Tag Archives: politics

A Couple of Litmus Tests

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The two major party Presidential candidates have them.  All Presidents and candidates who wish to nominate Supreme Court Justices have them; some are more or less legitimate than others.

Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s wants:

The kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on behalf of our rights as Americans[.]

Read that again.  Clinton wants Justices who put social agendas ahead of the actual law before them, ahead of the text of the Constitution, ahead of the Justices’ own oaths of office, which swear them to uphold and defend the Constitution, not ignore it, or “reinterpret” it.

Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s wants:

[Justices who would] interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted.

Notice that.  Justices who will do the opposite of what Clinton’s choices will do: rule on the basis of what the law and the Constitution actually say, rather than on what the Justices might wish had been said.

There’s just one more litmus test that I would add, one as general and carefully nonspecific as Trump’s: lose deference to the other branches of the Federal government.  The founders also wrote the Judicial branch as the equal of the Legislative and Executive branches.  No deference is owed, no deference is legitimate.  Deference subordinates what is intended to be a coequal branch of the government to the other two.  Besides, a law is Constitutional, or it is not; that does not depend in any way on who says it.   Further, a matter before the Court comports with the law and the Constitution on its merits, or it does not; that does not depend on who is bringing or defending the matter.

One of these two will be nominating Justices in the next term—at least one, likely three, and maybe four or five.  The next President will determine the tenor of the Court and the viability of our legal system for generations.

It’s clear which set of choices are better for the present and long term health of our nation.

Hand on the Scale

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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.

Celebrities and Their Moves

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Here’s a partial list of celebrities who’ve promised to move to Canada if Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump is elected next week.

  • Bryan Cranston, of Breaking Bad
  • Lena Dunham, actress
  • Whoopi Goldberg, of The View among other enterprises
  • Barbra Streisand, singer
  • Samuel L Jackson, actor
  • Chelsea Handler, comedian
  • Reverend Al Sharpton, Baptist Minister
  • Amy Schumer, comedian
  • Rosie O’Donnell, late of The View

A couple of questions come to mind.

Will these folks keep their promises, or are their promises just more Democrat promises?

Why would Canada want such blatantly disloyal folks?  How can Canadians be sure these Precious Ones won’t run out on them next?

This

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…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

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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.