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The Fusion collusion
If we were ever to get to the bottom of actual collusion in the course of the 2016 election, it would be that of the Democrats with the Fusion GPS smear outfit. Kim Strassel’s Wall Street Journal column updates the story of the appearance of two Fusion GPS principals before the House Intelligence Committee. In “The case of Fusion GPS,” I noted the intention of company witnesses to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to maintain their silence. They refuse to tell the committee who paid for the infamous Trump Dossier or whom their clients were. Kim now reports that they proceeded to do just that on Thursday. In the heart of her column Kim explains:

[Fusion GPS is] the firm behind the infamous “dossier” accusing Donald Trump of not just unbecoming behavior but also colluding with Russia. Republicans are investigating whether the Fusion dossier was influenced by Russians, and whether American law enforcement relied on that disinformation for its own probe.

But Fusion’s secret weapon in its latest operation is the Democratic Party, whose most powerful members have made protecting Fusion’s secrets their highest priority. Senate Democrats invoked a parliamentary maneuver in July to block temporarily Mr. Browder’s public testimony. Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, has been engineering flaps to undercut and obstruct Mr. Nunes’s investigation. Democrats on the House Ethics Committee have deep-sixed what was meant to be a brief inquiry to clear Mr. Nunes so as to keep him sidelined.

Then there is the intel committee’s meeting this week. Despite the spin, forcing Fusion to appear was Republicans’ only recourse after months of stonewalling. Fusion’s letter ludicrously claimed that Mr. Nunes’s subpoenas were invalid, which essentially forced the committee to show otherwise. It was a question of authority.

Florida Rep. Tom Rooney put the Fusion attendees through a series of questions not out of spite but to clarify finally just what topics the firm is refusing to talk about. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t provide protection against answering all questions. It only protects against providing self-incriminating evidence. It is therefore revealing that Fusion took the Fifth on every topic—from its relationship with British spook Christopher Steele, to the history of its work, to its role in the dossier.

The untold story is the Democrats’ unprecedented behavior. Mr. Rooney had barely started when committee staffers for Mr. Schiff interrupted, accused him of badgering witnesses, and suggested he was acting unethically. Jaws dropped. Staff do not interrupt congressmen. They do not accuse them of misbehavior. And they certainly do not act as defense attorneys for witnesses. No Democratic lawmakers had bothered to come to the hearing to police this circus, and Mr. Rooney told me that he “won’t be doing any more interviews without a member from the minority present.”

Private-sector lawyers also tend not to accuse congressmen of unethical behavior, as Mr. Levy did in his letter to Mr. Nunes. But Fusion’s legal eagle must feel safe. He’s former general counsel to the Senate’s minority leader, Chuck Schumer. He has also, I’m told by people familiar with the committee’s activities, more than once possessed information that he would have had no earthly means of knowing, since it was secret committee business. Consider that: Democratic members of Congress or their staff providing sensitive details of an investigation to a company to which the committee has given subpoenas.

You’d think all this would be big news in the context of the hysteria over alleged collusion of the Trump campaign with the Russian. A special counsel with a virtually unlimited mandate to torment President Trump, his family and his associates past and present has left the Fusion GPS/Trump Dossier matter untouched. The hysteria over alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia appears to be little more than a pretext for the Mueller operation.

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Originally posted by sigfreund:
I no longer have the respect for George II that I once did, but anyone who believes that the entire Bush “clan” is no better than the Clintons simply hasn’t been paying attention to what’s important.

But then it seems there has been a lot of that going around for a long time.

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October 21, 2017
Living in Trump Country, USA
By Lloyd Marcus

For those of you who haven't heard, Mary and I moved from Florida to a tiny town in West Virginia to be closer to our parents. We are experiencing wonderful culture shock. I am not a fan of the winding mountain roads. Supermarket and hardware stores are over 20 miles away. And yet, we unexpectedly love our new heavenly haven of Americana.

I am one of around 20 blacks in the population of 500. Everyone from the town hall to the bank, post office and country store knew we were the Marcuses who "bought the white house".

Virginia brought us homemade bread. Ron brought us corn from his garden which he promised to be the sweetest we have ever eaten. Ron was correct. Old men Charlie and George stopped by to welcome us. Peggy knocked on our front door bearing a gift of a homemade apple pie.

Mary purchased 3 huge real tomatoes for $2 from a road side vendor's garden. The old man told Mary she could take as many tomatoes as she wanted. From another small vendor, we purchased locally raised grass fed ground beef. The sales lady said it will taste 10 times better than supermarket's.

Handyman Randy is a hunter. Randy said he'll keep us stocked with venison. I thought Randy would be impressed that a member of my family hunts with a bow and arrow. Randy explained that he prefers using a gun because if the hunter's arrow does not hit the perfect spot, the animal will suffer. Wait a minute, Leftists tell us that hunters are coldblooded SOBs who don't care about animals. Randy obviously cares. While installing our ceiling fan, Randy said he needed to get more "wor." Mary eventually realized he was saying "wire".

The post office and public library closes for lunch. I stopped in the town hall to purchase a permit for the fence I planned to have installed. The clerk looking a bit puzzled said, "We're pretty laid back here. You don't need a permit." The police department consists of two patrol cars. The school's marching band of about 15 students marches past our house practicing. They sound good.

On Sundays from our front porch, we sometimes hear the choir of one of the five churches in town. The Potomac River is in walking distance from our house, past the guy's place with the horses.

I haven't gone fishing yet, but a kid schooled me on the best fishing spots.

Driving around town, we shamefully laughed seeing a lawn sign that read, "Trump that B****!" Yes, this is definitely Trump country.

Mary and I attended a fundraiser at the fire hall for a needy family. The elderly husband has terminal cancer and wants to make sure his wife has a new roof on their home. The fire hall was pretty full.

Contrast my daily heartland experience with the putrid-smelling Leftist hate dominating the airways and national political arena. Leftists bombard us daily with vitriolic poisonous lies for the sole purpose of removing Trump from office. It is truly amazing watching Leftists behave as if the purpose of their entire existence is to create hatred for Trump.

Leftists' relentless 24/7 efforts to brand Trump a racist wears me out. How on earth can Trump stand it? The answer is, millions of Americans are praying for him. Despite the Leftists' best efforts, Trump is still popular and winning; dismantling Obamacare http://bit.ly/2yzAuZe and more.

Trump is using legal executive orders to undo Obama's illegal executive actions. Trump is simply defending the law and our Constitution. http://washex.am/2yShw3l This has further enraged Leftists, making them even more committed to politically ripping Trump's head off.

Leftist evil is glaring when placed side by side with the decent everyday Americans in my new hometown.

Mary and I are experiencing wonderful culture shock; friendly people who appear to love God, family and country. Trump country!

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Draining the Swamp

For a businessman it must be frustrating to sit at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and realize how unbusinesslike is the government surrounding you.

President Trump issues executive orders, which can be stayed immediately by some obscure federal judge in a deep-blue state. He can ask the State Department to unwind the Iran treaty, but his own employees drag their feet. He negotiates with scores of congressmen who, like cats, enjoy being stroked but immediately go their own ungrateful way. And don’t even purr.

No wonder he is said to be frustrated. Some of these vexations come with the job. They are consequences of the very constitutional system he has sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. Separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and checks and balances are meant, in part, to frustrate over-ambitious office holders and their schemes.

These same constitutional devices, however, are also supposed to lead to better, more deliberative laws, judicial decisions faithful to the Constitution, and a chief executive who can energetically, to use e Federalist’s word, enforce the law and protect national security. They are supposed to produce good government, in other words.

But good government has not been forthcoming lately. This isn’t the Constitution’s fault. Its commands have been disregarded, or reinterpreted, and its operations distorted for so long and to such an extent that it functions as our frame of government much less reliably than you might think. Though still to be reckoned with, the capital-C Constitution yields far too often to the small-c (“living”) constitution, another word for government as usual in Washington, D.C.—that is, government as we have come to know, fear, and resent it since the 1960s.

When Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton concluded the political deal that put the nation’s capital on the banks of the Potomac, the District of Columbia was swampland; and to the metaphorical swamp it is returning. Trump is right about that. Some buildings, mostly monuments, museums, and memorials, continue to rise high above the muck, but others seem to inch lower every year.

Consider the Capitol, and the biggest legislative accomplishment it has seen since the 1980s, Obamacare. How could Congress have passed Obamacare the way it did in 2010—on a party-line vote, with corrupt bargains aplenty, and unconstitutional (big-C) provisions galore—and then turn around and fail to repeal the law the way it did this summer? “To lose one parent,” observed Oscar Wilde, “may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To have passed President Obama’s health bill may be regarded as a grave constitutional misfortune. But to fail to repeal it smacks of constitutional carelessness. Democrats were responsible the first time, Republicans the second. The former didn’t tell the truth about Obamacare, the latter (some of them, at least) about their oath to repeal it. How then are the American people supposed to reassert control over their own government, if neither party can be trusted?

But a breakdown of understanding helps to generate the loss of trust. Congress ties itself into a knot first on health care and now on tax reform in order to comply with its own arcane budget rules. Then, if decades of experience can be relied on, it will promptly toss all the budget and procedural rules aside—no separate authorization and appropriation bills for each department—in order to pass a hurried Continuing Resolution to fund the whole federal government at last year’s levels (which were carried over from the year before, and the year before that...), plus or minus a few billion here and there. Edward Luce of the Financial Times puts it nicely: the Congress is “a sausage-making factory that has forgotten how to make sausage.”

It isn’t just Congress. Across the government, the derelictions of duty mount, along with the sense that nobody here knows how to play this game. Few seem to miss good government because few remember it any more.

Trump’s executive orders valiantly reversing Obama’s can themselves be reversed by the next president. Organic problems in the executive agencies themselves, which cry out for legislative remedies—above all, the agencies’ propensity to combine legislative, judicial, and executive powers in the same set of hands, “the very definition of tyranny,” as Madison warned—go untreated.

Early in the administration, Stephen Bannon called for “deconstructing the administrative state.” That was a political bullseye, but it can’t succeed without a serious effort to reconstruct constitutional government at the same time. Now is the time to think not only about draining the swamp but about keeping it drained, through a wise system of dikes, dams, and pumping stations. To prepare such reforms, perhaps we need a presidential commission to examine all the leading elements of our constitutional dysfunction.

This essay will appear in the forthcoming fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Charles R. Kesler is editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

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Originally posted by Bigboreshooter:

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Originally posted by sigfreund:
I no longer have the respect for George II that I once did, but anyone who believes that the entire Bush “clan” is no better than the Clintons simply hasn’t been paying attention to what’s important.

But then it seems there has been a lot of that going around for a long time.

Really? The Bush clan (all of them) tried to give us a Hillary presidency. Let that soak in.

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Originally posted by ugeesta:
Wow. Corker just skewered Trump in an interview to CNN. The red meat to the Libs was just thrown into the middle of the room. This is all we are going to hear for the rest of the day.

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Originally posted by lbj:
Meanwhile, the winning continues.
And I'm so tired.