Tag Archives: rights

Smart Move

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Although, had it been me, I would have ignored it, not dignifying the thing with a response.

“It” is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s (D, NY) pro forma invitation to President Donald Trump to send along his lawyer to be present at the Nadler Impeachment Inquisition, so long as Trump responded by Nadler’s deadline with the lawyer’s name and impeachment areas of interest.

The smart move was Trump’s refusal to accede to Nadler’s demand.

Note, too, that Nadler is beginning his hearings even before the House Intelligence Committee has prepared its report on its just concluded hearings and sent it along to Nadler.  Nadler will be starting his inquisition before he and his committee even know (at least officially) what the Intel Committee’s findings are.

The refusal letter included this in part of its explanation of Trump’s decision:

As for the hearing scheduled for December 4, we cannot fairly be expected to participate in a hearing while the witnesses are yet to be named and while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process through additional hearings[.]

[U]nclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process.  Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel and author of the letter, is being generous.  It’s actually crystalline that there is no fair process to be had in the Judiciary Committee proceeding.  This is what House Resolution 660, passed on strictly partisan lines by the House Progressive-Democrats, says:

SEC. 4. IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY PROCEDURES IN THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY.
(c)(1) The ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized, with the concurrence of the chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, to require, as deemed necessary to the investigation—
(A) by subpoena or otherwise—
(i) the attendance and testimony of any person (including at a taking of a deposition); and
(ii) the production of books, records, correspondence, memoranda, papers, and documents; and
(B) by interrogatory, the furnishing of information.

Only with the permission of the Committee chairman can any Republican member of the Committee do anything. Of course, the Rules go on to say that the Chairman’s decision can be appealed to the committee as a whole—to the Progressive-Democrat majority membership. There’s nothing in this Progressive-Democrat-passed set of rules that even pretend to be a fair process.

There’s nothing going on in the House that warrants White House participation. There is a great deal going on in the House that warrants strong voter participation in the upcoming elections. We are, indeed, in a battle for the soul—and the safety—of our nation. The Progressive-Democratic Party is just too desperate to undo our choice in 2016 and to prevent us from exercising our choice in 2020.

Head in the Sand?

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Volkswagen is building cars in Xinjiang, People’s Republic of China.  You know Xinjiang, the “semi-autonomous” region of the PRC that’s home to tens millions of Muslims and to President Xi Jinping’s “reeducation” camps, Mao-ist internment camps for millions of those Muslims, a people of whom Xi disapproves.

VW thinks all of that is jake.

Speaking with DW on Tuesday, the company said its 2012 decision to open the Urumqi facility was “based purely on economics.” VW says it expects “further economic growth in the region over the coming years.”

Sure. Because economics isn’t just important (such considerations are), it’s all that matters (because principles, apparently, are for academics and parlor small talk).  And: economic growth in the region for whom?  The camp inmates?  Volkswagen?

Never mind the likelihood that Volkswagen’s facility uses forced labor.

We do not assume any of our employees are forced laborers.

Well, alrighty, then. A forced labor force is assumed away, so it doesn’t exist.  It’s all good.

Checks and Balances

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Editors at The Wall Street Journal correctly decry a Federal district judge’s ruling that ex-White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before the House of Representatives in response to a House subpoena.  As the editors put it,

the sweeping ruling essentially eliminates a right to confidentiality between a President and his most senior advisers.

Thus:

A federal judge says White House aides must answer to Capitol Hill.

Not just any Federal judge: an Obama judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Jackson’s ruling, though, goes far beyond that.  The judge has asserted absolute supremacy of the Legislative over the Executive.

Because checks and balances only run one way. The Legislative is above reproach, and the Executive may not—has no capability to—check or balance the Legislative.

That’s the new mantra of the Progressive-Democratic Party and its supporters, even though they lack the transparency to say so out loud.

Until a judge said so out loud. Thereby also deprecating another coequal branch’s ability to check and balance the Legislative.

Nuclear Disarmament

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Pope Francis wants it—completely, totally, for any purpose, even deterrence (assuming, for now, that this can be done verifiably and verifiably maintained).  The Pope thinks an arms race involving nuclear weapons adds to the danger of their existence, never minding the race, at least on the US’ part, is for self-defense and the defense of our friends and allies—the very purpose of NATO stationing nuclear weapons in Europe, for instance.

The Pope, though, avoided addressing how a non-nuclear nation with a small conventional military establishment would defend itself against an aggressively acquisitive non-nuclear nation with a large military establishment.  Like, say, the Soviet Union against the nations of Europe, individually or collectively. Or like, perhaps, the People’s Republic of China against the Republic of Korea or Japan—or us.

He appears unconcerned that this might lead to a conventional arms race and conventional military building-up race, a race whose deterrence exists only in the ability to conduct a follow-on mobilization race to the frontier—sort of like what turned out to be the first steps of European wars in the latter half of the 19th century and of two global wars in the first half of the 20th.

Of course, in the case of the PRC, the Pope already has abjectly surrendered control of the Catholic Church and of Catholicism—the Universal Church and universal religion—to the PRC government inside the PRC.

Maybe he expects the rest of us to meekly surrender politically, like he has done religiously.

No, I’m not going to turn the other cheek to conquerors and slavers. Not even St Augustine suggested that, for all that he decried preemption.

The People Have Spoken

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The tally is nearly completely in for Hong Kong’s Sunday vote for local offices.

Local broadcaster RTHK reported that pro-democracy parties took 390 out of 452 seats in the district council, or nearly 90%.
The polls closed with 71.2% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the election commission said, easily surpassing the figure of 47% in the last such vote in 2015.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggests

The government will certainly listen humbly to citizens’ opinions and reflect on them seriously[.]

Yeah. She’ll think about it.  But will it act accordingly? Keep in mind, as you cogitate on that question, that the Lam government is nothing but a Beijing satrap.

Gordon Chang, who often writes for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News, is optimistic:

This is political annihilation for Beijing and it’s going to have consequences that are going to reverberate not just in Hong Kong itself, but perhaps in China as well….

He has a warning, though:

Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, she reports directly to Xi Jinping. She no longer has any freedom of action. If he tells her not to give ground, which is what he’s been doing for the last several months, then you’re going to see Hong Kong erupt because, you know, people have expressed their will.
If the political establishment doesn’t make concessions, then we don’t know where this will go, but we know that will become probably much more violent and the protests will become even larger[.]

Are Xi and his Communist Party of China government listening?  Yes, most carefully.  But they’ll likely draw the wrong lessons.  I think we do know where this will go, and it won’t be pleasant, although it will be brief. Tanks rolling against a fundamentally unarmed civilian population will see to that, as was demonstrated in Tiananmen Square a little bit ago.

The US and our putative allies need to become more overt in supporting the good people of Hong Kong.  The PRC has already welched on its handover commitment and its pretense of a one country, two systems policy.

The Republic of China is watching the degree of our resolve, too.