ futile crusade to insulate as much of the state from the grubbiness of politics. As we learned recently, all they succeeded in doing is creating a political and unaccountable administrative state. Politics never disappeared; it just entered the bloodstream of the ever-expanding Leviathan.
Come to think of it, the third branch (judiciary) isn’t above the muck of the political sewer since many state and local judicial posts are elective posts and the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court is caught up in the power of legislating. Speak “government” – any part of it – and you will be bellowing “politics”.
“Politics” is not all there is to government, though. We get a hint in our professed belief that we are a nation of laws, not men. Overhanging the messiness of the politics of law-making is the principle of equity (basic impartiality), and after the the law is produced, the law’s adjudication demands more equity in the form of due process. We’re not perfect in our legislation. Samuel Johnson exclaimed that sometimes the law is an ass. Nevertheless, bounds are placed on our penchant to enlist the state in service of our demands at the detriment of others.
Similarly, bounds are placed on the act of impeachment. The actors are political but the process isn’t. The thing shadows normal jurisprudence. The charging power (impeachment) is in the House and a trial is conducted in the Senate. The Constitution outlines the statutory violations of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. At the time of the Constitution’s writing, the new federal Congress didn’t exist and therefore it hadn’t produced a single word of statute. Thus, the list of transgressions had to be general in nature, but are still statutory nonetheless. As in a regular court hearing that it adumbrates, regular due process can’t be ignored. Congress can’t do whatever its little political heart desires.
Robert S. Bennett, a nonpartisan attorney, defended President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings. (NICK UT/AP 1998)
Yet, Ponnuru tries to bolster his case for “political” impeachment by dredging up the 1804 impeachment and removal of Federal District Court Judge John Pickering. Ponnuru gets the incident wrong by distilling the case against Pickering to one of “low character”.
But what of Pickering’s “low character”? The “low character” was one of observable deterioration of mental capacity, instability while performing official duties, rulings glaringly discordant with standards of jurisprudence, drunkenness behind the bench, etc. The guy was a mess and didn’t live up to his oath of office. The problem was so noticeable to staff and the other judges in the federal circuit that they acted to suspend him by moving his caseload to Circuit Judge Jeremiah Smith. Pres. Jefferson sent the evidence to impeach to Congress and it quickly became embroiled in the partisan food fight between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans. Still, if impeachment can’t be applied here, it can’t be applied anywhere, regardless of the spit and fuming of the parties.
Judge John Pickering
The “low character” of Pickering is something far more than the bumbling and coarseness of Trump; something far more than a rambling phone call to the Ukrainian president.
I suspect that a residuum of animosity exists among the editors of the magazine against the “imperial presidency” (completely understandable) alongside Trump’s 2016 attack on the magazine. If so, I’m with you, but I can’t make my indignation a selective one. Essentially, all 20th and 21st century chief executives – with the exception of the 1920’s execs – abused their powers for over a hundred years, and so deserve the adjective “imperial”. Theodore Roosevelt saw himself as ringmaster of his own political Barnum and Bailey Circus. Woodrow Wilson gave us War Socialism, which was an extension of is own vastly expanded Leviathan. After a brief interlude in the 1920’s, the electorate foisted FDR upon itself for four terms.
FDR at one of his famous fireside chats.
And, ohhhh, there’s FDR. He presents a special case of defilement of the Article II powers. Not only was he given carte blanche to destroy something that was rationalized as farm “surpluses” (march livestock to the death pits, bribe people not to be productive) in the Agricultural Adjustment Act – thus giving “adjustment” a sinister ring – and to impose socialistic cartelization on nearly the entire American economy in the quasi-fascistic National Industrial Recovery Act, he was profligate in the application of his new-found powers for his personal political benefit. He was famous for lavishing taxpayer largesse on supporters and rejecting it for opponents. No wonder the guy got four terms.
We ought not to leave this very special political specimen without mentioning his persecution of Samuel Insull. Just like the Elizabeth Warrens of today, FDR wanted scalps for the Depression in a grotesque display of unrestrained reductionism and vicious class warfare. Insull was a successful businessman with his own holding company (the industrial equivalent of a broad-market mutual fund) that was responsible, by the way, for electrifying much of the country. It collapsed in the market crash, thousands lost their investments, and FDR was elected as the avenging demon. Insull fled. Our president-as-tsar went hither and yon to hunt him down, using his executive powers for a political vendetta in a manner that would make George III cringe.
Samuel Insull jailed after his extradition from Turkey in 1934.
Well, His Majesty’s imperial guard caught up with Insull in Turkey and brought him back in irons. Insull was soon marched off to 3 separate trials and before judge and jury was promptly acquitted of all charges. Is there a moral to the story? It might be that the innocently accused will win in the end (or, then again, maybe not), but not till after personal ruination. He died penniless in a Paris subway in 1938.
Do I need to mention LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton? Clinton had a hard time keeping his fly zipped, was caught in flagrante delicto with an intern, feebly tried to intimidate witnesses, and lied before a federal grand jury. He was allowed to finish his term, but a warning to minors was issued (probably unsuccessfully as per the Epstein case).
Going further down history lane and we arrive at Obama. Is it any surprise that a community activist would give us a community activist presidency? Let’s see, we had Fast and Furious, which was an attempt at entrapment of the Second Amendment. A border agent got killed in that one. Let’s see, there was the use of the IRS as an attack dog against Tea Party opponents. Let’s see, there was Obama’s discovery of his “phone and pen” to issue imperial decrees. And, finally, let’s see, we had the recruitment of the intelligence agencies and the FBI into his Praetorian Guard in a bid to defame Trump. A full accounting has yet to be written for that sordid tale.
And then there’s lowly Trump. He’s accused of soiling the office in a feeble and rambling conversation with the president of … Ukraine, of all paces. Trump comes off as a piker when compared to his predecessors.
Expect more excursions into impeachment-based political vengeance if impeachment is distilled to mere politics. Our penchant for divided government (different parties controlling different branches) would create a conga line down impeachment lane. Every two years could produce the precursors of impeachment lynch mobs. Is that what the Framers had in mind? Is it healthy for our system of governance to be constantly on the brink of volume 11? Once we become inured to the political cannabis high of impeachment, what’s next? The meth of civil war?
Nothing good can come of “political” impeachment. It’s not only wrong. It’s dangerous.
A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)
In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family. While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching. I ended up in teaching. It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle. Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology. Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.
Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967. Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.
Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today. The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.
Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do. Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism. What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy? A mess!
No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy. Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”. What’s that? It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another. How? Stay tuned.
I was reading about it this morning. 40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering. Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia. Right? No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.
The burlesque of net-metering.
The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse. No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed. It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights. The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar. The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels. That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain. It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames. The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.
The alternative is simple. If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them. Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager. Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions. But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves. The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.
For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet. Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering. You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.” AOC has interesting company.
Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.
Don’t buy into the racket. Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2. The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one. What does that say about us?
Gerald Ford (R. Mich.) as quoted in the Congressional Record for April 15, 1970: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a given moment in history.”
President Ford appears in 1974 at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing regarding his pardon of Richard Nixon.
Does Ford’s famous comment on impeachment make sense? Kinda, if you don’t have anything else to go on. Well, Yale law professor E. Donald Elliott and his mentor, Yale law professor and Dean Harry H. Wellington, would ask you to reconsider. Ford’s comment stems from a highly contentious legal philosophy called positivism or “legal realism”. Positivism straitjackets the meaning, purpose, and assessment of law to “the acts of government officials”.
Ok, so what’s the rub? Simple, according to Wellington, the idea lacks a “theory of mistake”. The concept has no place for the law being wrong. To put it bluntly, it is what it is. Thus, it’s a convenient theory for freeing up the law from any connection to morality. The 20th century’s thugocracies – fascism, communism, Maoism, Stalinism, Jim Crow – found it useful. And so do our own progressives and law-making guiding lights. Perform an official act and there’s no need to rack your conscience about the morality of it. Just do it, as Kaepernick intones.
Jim Crow in the deep South. The intimidation of blacks at a polling place is depicted here.Jim Crow as segregation in water fountains.Oskar Dankner, a Jewish businessman, and Edele Edelmann, a Christian woman, are humiliated in public for having an intimate relationship. The signs read: “As a Jewboy, I always invite only German girls up to my room!” and “I am the biggest sow in town and only have dealings with Jews.” Cuxhaven, Germany, July 27, 1933
The Dems agree, “Just do it” – impeachment that is – even if untethered from the Constitution’s standard of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors”. Though it must be admitted that quid pro quos, the firing of an ambassador, disagreements over foreign policy, and a person’s deportment as president don’t quite fit the Constitutional bill. For Schiff and company, no matter. Make it “official” even if it’s based on rank innuendo, hearsay, and politically useful bureaucratic carping.
Plenty of injustice was committed under the banner of legal positivism. Just because a past Republican mouthed the dangerous nonsense doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)
We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools. Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement. The stories don’t make much sense.
As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence. Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”. What?! “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one. As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before. It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.
The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.
Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long. The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37. Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.
Ditto for news stories. Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled. Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”. The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs. Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires. The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades. Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing? Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.
Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?
Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.
Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex. But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California. It’s a global phenomenon. What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento. Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento. Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.
The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies. They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia. PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses. Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia. After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over. Astounding!
A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids. Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications. I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda. Mmmm, something to think about?
