Monthly Archives: April 2024

Putting Mayorkas on Trial

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Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Mike Lee (UT) opined on the Senate’s duty to hold a trial of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas when the House delivers the articles of impeachment and on the Senate’s Progressive-Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (NY) intent to block any such trial. Toward the end of their piece, they offered this assessment of Schumer’s move:

He [Schumer] also wants to insulate Democrats from having to vote guilty or not guilty.

On this aspect of Schumer’s block I disagree.

Those Progressive-Democrat Senators who vote to table the impeachment trial will be putting themselves clearly on the record in two ways. One is that their vote to table will be their confession that they know Mayorkas (and Biden) are guilty and don’t want to have to vote against one of their own and, by implication, against Party’s boss on the matter.

The other is that they’ll be putting themselves on the record as lacking either the political courage to hold the trial, or the moral courage to hold the trial, or both.

An Argument for Patronage

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James Freeman described Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s move to strengthen bureaucracy’s and bureaucrats’ control over our Federal government. Citing a CNN report, Freeman wrote:

Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby report for CNN:

The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.

No swamp-draining allowed! The new Biden rule from the Office of Personnel Management is intended to impede Mr. Trump if he wins the presidency again and revives an executive order he issued in October of 2020. The Trump order created the option of converting thousands of senior bureaucrats into at-will employees. The CNN team has more:

Trump’s executive order created a new classification of federal employees titled “Schedule F” for employees serving in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” that typically do not change during a presidential transition.

Why shouldn’t a duly elected president have the authority to hire and fire policymakers in his own administration?

Indeed. While it’s certainly true that one administration’s agency or departmental rules or a President’s Executive Orders can be undone by a subsequent administration, Biden is illustrating the need for a return to statutory patronage in the Federal government’s bureaucracy. Statutes, after all, while undoable by a subsequent Congress, are much harder to undo.

With a patronage modification, this: civil servants and bureaucrats are hired on five-year contracts. Those contracts then are renewed, or not, in five-year increments at the sole discretion of the then sitting President or relevant Department/Agency head. And this additional fillip: upon leaving Federal government employ, whether through resignation/retirement/termination or through simple non-renewal, that now ex-employee has his security clearance automatically withdrawn.

Again, I Ask

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The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal editorial concerning Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s pushing Ukraine to stop hitting inside Russia, particularly Russia’s oil refineries, says it al.

The White House fears attacks on refineries inside Russia could raise global prices.

In the body of the editorial:

…the Biden Administration had urged Ukraine to halt its campaign targeting Russian refineries and warned that “the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation.”

That’s Biden’s tacit admission of two things: the currently in place oil sanctions against Russia aren’t working—else Ukraine’s successes would severely impact Putin’s ability to get fuel to his barbarians inside Ukraine, which we should be able to expect even Biden to consider good, but those successes would have no effect on oil prices outside Russia.

The other Biden admission is that he doesn’t want the sanctions to work.

Again I ask: whose side is Biden on?

Election Interference

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The No Labels group has folded its tents and quit the political race for this year, for a few reasons I’ve written about before. It appears, though, that there’s more to this fiasco than understood heretofore [ellipses in the original, emphasis added].

Democratic strategist Karen Finney argued No Labels had presented a “dangerous” threat to Biden’s re-election chances that Democrats, including her, actively worked to undermine.
They were very dangerous because they had over $70 million to get on the ballot,” Finney recalled.
“And what they were promising…They were promising that they could win states like Texas. And again, it was totally illogical, but it was a very real threat that myself and others worked very hard to not just undermine, but to make sure that the people they were talking to understood, that their rhetoric just did not work, and their math did not work[.”]

This is a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party openly bragging about having successively interfered with our upcoming election through sabotage of a third party’s effort to field a competing slate of candidates.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s on the ballot in this fall’s national, State, and local elections.

Deals with Terrorists

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is applying ever increasing pressure on Israel to reach an agreement with the terrorist Hamas regarding cease fires and hostages. This extends to his telecon with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu late last week, using the IDF’s screwup (an amazingly rare occurrence, illustrating the IDF’s amazing skill at minimizing civilian casualties, a skill that is amazingly ignored by the press and by Biden and his SecState) as his latest excuse for pressuring Israel.

President Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work out the issue during a phone call Thursday. He also called for an immediate cease-fire and for Netanyahu to empower his negotiators to reach a deal, according to US officials.

Which raises a couple of questions in my peabrain. What is Biden’s evidence that Netanyahu hasn’t already—hasn’t all along—empowered his negotiators to reach a deal?

The larger question, though, is when has Biden called Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas MFWIC, or Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ Gaza Strip MFWIC? Has he even tried? Neither of them will take his calls?

The answers to that larger question, coupled with Biden’s blatantly one-sided pressure on Israel to reach a deal that he knows Hamas doesn’t need or want, are very strong clues to whose side Biden is on and to the depth of Biden’s antisemitism.