Category: partisanship

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies partisanship

A Very Special Prosecutor

Hunter Biden, swamp, Washington DC, investigation, law, crime

You don’t send a salamander to put out a fire or a leech to drain a swamp. Similarly, you don’t appoint David Weiss as a special counsel to “investigate” the Hunter Biden case. 

Not if you want justice.

Weiss, who has been on the case since 2017, was responsible for the cushy plea deal that fell apart last month, in court. It was a novel, first-of-its-kind offering of immunity to all future prosecutions for unspecified charges. When pressed in court, the prosecutors had to admit it was “unprecedented.”

And the judge had to throw it out.

Now, with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing Weiss as special counsel, the questions mount:

  • Why Weiss — considering his track record?
  • What additional powers does he have — considering the AG’s past assurances that Weiss had everything he needed?
  • And why now?

To answer that last query, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) admitted on ABC’s This Week — amidst many accusations against former President Donald Trump — that Hunter Biden “did a lot of really unlawful and wrong things” and that Mr. Weiss, “with the collapse of the plea agreement that he had apparently worked out with Hunter Biden,” now “wants to be certain that he’s got the authority to go bring charges wherever he wants.”

Which only further begs the question. Weiss says he didn’t ask for it. And if he in fact lacked what was needed, why didn’t Garland give it before?

What’s really going on?

“The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight,” explains House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “as we have presented evidence to the American people about the Biden family’s corruption.”

And as Jonathan Turley, the renowned George Washington University law professor, adds, “The initial impact is to insulate Weiss from calls for testimony before Congress.”

Republicans are looking this Democrat gift horse in the mouth. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption partisanship

The Precedentedness of It All

Washington, D.C., corruption, politicians, deep state

When Democrats impeached President Donald Trump for pushing Ukrainians to look into Hunter Biden’s Burisma deal, the outcry was Orange Man is prosecuting his political rival! The enormity! The unprecedentedness of it all!

Now, Trump is being prosecuted for mishandling classified documents upon leaving office, and only Republicans cry “prosecution of a political rival!”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden just received something close to mere admonishment for his not paying taxes on his loot. And no charge for lying on a federal gun application. The Administrative State favors its own.

“The real difficulty, in my view, is trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for their conduct,” said former Special Counsel John Durham in his recent testimony to Congress. “It’s not a simple problem to solve.”

Durham was talkingabout the Russiagate panic that Democrats in government, media, and Congress exhorted for years. “If there was something that was inconsistent with the notion that Trump was involved in a ‘well-coordinated conspiracy’ with the Russians and whatnot, that information was largely discarded or ignored and I think, unfortunately, that’s what the facts bear out.”

Functionaries in the CIA, FBI and Department of Justice “investigated” — but merely to find evidence to bolster a pre-selected story that they could use to oust a president they did not like.

What to do?

Clean house: fire the worst offenders. 

Who can do that?

Any president could hire an Attorney General and directors of the FBI and CIA, each with broom in hand.

And Congress could actually do its job. You know, legislate in the public interest.

But we possess neither, and so we persist in the current stalemate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
partisanship Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights

Partisanship & Pretense

Tennessee 3, three, guns, bullhorn

Protest is a tricky business. 

Had those in power their druthers, no protest would be allowed. Had those out of power their way, all their demands would be met.

I’d say the necessary middle ground lies in the rule of law.

Did the recent Tennessee legislature’s reaction to three legislators who broke House rules follow the law?

Not according to The Washington Post, which provided the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spin in the headline: “Tennessee House expels two Democrats in historic act of partisan retaliation.”

In the wake of the shooting at the Covenant School in late March, with its death toll of six, “activists descended on the Tennessee Capitol and demanded that lawmakers pass gun-control legislation. Republicans, with supermajorities in both chambers, refused to do so. The three lawmakers — dubbed the Tennessee Three — said they joined the protests inside the legislative chamber to speak out for Tennesseans whose voices have been ignored.”

But what they did is disrupt the proceedings of the legislature. Noisily. Angrily. Not-very-reasonably.

While it’s true that the votes to remove two of the three offending members were along partisan lines, it’s also true that all three offending members were unified by party.

But only two were removed from the legislature. Both are black, and the woman not removed is white. So of course the big issue for many became racism.

She escaped expulsion by one vote.

Was that vote racist?

Well, the two who were ousted used bullhorns within the legislative chamber. She did not.

That does seem an extra-outrageous breach of decorum.

Of course, the whole idea of legislators jumping sides to pretend they are “voiceless” protesters is itself absurd, making the issue here neither partisanship nor racism.

It’s a question of posturing and pretense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: After his expulsion last week, the Nashville-Davidson Metro Council yesterday voted to return Rep. Justin Jones to the state legislature on an interim basis. A special election will be held to fill the seat in the coming months.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney / DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies partisanship

Breaking the Jell-O Mold

jello, Congress, term limits

American politics has become amazingly “gerontocratic.” 

Congress is run by really old people, the faces of the Supreme Court Justices are as wrinkled as the Constitution they allegedly serve, and the oldest U.S. president in our history is a Silent Generation stumbler with one foot in the grave and the other in his mouth. 

Enter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, sporting an “I” and not an “R” or a “D” next to her name, followed by a hyphen and the state from which she hails: “AZ” for Arizona. She won office as a Democrat in 2018 but with some ballyhoo left her party last December. Wikipedia says she still caucuses with the Democrats, but in recent reporting Sinema has denied this: “I’m formally aligned with the Democrats for committee purposes,” Sinema was quoted in The Daily Wire. “But apart from that I am not a part of the caucus.”

Indeed, she stopped going to the Democrats’ bi-weekly caucus lunches because, as she puts it, they are “ridiculous”: “Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are.”

Ah, Washington!

“The Northerners and the Westerners put cool whip on their Jell-O, and the Southerners put cottage cheese,” she adds, laying it on a bit thick.

While Senator Sinema makes much of her status as an Independent, and the increasing popularity of that stance in her home state, getting re-elected without a major party is tricky business. Politico quotes Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as being on the verge of endorsing her, as well as expressing hopes that Republicans can seduce her to the GOP side.

There is nothing wrong with slurping down Jello, per se. The real problem is unbridled power that calcifies our career politicians . . . and with them our political system.

We need term limits. If not age limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies partisanship

Invitation to a Beheading

Twitter, Taibbi, hearings, Congressional Committee, stupidity

I don’t gawk at car crashes. I did not watch the ISIS beheadings. Bloody slasher movies aren’t my thing. 

And neither was the recent hearing held by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It was so hard to watch I could hardly take more than a few minutes at a time.

Before the committee appeared two of the three heroes of Twitter Files fame: Michael Shellenberger, listed as “Author, Co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition”; and Matt Taibbi, Journalist.

Or, as Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands) referred to them, “so-called journalists” — before she asked her first question.

Mr. Schellenberger testified about “The Censorship Industrial Complex” and Mr. Taibbi’s testimony was a less elaborate narrative about how he got involved in the Twitter censorship issue, and what he discovered in working through the files. But Del. Plaskett and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fl) were far more interested in discrediting what they said by attacking their qualifications and methods, not dealing with the facts they found.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tx) was the worst. I hand it to you if you can stomach her full interrogation — I came away wondering mostly about her IQ.

My negative reactions? Hardly an outlier. 

“Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were a credit to their profession and to all Americans who genuinely care about a free press and the First Amendment,” wrote Maud Maron in an op-ed for The New York Post explaining why she was walking away from the Democratic Party: the party has fully endorsed censorship. The Democrats at the hearing “questioned, mocked, belittled and scolded [Taibbi and Schellenberger] for not meekly accepting government knows best” — proving themselves “an embarrassment.”

It might be good for our side when our enemies make fools of themselves. But it’s hard to watch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights judiciary partisanship

Disbar the Disbarrers?

Texas State Bar, politics, censorship, corruption

After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton legally challenged how several states conducted the 2020 election, dozens of lawyers submitted complaints. 

To the state bar. 

Their idea: disbar the Republican officeholder for daring to oppose the current Democratic narrative about “election denialism.” 

The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel dismissed those initial complaints as “not demonstrat[ing] Professional Misconduct,” but several attorneys appealed the decision, including a friend of Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the 2022 election for attorney general. The Texas State Board reversed the dismissal. Now a judge has allowed the case against Paxton to go forward.

The threat of disbarment is increasingly being wielded as an ideological weapon and without regard to whether targeted individuals have committed any wrongdoing worthy of disbarment. It’s the lawyers’ version of cancel culture.

This is demonstrated in a lengthy report by Margot Cleveland in The Federalist, who details many other instances as well as Paxton’s. 

These include the DC Bar’s pursuit of former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark and the California Bar’s pursuit of John Eastman, among a “barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.”

The purpose, then, is not to combat corruption but to corruptly intimidate any lawyers inclined to represent Republicans in challenges of dubious election results. One malefactor is a group called 65 Project, targeting more than a hundred Republican-aligned attorneys but no Democrat-aligned attorneys. Seems partisan.

Should lawyers who seek to disbar lawyers solely because of political disagreements be disbarred themselves?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
election law partisanship political challengers

Democratic Money for Republicans

blue wave, red wave, money, campaign finance

“After years of claiming that money in politics is bad and Trumpists will destroy America,” writes Joe Lancaster in Reason, “Democrats spent millions to boost the people they are most afraid of.”

In a strategy that might be designated Too Clever by Half, “Throughout the 2022 primary season, groups affiliated with the Democratic Party funded ads to boost immoderate Republican candidates,” Lancaster explains. “The goal was to boost the least moderate candidates in the hopes that they would be easier to beat in a general election.”

The Senate Majority PAC bought ads for New Hampshire’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, for instance, calling Chuck Morse a “sleazy politician,” allowing a retired brigadier general to advance on to the general election — only to lose to the incumbent. Another Democratic PAC pushed “nearly $100,000 on ads proclaiming Republican House primary candidate Robert Burns ‘the ultra-conservative candidate’ who ‘follows the Trump playbook.’” Burns went on to defeat his more moderate competitor and then be defeated in the general election.

That was the pattern around the country.

If this all sounds familiar, this is how we got Trump into the forefront in the first place. Hillary Clinton’s campaign infamously orchestrated the corporate news media’s fixation on Trump in 2015 and through to Trump’s winning the primary contest. And then, you will remember, the news media changed course and started the great anti-Trump freak-out.

This time, however, it may have paid off. Or at least not horribly backfired, for the much-prophesied Election Day 2022 “Red Wave” merely eroded the Democrats’ stranglehold on unified government. 

Washed away, instead, is the idea that Democrats truly fear these “mega-MAGA Republicans” or care about democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ballot access national politics & policies partisanship

Launch a Thousand Lawsuits

voting, emergency, voters

In the last couple of years, the Republican National Committee has launched 73 lawsuits in twenty states to challenge slack, lax, state-law-defying election rules and prepare for further lawsuits if the elections in November are afflicted by any shenanigans. A good start.

The litigation pertains to things like treatment of poll watchers, how absentee ballots should be counted, and whether noncitizens may be allowed to vote. The RNC has achieved some important successes.

  • In June, a New York court ruled that a new law giving almost a million noncitizens the right to vote in New York City is unconstitutional. The RNC has also sued to block noncitizen voting in two Vermont towns.
  • A court ruled that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson violated the law when imposing new restrictions on poll watchers.
  • Nevada and Arizona must now provide poll-worker data to ensure that both major political parties are represented at voting sites.

A lot of electoral hanky-panky in 2020 was never adequately investigated. Many of us were blindsided by the brazenness with which foes of one-citizen-one-honest-vote exploited COVID-19 fears to undermine election integrity. (It was an emergency. Safeguards just had to be scuttled, supposedly.)

Until the time machine gets invented, though, we’re stuck with the electoral results of that year. We can no longer contest the 2020 election.

But we can darn well contest the 2022 election if and when we espy dubious electoral doings. 

And the 2024 election too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture partisanship

Ultra-Dumb

MAGA, ultra, Democrats, Republicans

A turn in rhetoric caught the attention of the attention-catchers.

On Friday, USA Today explained “Why Biden is blasting the ‘ultra MAGA’ agenda, not Donald Trump, in his midterm push.” The paper explained that Biden, seeking “to avert a midterm disaster that would all but end his domestic agenda,” is pointedly not mentioning the name of his predecessor in office.

“Instead, the White House works aggressively to paint Republicans and their policies as an ‘ultra MAGA agenda’ in a push to overcome the president’s brutal approval ratings and voters’ frustration with high inflation to help Democrats maintain control of Congress.”

Jenn Psaki, on the way out as the president’s press secretary, attributed the “ultra MAGA” epithet to none other than that genius specimen of Homo politicus himself, Joe Biden. But, as reported in the Washington Post, that’s just another whopper for the cameras and the gullible.

Actually, the Post didn’t put it like that. “The attack line followed months of testing from the Center for American Progress Action Fund,” writes USA Today, summarizing the Post’s reportage. “Democrats believe ‘ultra MAGA’ tells a story of a movement that’s no longer just about Trump.”

Democrats are right . . . in that “ultra MAGA” does tell a story.

Democrats are wrong . . . to imagine it could dissuade Republicans. Many conservatives now embrace the epithet, mocking Democrats for thinking they’ve found the key to unlocking Democratic success in the upcoming mid-terms.

While I won’t be embracing Ultra for my messaging — is Ultra Freedom or Ultra Responsibility or Ultra Accountability on the menu? No? Then: no! — I can join conservatives in shaking my head at rule by focus group.

And President Biden’s calling MAGA “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history?”

The charge — coming from the party of riots, lockdowns, shortages, and inflation — seems ultra-suspect.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
government transparency partisanship term limits

A Bazooka to Congress

Congress, term limits, chairman

It is “like bringing a bazooka to a sword fight,” complains an anonymous long-serving Democratic congressional aide.

“Democratic leaders are hammering Republicans,” Mike Lillis explains in The Hill.

At issue? The House Republican caucus is “considering term limits,” Punchbowl News was first to report, “on committee leaders of both parties if the GOP flips control of the House next year.” 

Republicans, since taking Congress back in the 1994 term limits wave, have mostly imposed a three-term limit on committee chairmanships, when in the majority, and on a committee’s ranking opposition member, when in the opposition. What may be different in the next Congress is that Republicans are looking to impose term-limits on committee leaders of both parties. 

Democrats, too. By House rule.

Though Democratic Party bigwigs won’t like it . . . especially current committee chairs who would get the heave-ho next year, such as Representatives Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) now in his 34th year in Congress; Bobby Scott (D-Va.), in his 30th year; Adam Smith (D-Wash.) in his 26th year; Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), in his 26th year; and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), in her 32nd year.*

Some younger congressional Democrats, on the other hand, see term limits . . . as an opportunity.

“High functioning organizations become so by building strong benches and limiting the tenure of leaders,” tweeted Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), now in his 4th year. “No matter which party controls Congress in ’23, we should adopt term limits for committee chairs & get serious about developing a new generation of leaders.”

Lillis calls it “a recurring predicament for Democratic leaders.”

But no fuss at all for the rest of us: we’re for term limits. On committee leadership as well as Congress membership.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Even without this change, these Democrats would lose their chairmanships in the next Congress, should the GOP gain a majority in this November’s elections. But with this change they would also be denied the position of ranking member and thus would lose their hold on the chairmanship if Democrats won back the majority in 2024.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts