Rescission?
Is this for real? Or just another chance for Lucy to hold the football for Charlie Brown?

Springing Forward
By Clarice Feldman

What seemed as though it was going to be a dull news week – punctuated by sometimes fanciful articles from "sources" about what Special Counsel Mueller was up to – ended with a plethora of important news late Friday. To spare you having to wade through the mounds of drivel to get to it, I'm highlighting what I think is the important stuff, so you can enjoy this spring weekend.

The Budget

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, unhampered because of the filibuster rule, which allows them to block any budget not supported by a Senate supermajority of 60, and aware of the desperate need of our military for funding, publicly rejoiced that they were able to force through Congress a ridiculously extravagant budget. Fiscal conservatives were furious, but the president had little choice but to sign the bill into law. "He who laughs last laughs best" is the saying, and in this case, there may be no joy in Demville. James Freedman at the Wall Street Journal explains:

The political left is getting nervous because a virtuous and lawful reduction in federal spending is suddenly looking much more likely. This column is told that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) is now on board.

Specifically, Mr. Ryan likes the idea of paring back the huge spending hikes in the recently enacted budget bill. While the budget required 60 votes in the Senate and therefore Democratic support, a "rescission" bill to repeal the spending increases needs only a simple majority in each house. ...

It's a chance for Republicans to honor their promises of spending restraint and redeem themselves with a base turned off by the omnibus blowout. It's an opening for the GOP to highlight the degree to which Democrats used the bill to hold the military hostage to their own domestic boondoggles. And it's a chance for Mr. Trump to present himself again as an outsider, willing to use unconventional means to change Washington's spending culture.

It's called the 1974 Impoundment Act, which allows the president to order the rescission of specific funds, so long as Congress approves those cuts within 45 days. ...

The Senate being a clubby place, one might think the rescission bill would languish in committee there. But the budget law gives spending cutters super powers. A discharge motion is made automatically in order, and in the Senate it is a privileged motion. (This means it can cut in front of other business.) The motion is limited to one hour of debate – really fast work for the Senate.

But wait, there's more: in the House, where there are also the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Appropriators (the latter of whom can be counted on to scuttle rescissions if they can get away with it), there are fast-track procedures, too. It takes only one-fifth of the Members of the House to force a floor vote on a rescission bill. When the bill comes to the floor the motion to proceed is "highly privileged" (that is, it takes precedence over all pending business)...

Getting 50 Republican votes in the Senate will be made easier because they will be forced into an up-or-down vote – not the usual forest of complexity where they can hide in the tall grass. Ditto for House Republican appropriators.

This week a number of media outlets reported that President Trump has been talking about rescission with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.). Mr. Ryan's support, if paired with an endorsement by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), would make it extremely difficult for appropriators to resist.

Upset about the budget deal? Get on the phone to your congressmen and senators and support rescission.

Illegal Immigration

Never say never to President Trump. Despite the best efforts of the Democrats to keep our borders wide open and to block legislation to deal with the issue, he is determined to preserve national security and sovereignty by controlling who enters the country and how.

Friday the president ordered an end to the "catch and release" Obama policy, where border-jumpers were captured and released with a rarely kept promise to return for an immigration hearing to determine whether they had a legal basis to remain here.

The attorney general explained the new policy – border-jumpers are going to be held and criminally prosecuted.

As part of the order, Trump is requesting "a detailed list of all existing facilities, including military facilities, that could be used, modified, or repurposed to detain aliens for violations of immigration law at or near the borders of the United States."

Trump has also directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security's Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to identify any other resources or steps "that may be needed to expeditiously end 'catch and release' practices."

National Guard troops are being deployed at the border to supplement and assist the Border Patrol. The president last year he added 50 immigration judges to handle the work. This year, it is anticipated that another 75 will join the roster, and they are being given quotas to process these cases more rapidly.

The Congressional-FBI/DOJ Standoff Is Broken

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse broke the welcome news early Saturday morning.

Until today the only people allowed to review the full Title-1 FISA application were Trey Gowdy, Adam Schiff, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Rep John Ratcliffe.

In an interesting development, the Department of Justice has responded to HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes notifying him the DOJ will allow all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees full access to review the unredacted FBI/DOJ FISA application used to gain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against U.S. citizen Carter Page.

According to CNN: 'Separately, Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the department on Monday will supplement its document production to the House Judiciary Committee by producing another 1,000 pages of materials in response to a subpoena issued by committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.'

He surmises, not unreasonably, that the willingness to share this information more broadly suggests that the FISA application may soon be declassified. More importantly, it hints that the OIG and Sessions's designated prosecutor, U.S. attorney John Huber, have completed their own investigation into the content and sourcing of the FISA warrant application that permitted the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Bill and Hillary Clinton's Corrupt International Charity Network Faces Countless Legal Challenges

Charles Ortel, a retired investment banker, has been doggedly researching the Clinton Foundation and international charity frauds and reporting on his findings on his blog and elsewhere. He has been assiduously tracing the Clintons' many false filings and substantial conduct violative of federal, state, and international laws relating to charities.

To take but one example: Since May of 2014, Haitians have been complaining about the work of both Clintons in Haiti while she was secretary of state and he was working with the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.

For the Clintons, doing a bad job of it is no barrier – they regularly build on failure. Charles Ortel explains and documents stranger, and certainly illegal transactions involving "charity" in Haiti, this time involving not only the Clintons but also their new best friends forever, the Bush family. He focuses on a missing $37 million from the Clinton-Bush Haiti fund sent to a post office box in Baltimore where the fund had no office.

The story of the Clintons' misuse of charity solicitation, reporting, and accounting laws begins in 1997 and continues on past Clinton's term as president where people familiar to us in the present DOJ-FBI investigations failed to prosecute the Clintons for obvious charity fraud and violation of federal and state law on charitable solicitations. The most recent investigation of the Clinton foundation took place under Rod Rosenstein, then U.S. attorney for Baltimore. He utterly flubbed the task, as Ortel notes.

Records available through the FBI vault confirm that the FBI and DOJ attorneys conducted investigations, empaneled grand juries, and issued subpoenas, yet they were unable to bring indictments or gain convictions against the many individuals and entities linked to the Clinton charity, which clearly engaged in a raft of frauds, across state lines, and in numerous nations.

These FBI records, many of which are heavily redacted even now, clearly show that former FBI Director James Comey played "leadership" roles in these epic failures and that Comey's predecessor as FBI chief, Robert Mueller, was personally aware of the course of these ineffective efforts after he assumed his duties in September 2001. ...

Claims by the Clinton Foundation concerning its supposed grant to CBHF [Clinton Bush Haiti Fund] do not and cannot be squared with CBHF filings. Someone here is lying and many people are doing their best to cover up what looks like a crystal-clear instance of charity fraud and other serious crimes.

How much money did the Clinton Foundation actually receive during 2010, while soliciting to help poor Haitians after their devastating earthquake? More important, where did the money raised for Haiti by Clinton, Bush, and their associates actually go? And remember, 2010 was a key election year, with much at stake for Democrats.

We certainly will never know the answer to that question if we must rely on Rosenstein, Mueller and Comey, who, it must be remembered, were failing to catch obvious frauds during those early years.

At the moment, some state attorneys general are investigating Clinton foundation fraud and illegality. So are some foreign governments whose laws were violated by the foundation. While in the U.S. opportunities to prosecute longstanding frauds may be barred by the passage of time and the statute of limitations, this latest Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund transaction seems not to be. If I were to speculate, I'd suggest that it is not unlikely (now that the Clintons are fairly politically neutered) that whistleblowers inside the foundation, the donors' offices, and the government – particularly the IRS – may come forward, at long last, to expose the frauds which Rosenstein, Mueller, and Comey seem to have lacked the integrity and guts to do.

https://www.americanthinker.co...ringing_forward.html

This message has been edited. Last edited by: chellim1,

Kudlow: White House Planning Cuts To $1.3 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill

Larry Kudlow has been making the media rounds this week, appearing on Fox and Bloomberg (though, tellingly, not his former employer, CNBC) to help soften President Trump's aggressive trade rhetoric to make it more palatable to investors.

But in what can only be interpreted as a show of defiance considering the Dow's nearly 600 point drop on Friday, Kudlow took to Fox News Sunday to offer a stern warning to China: Stop stonewalling and instead make a good-faith effort to come to the table.

WALLACE: And that's what they're doing is stonewalling?

KUDLOW: Basically. I mean, lots of rhetoric out there, like, you know, old communist party type stuff. The whole world, please, the whole world knows China has been violating trade laws for many years and President Trump is the guy calling them on it and he's right to do so.

WALLACE: Is the president -- you say he's calling them on it. Is he bluffing or will he impose tariffs if China doesn't change its trade practice?

KUDLOW: Look, I -- he's not bluffing. I mean, there are a number of tools at his disposal.

Just one thing there -- people are saying Trump, Trump, Trump. This is a problem caused by China, not a problem caused by President Trump, and I would go so far as to say, Trump is there to fix the problem.

If you talk to the president as I have, he regards himself as a free trader, all right? As do I. But his argument, and it's a good one, you can't have free trade, which is pro-growth around the world unless China brings down its barriers, opens up its markets --

And while Kudlow neglected to announce his "trade coalition of the willing" like he had promised on Friday, he did try his hardest to burnish both the president's and his own free-trade bona fides while trying to frame the US's tariff tit-for-tat with China as an isolated issue within the framework of global trade - not a runup to the US implementing blanket tariffs, a policy Kudlow says he vehemently opposes.

KUDLOW: Well, hang on. So, I oppose the blanket tariffs, I always do.

Now, with respect to China, I've always been a hard-liner on China, and while I don't like tariffs, sometimes there is no substitution for putting tariffs into the discussion, into the process. That is part of the quiver of arrows that the president has.

Look, he's a great negotiator. He has a whole history of that. But in this process, tariffs have to be part of it. There's no two ways about it. Then, hopefully, there will be discussions and hopefully, in just the next two months, the Chinese will come seriously back to the table.

President Trump has told me, we were together a long time on Thursday and Friday. He likes President Xi. They get along. He respects President Xi as a negotiator, but they have not played by the rules, Chris. This has been going on.

Technology is everything to this country, everything -- our entrepreneurship, our innovation, our future growth, our productivity. We cut corporate tax rates precisely to unlock the animal spirits around technology.

We cannot let China willy-nilly steal our technology.

Of course, we've heard most of this trade rhetoric before, Kudlow took viewers by surprise after Wallace moved on to his next topic, the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. Is it true, Wallace asked, that the White House is pushing a bill to undo some of the spending increases included in the omnibus bill?



Kudlow confirmed that he and OMB Chief Mick Mulvaney are working on an "enhanced rescission package" that would "trim some spending", now that Republicans on the Hill have finally come around to the idea that blowing a massive hole in the federal budget could be bad for America in the long term.

WALLACE: OK, I've got a minute left. There is talk this morning that the president may ask Congress to undo part of the $1.3 trillion spending bill to cut back some of the expenditures that were made. Is that true and how far along are you on that?

KUDLOW: It's playing in the White House. My friend, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, he and I are on -- I'm an ex-OMB guy. I feel his pain.

We are looking at an enhanced rescission package. I'm not going to use numbers. This is all around town.

I think the Republican Party on the Hill has finally figured out. It's really not a bad idea to trim some spending because, after all, spending can lead to deficits and spending interferes with the economy. And President Trump is a deregulator and a tax cutter. So, we want and much more modest government role.

While this is certainly an encouraging sign for Treasury bulls, there's much that needs to be determined. Depending on the final number, whatever rescission package Kudlow is planning could amount to a drop in the bucket: Goldman warned in January that US Treasury issuance was set to double in 2019 - and that was before the omnibus bill was signed into law. Trump warned when he signed the $1.3 trillion bill that he was only affixing his signature because of national security concerns, and that he would never sign another bill like it.

Will markets take Kudlow's hint seriously? We'll need to wait until Treasury futures open later this afternoon to find out.

Of course, Kudlow wasn't the only senior administration official to talk trade on the Sunday shows this week. After he admitted on Friday that a trade war with China remained a possibility, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin clarified that, while a trade war remains a possibility, he doesn't see one as likely.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...mnibus-spending-bill

I watched the interview, and thought some of the points made some sense. IIRC he mentioned something of the EU needing to also step up, and they might since the US is going to step up.

Let's see how fast McConnell and the other establishment RINO's wanna sign onto this effort. Something tells me, not very quickly or enthusiastically.