Daily Archives: 28 August 2025

Not Really

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President Donald Trump (R) wants the Senate to get rid of its Blue Slip Rule, which a couple of New Jersey Progressive-Democrats used to block attorney Alina Habba’s Senate confirmation as US Attorney for New Jersey even from getting out of committee. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors claim that threatens the Senate’s role in the checks and balance structure of our Federal government. Never mind the editors’ obfuscatory natterings about the machinations Trump has been going through to get her in that position as Acting US Attorney; the alleged threat to checks and balances is the thrust of their editorial.

The editors finished with this in their penultimate paragraph:

Yet that’s [getting rid of the Blue Slip process] up to the Senate, and the Founders gave the chamber its advise-and-consent power for a reason.

The role of the Senate under our Constitution, in the present context, is precisely to provide advice and where warranted consent to a President’s nominations. That’s the whole Senate, though, not one or two self-important or virtue-signaling (or both) Senators. Even the erstwhile filibuster of judicial nominations required a significant collection of Senators—more than 40 of them—to enact a block.

The time of Blue Slips never was, legitimately, and it’s time for the blockage to be cleared away.

Why Ukraine Won’t Surrender the Donetsk

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The reasons proffered center on the defensive lines of barriers that Ukraine as developed in holding onto the region and the barbarian’s demand that Ukraine surrender the region so he doesn’t have to fight his way across them.

Russia wants the entire region of Donetsk, including the 25% that Ukraine still controls, an unoccupied swath larger than Delaware. A heavily reinforced defensive line, known as the fortress belt, has stopped the Russians from rolling deeper westward, and Ukraine has no plans to surrender the area.

That’s entirely wrong. The Ukraine defense works are, in fact, every bit as formidable to a modern army as the Maginot Line was to then-modern armies. That’s why the Nazi German forces bypassed the line in Nazi Germany’s invasion of France, even violating Belgian neutrality to do so. So it is in eastern/southeastern Ukraine.

Is it a sign of Russian weakness to demand the region as the article’s subheadline has it?

It is the site of a reinforced defensive line, the “fortress belt.” Putin’s demand for it is a sign of weakness.

No. The defensive barriers are neither here nor there. As with that Maginot Line, it would be straightforward enough for the barbarian to bypass those barriers, here, around either or both ends. On the contrary, it’s a sign of Russian recognition of the industrial importance of the Donetsk to Ukraine (recall the deindustrialization of Germany and the packing up and moving of whole factories from western Germany into eastern France at the end of WWI), and it’s a sign of the importance of the mineral and rare earth wealth of the Donetsk both to Ukraine (and to the West) and to Russia.

The sooner the West recognizes that and internalizes it, the sooner the West can set about properly supporting Ukraine in the latter’s war for survival.