Tag Archives: freedom

Policing the World

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI) had an interesting campaign advertisement op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  One campaign promise she made in it jumped out at me.

A Gabbard presidency would mean the end of trying to police the world….

Who does Gabbard think would police the world if we don’t? Can she really believe that a police-less world would be benign, or that our enemies won’t divide up the policing among themselves explicitly for their benefit and just as explicitly for our detriment?  Or that their squabbling among themselves over the spoils won’t spill over into serious regional or even global conflict?

The Doings of a Star Chamber

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Here are some, from the House Intelligence Committee’s canonical Star Chamber, chaired by Congressman and Intell Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA):

a single, printed transcript of every interview…of its impeachment inquiry. Only members of the three committees…allowed to view that printout, and only in the presence of a Democratic staffer

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) has the right of this one:

Ms Stefanik—an elected member of Congress who sits on the Intelligence Committee—will be babysat while reading by an unelected employee of the Democrats.
“It’s outrageous, and it’s an abuse of power,” Ms Stefanik said in an interview. “Every constituent across this country deserves to have their members have access to all the facts.”

Here’re more of Schiff’s Star Chamber rules:

  • witnesses locked behind secure doors
  • shield the whistleblower who prompted this “impeachment” proceeding from cross- much less direct examination
  • public, press, representatives of his selection barred from secret, though unclassified, hearings
  • carefully scripted and executed leaks and accusations
  • Progressive-Democratic staff supervision of Republican members
  • bar Republicans from calling opposing witnesses
  • withhold official documents including nearly two dozen letters from the committee…that had not been uploaded to the committee repository
  • Republicans not allowed to know the questions Schiff is asking
  • refuse to allow White House counsel in the room to hear the accusations against the president

This is what we can look forward to under a Progressive-Democratic Party reign.

A Judge Got One Wrong

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Recall Florida’s citizens, by a 2:1 margin, voting up a State constitutional amendment restoring to convicted felons (except murderers and sex offenders) their right to vote on completion of their criminal sentences.

Recall, further, Florida’s government passing a law that required these felons to pay off their outstanding fines, fees or restitution—in other words, actually to complete their sentences, including court-imposed financial requirements.  This law went further: it provided mechanisms for relief from those financial penalties so the felon could complete their sentences more quickly after release from jail:

  • payment of the financial obligation in full
  • a court’s dismissal of the debt
  • conversion of the debt to community service

That last is instructive: community service is one of several sanctions, whether in addition to or in lieu of jail, applied on felony conviction. Community service in this guise thus stands as the State’s explicit recognition that a felon has not completed his sentence until he has completed all of it, including financial penalties.  That community service also is used to sanction misdemeanors and civil wrongs in no way alters that simple truth.

Now Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle has chosen to overrule the will of the citizens of the State: he’s issued an injunction that bars Florida’s Secretary of State and County Supervisors of Elections

from preventing plaintiffs from registering to vote solely because they can’t pay a financial obligation. He cited an appellate court ruling that held that “access to the franchise cannot be made to depend on an individual’s financial resources.”

Never mind that the law does not bar a right to vote based on a voter’s financial resources but on a felon’s having completed his sentence.

Never mind, either, that the law provides two means of relief from the financial portion of the felon’s sentence.  With his injunction, Hinkle has both removed the possibility of relief from financial distress, thereby making even more difficult an already arduous journey back to society, he’s removed much of the incentive for the felon to try.

This is another example of activist judges making political decisions in direct contravention of the political arms of a government, for all that this injunction is temporary, pending next year’s trial on the merits.

Warren, Again

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At last Thursday’s CNN-hosted Equality Townhall attended by many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates, Senator and candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had this exchange with a townhall questioner:

Townhall Questioner: “Let’s say you’re on the campaign trail … and a supporter approaches you and says, “Senator, I am old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.” What is your response?
Warren: Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I’m going to say, “Then just marry one woman.  Assuming you can find one[.]

Now, the question appears to have been planted by Warren or her staff, but that just emphasizes the matter: this is the utter contempt with which she, and by extension, Party, view ordinary Americans.

Keep this in mind next summer and fall.

A Senate Impeachment Trial

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Against the possibility that articles of impeachment might pass out of the Progressive-Democrat House, The Wall Street Journal wondered whether the Senate should—or could, given a handful of Republican Senators’ misgivings over the Trump-Zelenskiy telecon—simply vote to dismiss the articles “without a trial.”

The path to a successful dismissal vote is uncertain but eminently possible, even somewhat more likely than not.  I’m not convinced, though, that a successful vote to dismiss actually would be a success: dismissing the articles out of hand would do nothing but feed the Progressive-Democrats’ and the NLMSM’s conspiracy theories.

No, the Senate with (especially with) its Republican majority, should hold the trial. That way they can examine the Progressive-Democrats’ witnesses and call their own, which would let the Progressive-Democrats examine those witnesses in their turn.

Such an obviously balanced approach, which I believe would lead to a bipartisan acquittal on all articles (not all of the Senate Progressive-Democrats are in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hip pocket), would greatly mitigate the Progressive-Democrats’ and NLMSM’s efforts to delegitimize the 2016 election and to interfere with the 2020 elections up and down the ballot.

That last, after all, is the real purpose of the House Progressive-Democrat caucus. That’s why Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is refusing to put the question of a formal impeachment proceeding to a House floor vote and why the chairmen of the three Committees are holding, instead, their secret inquisitions in their separate Star Chamber hearings.  The Star Chambers and the’ selective leaks emitted by them are solely intended to keep the smear going in a naked attempt to prejudice those irredeemably deplorable and amazingly ignorant Americans who will be voting.

On acquittal, the remaining objectors, and there will be some both in Party and in NLMSM, would be (further) exposed for the TDS-ridden personages that they are, to the politicians’ detriment in a few months.  Ordinary Americans, in the end, aren’t what Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM project onto them.