Voting Dishonesty

The Democrats are feeling threatened and are in court, lots of times, because of it.  Their beef?  Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump wants his supporters, when they vote, to be careful and to be observant for error or misbehavior at polling places.  Here’s an example of what Trump has said that the Democrats pretend is so intimidating:

I hope you people can…not just vote on the 8th, [but also] go around and look and watch other polling places and make sure that it’s 100-percent fine[.]

Only a Democrat with a guilty conscience would find a threat in that advice to Trump voters to be careful.  Yet they’ve (pretended to) found one.

“Immediate relief is necessary,” Donald J McTigue, a lawyer for the Ohio Democratic Party argued in court papers filed in the Ohio case. McTigue said that the defendants’ [sic] including the Trump campaign, the Ohio Republican Party, and Trump supporters are engaged in a “coordinated campaign of vigilante voter intimidation….”

This is not the manufactured thin skin and pretended fear that we need anywhere in our Federal government.

Democrats’ View of Rules

Here, the Senate’s rules, and Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Senator Tim Kaine (VA) is exposing Democrat disdain for them.

Here’s the relevant part of  Senate’s rule for changing a Senate Rule, from Rules of the Senate XXII, para 2, regarding a cloture vote to end debate on a motion, including a motion to change a Senate rule [emphasis added]:

…that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn—except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting….

Here’s how Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) was able to railroad through the nuclear option that ended filibusters on Presidential nominee confirmation votess for all offices other than Supreme Court Justices, from a Congressional Research Office paper.  In essence, it relies on the fact that an appeal of the Senate’s presiding chair on a point of order ruling is non-debatable, and the appeal is decided by a simple majority vote of the Senators present.

[I]f the chair rules…against the point of order embodying the new interpretation [here, to eliminate (most of) the filibuster of appointee confirmations], it is supporters of change who would have to appeal the decision. There is little likelihood that they could be prevented from doing so, for the right of appeal is understood to be an essential element of the power of the Senate to determine its own rules. The Senate could then potentially overturn the old precedent, and establish the new interpretation, by a simple majority vote on the appeal.

All strictly legal, and all wholly outside the spirit of the rules for changing a rule.  This is the cynicism with which Reid implemented the nuclear option.

And this is the cynicism with which Kaine intends to abolish the filibuster of Supreme Court Justice confirmation votes, too, so as to allow a Democrat-majority Senate to stack the Court with Justices having no respect for the Constitution, but only loyalty to the Democratic Party.

I am a US Senator. I have a prediction—this is not a guarantee—and I’m not revealing inside intel.  I was in the Senate when the Republicans’ stonewalling around appointments caused the Senate Democratic majority to switch the vote threshold on appointments from 60 to 51. And we did it on everything but a Supreme Court Justice.

If these guys think they’re going to stonewall the filling of that vacancy or other vacancies, then a Democratic Senate majority will say, “We’re not going to let you thwart the law.” And so we will change the Senate rules to uphold the law that the court will be nine members.

Notice one thing: the Senate Democratic majority changed the Senate’s filibuster rule—a wholly partisan attack, with no semblance of the Rule’s original two-thirds majority requirement, which would have been too bipartisan to suit the Democrats.  And Kaine is proud of that.

Notice one other thing.  Kaine—proudly—will impose a simple majority action to destroy the ability of a minority party to protect the interests of its minority constituents.  Those folks, who disagree with the majority, simply don’t matter.

Notice one last thing.  Blocking a particular Supreme Court Justice confirmation is in no way a thwarting of the law.  The President has the obligation to offer nominees that satisfy the Senate’s (not the majority party’s) advice and consent—here, it is the President who has the legal obligation to offer nominees to fill the Court’s vacancy.  The Senate has no obligation to rubber stamp any of those nominees, vacancy or no.  Kaine knows this full well.

This is the Democratic Party arrogance and the Democrats’ disdain for American citizens that’s at stake in the Senate elections next week.

Hand on the Scale

But, whose hand?

The Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton apologist Adam Schiff (D, CA) insists it’s FBI Director James Comey’s hand because Comey had the temerity (or found the courage, take your pick) to update the Congress on his reopening the FBI’s investigation into Clinton and her private, unsecured email server on which she routinely conducted State Department official business.

…Comey put an “enormous hand on the scale in a political contest” by publicizing investigators’ review of a new batch of emails that might be relevant to Hillary Clinton.

Schiff went on:

Clearly here the [FBI] director did not have the facts.  He had not read the emails. He didn’t know if they were significant or not, and I think we are seeing in all of its graphic character just why these DOJ policies exist.

He did have a salient fact though: the metadata clearly showed that many of those 650,000 Abedin emails on Weiner’s laptop were related to the Clinton investigation Comey suspended last July.  The “hadn’t read” bit is just a cynical red herring.  Of course the MFWIC hadn’t personally read all that stuff.  Equally of course, the MFWIC relied on his agents to advise him.

One salient fact Comey didn’t have, true enough: how those emails got onto the Abedin-Weiner shared, unsecured laptop.  The point of reopening the Clinton case is to answer that question and to determine the extent of the breach regarding Clinton’s abuse of State official business and her abuse of the nation’s secrets.

Schiff plainly misunderstands.  It’s his desired withholding of information that would be the hand on the scale, not its exposure.

This

…about sums it up.  In a Wall Street Journal op-ed about FBI Director James Comey’s missteps, US Attorney General and Federal judge Michael Mukasey had this bit that summarizes Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s criminal behavior while Secretary of State and since:

…Mrs Clinton had classified information on a private nonsecure server—at least a misdemeanor under one statute; and although she was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information such that it was exposed to hacking by hostile foreign nations—a felony under another statute; and apparently had caused the destruction of emails—a felony under two other statutes.

And regarding one likely outcome of this reopening of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s crimes, Muckasey had this:

Mr Comey reportedly wrote his letter to Congress over the objection of the attorney general and her deputy. Thus, regardless of what is in the newly discovered emails, the current Justice Department will not permit a grand jury to hear evidence in this case. And because only a grand jury can constitutionally bring charges, that means no charges will be brought.

Keep it in mind as you vote next week.

There’s Spiking, and There’s Spiking

The NLMSM has been spiking bad news about Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton until very recently (when it’s begun merely slanting the news).

Now it’s becoming clear how the upper levels of bureaucrats and political appointees in the Barack Obama/Loretta Lynch Department of Justice have been trying to spike investigations into Clinton’s…misbehaviors…both in relation to her private, unsecured email server on which she handled State Department official business, including classified business contained in some 2,000 emails, and in relation to her Clinton Foundation.

Recall that FBI Director James Comey has reopened the FBI investigation of Clinton and her private, unsecured email server.  The reopening was triggered by some 650,000 (!) emails by and to Clinton senior advisor and confidante Huma Abedin found on a laptop shared by her and her husband, Anthony Weiner, in the course of the FBI’s investigation of Weiner over his alleged sexting with a minor.  We’re starting to learn just how obstructive the Obama/Lynch DoJ have been in attempting to keep both the email and the Foundation investigations blocked.

Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting [a February update on the progress of FBI field agents’ investigation into the Clinton Foundation] they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people [participants in the meeting] said.

February—that’s how long the DoJ’s obstruction of the investigation has been going on.  They’ve been trying to keep the investigators’ hands tied for nine months.

According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr [Andrew, FBI Deputy Director] McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals.

“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” Mr McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official replied, “Of course not,” these people said.

And

In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.

Read Devlin Barett’s whole piece in The Wall Street Journal at the above link.

The DoJ plainly needs a thorough house-cleaning and fumigation after this election.