It was a good move and a powerful way to sum up what this impeachment trial has really been all about: Democrats impeaching the vote of the American people. However, it doesn’t look like Trump will get an acquittal vote without witnesses being called.

While Trump’s defense team appealed to the Senate to end the Democrats’ partisan trial with a quick vote to acquit, it’s looking more likely that at the very least John Bolton will be called as a witness. In a Tuesday evening meeting with Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that he didn’t have the votes needed to block witnesses or document requests. It’s a recognization that at least four Republican senators want to hear from Bolton, and a further admission that not calling witnesses will play into Senate Minority Leader Chuck scumbag-Schumer’s twisted narrative that Republicans aren’t interested in the truth, just in covering for Trump.

If calling witnesses is a forgone conclusion, what options does the GOP have to prevent the Democrats from drawing this charade out ad nauseam? First, simply vote to call Bolton and only Bolton. Democrats would immediately wail for adding Mick Mulvaney, but McConnell might have the votes to turn that demand aside.

Otherwise, McConnell could also put forward a list of witnesses that Republicans have long been calling for, including the loose lips liar-Bidens and the whistleblower, as part of a take-it-or-leave-it package deal. That would effectively put the pressure back on the Democrats to argue against certain witnesses. Of course, if scumbag-Schumer and company agreed to this deal, then McConnell would need Trump to agree to not invoke executive privilege, as that would only complicate matters for Republicans, delaying the process and playing into the Democrats’ “cover-up” narrative.

The key for McConnell and Republicans is to prevent Democrats from dictating or dragging out this process. The probability that Bolton will present any new or damning information is low, no matter how the Democrats and their media spin machine may claim, and it might even play in Trump’s favor. Wrangling over witnesses will play out over the next couple of days, with key votes later in the week.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68217?mailing_id=4829&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4829&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

I love Ireland for its natural beauty, its people, its food (some of it), its music, its writers and especially its elections, which are shorter, less costly and designed to engage citizens and boost voter turnout.

On January 14, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called a general election for February 8. That means a campaign of slightly more than three weeks. In the process, the Irish Parliament was dissolved. What a delightful thought. If only the U.S. Congress could be at least occasionally dissolved. It could use some dissolving, or at least disinfecting, after the toxic impeachment and trial of President Trump.

Unlike Irish politics, U.S. election campaigns increasingly resemble endless wars. Like those wars, campaigns cost too much and never seem to resolve the conflict.

Multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg says he is willing to spend up to $1 billion of his fortune to either win the Democratic nomination, or if he doesn’t, to help the eventual nominee defeat President Trump. Recent presidential campaigns have cost over 1 billion (some estimates put the cost of 2020 ad spending alone at over $6 billion), so Bloomberg’s spending will ensure this year’s presidential campaign will set another record.

As soon — or possibly before — this election season ends, people will be talking about 2024 and 2028. It never ends and real problems are rarely solved.

The process begins with candidates establishing “exploratory committees” during which the “explorer” speaks about carefully poll-tested subjects and repeats them ad nauseum, while fundraising and appearing on TV.

Does any of this time and money spent produce real solutions to obvious problems, such as reforming entitlement programs and reducing debt? If it did, by now, wouldn’t those solutions have been implemented? The goal of too many politicians is not solving problems but getting elected and then re-elected.

All of this contributes to generally low voter turnout compared to other developed nations. This gives power to activists on both the left and right, which skews the results and gives no clear picture of where most Americans would like to see the country go. For example, consider how often the parties exchange power in Congress and the presidency. Why do we elect a liberal like President Obama and then eight years later elect President Trump, who has been enacting and promoting the conservative agenda?

Ireland isn’t the only country that has sane campaign and election practices.

In 1926, the longest Canadian election — from announcement to voting — was 10 weeks.

According to mic.com, an American internet and media company based in New York City that caters to millennials, “Election spending is strictly limited in the U.K. Each party cannot spend more than $29.5 million in the year before the election. The New York Times reported that the combined spending of both major British political parties in 2010 came out to around the same amount as the American presidential candidates spent … on expenses related to raising money in 2012.”

German political parties may not release more than one 90-second television political ad during a campaign. That would not please U.S. networks and local stations, which make a fortune from political ads. TV expenses in America are a major contributor to the escalating costs of campaigns, even though studies show the ads change few minds.

Brazilian elections are held on weekends, making it more convenient.

Not every country’s campaign and election practices may be worthy of copying in the U.S., but some are. Why can’t we learn from others to improve the process by which we nominate candidates and elect presidents? We can, but will we? A corollary question: What’s stopping us? The answer: only our lack of will.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68180?mailing_id=4827&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4827&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Like clockwork, just after the president’s defense team decimated scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff’s entire impeachment case (more on that below), the two main media organs of the left, The New York Times and CNN, came rushing to the rescue.

Both outlets dropped a report that every Trump-hater is calling a “bombshell.” Here are my thoughts on the latest “revelations” allegedly from John Bolton’s upcoming book.

• There are no direct quotes from the Bolton manuscript in either the CNN or New York Times story because neither outlet has actually seen the book manuscript. It was simply “described” to them by “multiple people.” This is yet another attack piece by the liberal media using anonymous sources in a desperate attempt to reverse the last election and force Trump off the ballot in the next election.

• The reporters for the Times story, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, are well-known partisan hacks with histories of running reports later debunked as false. And the left-wing bias at The New York Times goes well beyond these two reporters.

• Whatever is in Bolton’s book, how would someone have leaked what is or is not in it? The leak could have come from the publisher. The book is currently at the White House, undergoing a review process to ensure it does not violate national-security agreements that people like Bolton have to sign when they work in the administration.

• That review is taking place at the National Security Council (NSC), which was expanded during the scumbag/liar-nObama years and is still filled with scumbag/liar-nObama loyalists. The so-called “whistleblower” was at the NSC. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother, Yevgeny, are at the NSC. By the way, one of Yevgeny Vindman's jobs is to review book manuscripts.

• A senior NSC employee, responsible for Russia and Ukraine policy, was recently escorted from the White House and placed on leave pending a security investigation. The official had only been there for a few months, after transferring from the State Department. I have no idea what that is all about, but it does seem like a big coincidence. One reason officials are abruptly removed from the White House is that they were caught leaking.

Even if Bolton’s claims are accurate, none of it changes the basic facts, which the Trump defense team outlined very well on Saturday. 

Nonetheless, the target of this Democrat Party press release disguised as a news story is a handful of Republican senators who could force so-called “witnesses” (to what?) to be called, dragging out this process and setting up a Kavanaugh-style situation with new accusations and new demands for witnesses every day.

In short, it would be a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition against the president just as the 2020 presidential campaign kicks into high gear.

By the way, many in the media are citing polling data showing that Americans overwhelmingly support calling witnesses during the Senate’s impeachment trial.  

What they fail to point out is that many Republicans support calling looae lips liar-Joe and Hunter Biden, as well as the so-called “whistleblower,” who has yet to face any serious public scrutiny or be crossed-examined by the president’s lawyers.

Defense Team Demolishes scumbag/liar-Schiff’s Case

President Trump’s defense team finally got the chance to make its case Saturday after scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff and the other House managers exhausted all their time. The presentation by Michael Purpura, deputy counsel to the president, was particularly effective. Here’s an excerpt of his remarks:

Once you sweep away all of the bluster and innuendo, the selective leaks … the staged public hearings, what we’re left with are six key facts that have not and will not change.

First, the transcript shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything. The paused security assistance funds aren’t even mentioned on the call.

Second, President Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that there was no quid pro quo and no pressure on them to review anything.

Third, President Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not even know … the security assistance was paused until the end of August, over a month after the July 25 call.

Fourth, not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting, or anything else.

Fifth, the security assistance flowed on September 11 and a presidential meeting took place on September 25 without the Ukrainian government announcing any investigations.

Finally, the Democrats’ blind drive to impeach the president does not and cannot change the fact as attested to by the Democrats’ own witnesses that President Trump has been a better friend and stronger supporter of Ukraine than his predecessor.

By the way, you may recall that last week I questioned why scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff was leading the impeachment charge given his own serious credibility issues. I’m pleased to report that the president’s lawyers made it a point to zero in on scumbag/liar-Schiff during their opening statements.

Never Again

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, revealing some of the worst horrors of the Holocaust. More than one million people were systematically murdered there. 

In 2005, as then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was threatening a second Holocaust by vowing to “wipe Israel off the map,” the United Nations voted to recognize January 27th as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

President Trump issued a proclamation recognizing the significance of this day and reaffirming “our steadfast commitment to confronting the vile poison of anti-Semitism wherever and whenever it arises.”

I join President Trump and all men and women of goodwill in standing against the evil of anti-Semitism and standing proudly with the Jewish state of Israel.

Speaking of Israel, Israeli officials noted over the weekend that the country’s aviation system came under sustained cyberattack during last week’s World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem. 

Israel fended off more than 800 attacks “aimed at disrupting the flight paths of more than 60 planes carrying heads of state, kings and presidents.” The attacks originated from Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, and Poland.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68173?mailing_id=4827&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4827&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

As our editor Thomas Gallatin noted Monday, The New York Times published a leaked report about a soon-to-be-published book by former National Security Advisor John Bolton. The Times alleges that Bolton alleges that President Donald Trump mentioned to him that freezing aid to Ukraine was, in part, motivated by Trump’s interest in having Ukraine’s government investigate corruption suspicions regarding loose lips liar-Joe and Hunter Biden.

The report about Bolton’s allegation re-warms the Demos’ “quid pro quo” claim that Trump used his office to threaten withholding aid in order to undermine his 2020 opponent, loose lips liar-Joe Biden. That is the centerpiece of the Democrat impeachment case. However, there is nothing illegal or impeachable about a president using his office, and the promise of U.S. aid, to insist a third-world nation clear up longstanding questions of internal corruption — particularly if tied to the actions of a former vice president and Ukrainian grossly-excessive “compensation” for his son Hunter.

Recall that loose lips liar-Joe Biden bragged on the record about how, in 2015 as VP, he coerced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor — which even The New York Times acknowledged benefited Hunter Biden, who was a target for investigation. As loose lips liar-Biden recounted, if Ukrainian officials didn’t “take action against the state prosecutor” (fire him), “I said … ‘We’re not going to give you the billion dollars. … I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ … Well, son of a b—h. He got fired.”

But there is somebody whose name did not appear in The New York Times revelation’s about Bolton’s book and the source of that information: Yevgeny Leonid Vindman.

For context, Democrat Party would have no contrived case against Trump (which is actually what impacts loose lips liar-Biden’s 2020 candidacy) if not for a Soviet Union-born U.S. Army officer, Alexander Semyonovich Vindman, on the National Security Council. We believe Vindman provided the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call to impeachment manager Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff’s Demo deep-state operative, Eric Ciaramella, the so-called “whistleblower.” Ciaramella’s collusion with scumbag/liar-Schiff launched the impeachment charges.

A day after The Times’ deliberately-timed “blockbuster” revelation, it is now reported that the twin brother of Alexander Semyonovich Vindman is U.S. Army officer Yevgeny Leonid Vindman. That is significant because Yevgeny Vindman is responsible for National Security Council reviews of publications by current and former NSC officials — like, say, John Bolton. Bolton submitted the transcript of his book for NSC review in December, and the NSC has not responded to requests regarding Yevgeny Vindman’s access to that review copy, or the implication that he could be in the pipeline of Demo operatives who informed The New York Times about the Bolton allegations.

Are scumbag/liar-Schiff and his dullard Demos that stupid…?  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68192?mailing_id=4827&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4827&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

It’s 2020, which means election year is upon us. And although Washington is currently preoccupied with the impeachment melodrama going on in the Senate, we should not lose sight of problems in our voter registration and election process that imperil the integrity of upcoming local, state, and federal elections.

When our citizens exercise their right to choose their leaders, their votes shouldn’t be diluted or stolen through fraud or administrative errors.

Unfortunately, that remains a problem, as demonstrated by the proven cases in The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database. We recently added 18 instances of election fraud to the database, which contains a sampling of almost 1,300 fraud cases from across the country.

There are other cases the database does not yet include but that should concern everyone.

Paul Pate, the Iowa secretary of state, recently referred nine Iowans to Polk County prosecutors for double voting in the 2018 election — that is, voting in Iowa and another state in the same election. Another 27 suspected occurrences of double voting are under investigation.

These problems were discovered through the state’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center program. Currently, 25 states and the District of Columbia are enrolled in the program, which allows states to compare voter registration information.

Unfortunately, not enough states are participating in either the Electronic Registration Information Center program or the similar Interstate Crosscheck program. New York and California, the states with the largest voting populations, are not in either program. Some states that do participate don’t do anything with the reports they receive on possible double voters. So it is still relatively easy to vote illegally in more than one state without getting caught or prosecuted.

As Pate correctly said, “One fraudulent vote is too many. It nullifies a legally cast vote. Iowans take the integrity of our elections very seriously, and we will not stand for people trying to cheat the system.”

If you think these incidents in Iowa are isolated, look at a recent entry from Heritage’s database.

Charles Eugene Cartier Jr. of New Hampshire just pled guilty to double voting in the 2016 general election, voting first in New Hampshire and then again in neighboring Massachusetts. He was the fourth person found guilty of duplicate voting in New Hampshire just in the last year.

Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t the only states to uncover instances of duplicate voting. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has referred 18 cases of duplicate voting in his state to appropriate prosecutors — all discovered through the state’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center.

But can one vote actually affect the outcome of an election?

Absolutely! From 2013 to 2017, 56 elections in Ohio resulted in a tie vote and 86 were decided by only one vote.

The problems in Ohio don’t stop with duplicate voting, either. LaRose also found 77 noncitizens who cast ballots and 277 aliens who were on the voter rolls.

Similarly, Illinois recently was forced to admit it had mistakenly registered 574 aliens through its new “automatic voter registration” system, 16 of whom cast votes in the 2018 election. State officials minimized the problem by saying the glitch in the system that caused this has been fixed.

But Illinois has long had a problem with aliens registering and voting, and election officials there never have had any interest in doing anything about it. It has no checks in place to verify that individuals registering to vote are citizens. The U.S. Justice Department prosecuted dozens of aliens for voting in the 1982 election in Chicago, and the U.S. attorney in Chicago at the time, Dan Webb, estimated that there were thousands of aliens registered and voting in Chicago.

In 2012 and 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued decisions involving three different aliens who illegally registered and voted in Illinois, two of whom did so through the DMV. This wasn’t prevented by the DMV or detected by Illinois election officials; the aliens were caught only when they applied for a change of status with the Department of Homeland Security.

Still think we don’t have a problem with alien voting? Last year, Pennsylvania officials admitted that more than 11,000 aliens had registered to vote in the state, also through a glitch in their DMV system.

Over the past few years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation has issued a series of reports on aliens who self-reported to election officials that they were registered. That included:

— 86 aliens registered to vote in Philadelphia.

— 5,556 aliens in Virginia who were removed as registered voters but not before a third of them had cast ballots.

— More than 1,000 aliens in 11 counties in New Jersey.

— Almost 5,000 aliens in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, sanctuary jurisdictions in seven states, 11 townships in Michigan, and Palm Beach, Florida, many of whom had voted before they were removed.

These aliens were removed only because they contacted election officials to inform them that they were not U.S. citizens. There is no telling how many more aliens are illegally registered and voting who are not being detected by election officials.

The stakes of the 2020 election are high for all involved. But the stakes are even higher for the voting public who have a right to fair and secure elections.

Combating election fraud head-on is the only way to secure our elections, and in turn, the sanctity of the democratic process.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68148?mailing_id=4825&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4825&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Yesterday was one of my favorite days of the year — the annual March for Life. Every year hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington, DC — in January! — to march for the sanctity of life. That tells you something about the dedication of the pro-life movement.

Usually the “mainstream media” totally ignores the march. But it couldn’t ignore this year’s march because President Trump made history by becoming the first sitting United States president to address the March for Life! Here are a few excerpts of the president’s remarks:

We’re here for a very simple reason — to defend the right of every child, born and unborn, to fulfill their God-given potential. For 47 years, Americans of all backgrounds have traveled from across the country to stand for life. And today as president of the United States, I am truly proud to stand with you…

All of us here today understand an eternal truth — every child is a precious and sacred gift from God. Together we must protect, cherish and defend the dignity and the sanctity of every human life. When we see the image of a baby in the womb, we glimpse the majesty of God’s creation… As the Bible tells us, each person is wonderfully made…

To all of the moms here today, we celebrate you and we declare that mothers are heroes. Your strength, devotion and drive is what powers our nation. And because of you our country has been blessed with amazing souls who have changed the course of human history…

We know this: Every life brings love into this world. Every child brings joy to a family. Every person is worth protecting. And above all, we know that every human soul is divine and every human life, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of Almighty God.

If you missed the president’s March for Life address, you can watch it here.

And the president is continuing to lead on this critical issue. Yesterday, the Trump administration formally notified the state of California that it is violating federal conscience laws by mandating abortion coverage in all health-insurance policies. 

The state’s abortion mandate was challenged by an order of Catholic nuns and Skyline Wesleyan Church. The state has 30 days to repeal the mandate or risk losing federal funds.

In related news, the Trump campaign announced its “Pro-Life Voices for Trump” coalition yesterday. Having dedicated my entire adult life to defending the sanctity of life, I am proud to be an advisory-board member of “Pro-Life Voices for Trump.” This president has proudly stood for the unalienable right to life, and I am proud to stand with him!

Pro-Life America

A new Marist poll released this week finds overwhelming support for pro-life policies. For example:

• 70% of those surveyed support significant limits to abortion.

• Only 21% support abortion on demand.

• 60% oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.

• 75% oppose the use of their tax dollars to perform abortions overseas.

• 62% believe the Supreme Court should allow states to regulate abortion.

In the coming weeks, the court will have an opportunity to do just that when it considers a challenge to a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to meet certain health and safety standards. 

The Louisiana law is similar to Texas law the high court struck down in 2016 in a 5-3 vote after Justice Scalia had passed away. But the Supreme Court has changed significantly since then. President Trump nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia and Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, who was the deciding fifth vote in the Texas case.

The Deep State Scandal

Late Thursday there was breaking news that the Justice Department informed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it was wrong to renew the last two warrants to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Better late than never, I guess.

Many media outlets glossed over the news, often with tepid headlines that downplayed the importance of the story. We’ve just been told that the Deep State effort to investigate, undermine, and delegitimize a duly elected president, by spying on an innocent American who was part of the campaign, was illegal! 

Every citizen should be outraged by this gross abuse of power and the gross politicization of our intelligence agencies. Once again, we’re seeing that President Trump was right to fire scumbag-James Comey, that all the hype about Russian collusion was an absurd hoax, that the Mueller investigation was a colossal waste of $30 million.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Rachel Maddow or scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff to apologize for misleading the country or accusing the president of being a Russian asset.

The Wuhan Virus

A few folks have asked me this week how concerned they should be about the coronavirus from Wuhan, China. For now, I think the answer is that we haven’t been told enough yet to know how concerned we should be. 

Chinese communist authorities are notorious for hiding the truth. We don’t know for certain how many people are infected and how many have died. We don’t know enough yet to know for certain if this is just another random flu or another Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918. 

Rising additional concern is that communist China’s reaction to this outbreak seems over the top based on what we know so far. To shut down travel and isolate Wuhan, a city of 11 million people and bigger than New York City, does not seem like a reasonable reaction if just a variant of the flu is going around. According to the latest news, Beijing has now imposed restrictions on more than 30 million people.

Here’s another curiosity: China announced that it is immediately constructing a new hospital — just for the people stricken with the “Wuhan virus.” It also closed 70,000 movies theaters across the country in order to discourage crowds. That makes sense if this is a “killer virus." 

On the other hand, thousands of people may have contracted the virus but never got sick enough to go to the hospital and have since recovered. If that ends up being true, then this is just another viral flu.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68146?mailing_id=4825&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4825&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=bod

I must have said it a dozen times since the Democrats’ impeachment miniseries took over our televisions, but I’ll say it again.

The Democrats and their allies in the liberal media think history began this morning when they rolled out of the left side of their beds.

It happened again during the Democrats’ opening impeachment tirades in the Senate.

Democrats are still wasting our time — and ignoring their jobs — trying to prove that President Trump should be impeached because he abused the power of his office and because he obstructed Congress by claiming executive privilege.

The obstruction charges against Trump are for refusing to let administration officials testify before the impeachment hearings in the House and for withholding documents the House had requested.

Well, if using or threatening to use executive privilege for those reasons are impeachable crimes, George Washington and every president since JFK, including my father, is guilty — often on multiple counts.

In 1962, for example, JFK used executive privilege to order his military adviser General Maxwell Taylor to refuse to testify before a congressional committee investigating the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Between 1980 and 2012 it was used 25 times.

President scumbag/liar-Clinton, the all-time modern leader, asserted executive privilege 14 times to try to keep his staff from appearing before various grand juries and congressional committees.

George W. Bush used it six times, including in 2008 when he told his Attorney General to assert executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena for documents related to an investigation into who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

Meanwhile, President scumbag/liar-nObama employed executive privilege so many times that even the liberal media of the day questioned the legitimacy of invoking it.

The prime example was the infamous “Fast and Furious” case in 2012, when Attorney General scumbag-Eric Holder used executive privilege to shield documents from Congress that were related to the scumbag/liar-nObama administration’s program to let illegally purchased guns flow across the Mexican border.

Congress obviously didn’t rush out and impeach those pre-Trump presidents for obstructing Congress or for posing an existential threat to the U.S. Constitution.

They let the legitimacy of invoking executive privilege in each case be decided in the courts, where it belonged. That’s why we have three branches of government.

But now, thanks to the Democrats’ blind hatred of President Trump, the bar has been lowered to where if a president doesn’t immediately roll over and give Congress whatever people or documents it wants, he’ll get impeached.

It’s been frustrating having to watch the first three ridiculously long, tedious days of the Senate impeachment hearings, which Democrats are cynically using as a weapon to stain Trump ahead of the 2020 election and hurt some Republican senators who face tight races in the fall.

Everyone has known for months what the outcome of the House Democrats’ impeachment show trial will be — the Republican Senate will never find Trump guilty.

I’m starting to really feel sorry for the members of the Senate who are trapped at their desks for twelve-hours at a time without their smartphones.

They have to sit in silence as scumbag/liar-Schiff and his solemn crew say over and over again how the U.S. Constitution and our national security were put at risk by a phone call our treasonous president made to the president of Ukraine last summer.

All those poor senators are allowed to drink is milk and water. The rest us watching the hearings on TV are lucky.

We can always get up and do a few Jello shots or drink some tequila to pass the time and ease the pain.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68139?mailing_id=4825&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4825&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The House Democrats’ argument for convicting Trump is based on a narrative of their own creation. They argue that Trump placed a hold on $400 million in aid to Ukraine to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky into “digging up dirt” or at least announcing an investigation into loose lips liar-Joe and Hunter Biden. They contend that in so doing Trump abused the power of the presidency for his own personal benefit — thus he was somehow attempting to rig the 2020 election. (Kind of like what scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton actually did to Trump in 2016, but we digress.) Their “evidence” for Trump’s corruption is an alleged quid pro quo … that never happened. To put it bluntly, Democrats have impeached Trump over his supposed motives for something that did not happen. Thought crimes.

After the obviously timed Bolton curveball, the Trump defense team responded directly and effectively. “Nothing in the Bolton manuscript would rise to the level of an abuse of power or impeachable offense,” stated Alan Dershowitz. “That is clear from history. That is clear from the language of the Constitution. You cannot turn conduct that is not impeachable into impeachable conduct simply by using words like quid pro quo and personal benefit. It is inconceivable that the Framers would have intended so politically loaded and promiscuously deployed a term as ‘abuse of power’ to be weaponized as a tool of impeachment. It is precisely the kind of vague, open-ended, and suggestive term that the Framers feared and rejected.”

The president’s defense team also disputed the Democrats’ assertion that Trump’s motive for wanting Ukraine to open investigations was not concern over corruption but purely intended to benefit his 2020 campaign. “The president wasn’t ‘caught,’ as the House managers allege. The managers are wrong,” Deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura stated. “All of this … demonstrates that there was no connection between security assistance and investigation.”

Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer, pointedly noted, “Asking a foreign leader to get to the bottom of issues of corruption is not a violation of an oath.” And regarding the questions of corruption surrounding the loose lips liar-Bidens, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi highlighted the litany of instances in which numerous individuals both within the mainstream media and even the scumbag/liar-nObama administration raised red flags. She also observed, “Every witness who was asked about Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma agreed there was a potential appearance of conflict.” She further noted, “The House managers talked about 400 times, but they never gave you the full picture. Here are those who did: The United Kingdom Serious Fraud Unit, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, … ‘ABC Good Morning America’, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ukrainian law enforcement, and the scumbag/liar-nObama State Department itself. They all thought there was cause to raise the issue about the loose lips liar-Bidens and Burisma.”

Ken Starr warned against allowing the precedent of so grossly politicizing impeachment: “We are living in what can aptly be described as the age of impeachment. In the House, resolution after resolution, month after month, has called for the president’s impeachment. How did we get here? … Presidential impeachment has become a weapon to be wielded against one’s political opponent.” Meanwhile, the Democrats’ argument that Trump’s refusal to give documents and witnesses to the House equated to obstruction of Congress is actually evidence of a “runaway House,” Starr insisted. “If there is a dispute between the people’s House and the president of the United States over the availability of documents or witnesses, and there is in each and every administration — then go to court. It really is as simple as that.”

Finally, due to the leaked Bolton manuscripts, it now appears more likely that a sufficient number of Senate Republicans will vote to call witnesses. However, this also gives Republicans an opening to call witnesses Democrats vehemently objected to, such as Hunter Biden and the whistleblower. The timed Bolton leak has put Republicans in a tough spot, but Democrats may ultimately regret opening Pandora’s Box.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68190?mailing_id=4827&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4827&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

After Sanders began a non-answer, O'Donnell broke in, “You don’t know how much your plan costs?”

“You don’t know. Nobody knows,” commie-Sanders admitted. “This is impossible to predict.”

O'Donnell responded with appropriate incredulity, “You’re going to propose a plan to the American people and you’re not going to tell them how much it costs?”

That’s socialism in a nutshell. Oh, there might be some numbers out there, but the negative reaction against those numbers has left commie-Bernie increasingly unwilling to offer estimates. This isn’t the first time he’s refused to discuss a price tag.

That price tag? Try at least $32 trillion for Medicare for All or $16 trillion for commie-Bernie’s version of the $93 trillion Green New Deal. The $60 trillion O'Donnell references is CNN’s analysis of the commie-Sanders agenda, though it also isn’t comprehensive or accurate.

No matter what Democrat wins the nomination, his or her agenda will dwarf Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s spendthrift “stimulus” and scumbag/liar-nObamaCare. Every Democrat candidate want to “pay for” this income redistribution by raising taxes. They claim it will be only on the wealthy — the billionaires commie-Sanders says shouldn’t even exist — but those tax increases will hit everyone. Regardless, even if raising taxes brought in the vast revenue Democrats claim, it wouldn’t pay for what the government spends now, let alone new or expanded programs.

And that’s why we can all expect the Leftmedia to forget all about asking these questions of the eventual Democrat nominee.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68159?mailing_id=4825&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4825&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body 

Let’s begin with a reality check. The current impeachment effort is only the latest vehicle being used to remove Trump from office. Previous vehicles included the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, and the Russia investigation. Prior to his inauguration, the media campaigned for Democrats to reach a deal with Republicans and persuade Electoral College electors to defect, and The Washington Post reported efforts to impeach Trump had begun 17 minutes after he was sworn into office. Far more important, before Trump’s election, the scxumbag/liar-nObama administration  initiated its scandalous Crossfire Hurricane project to investigate Russian collusion with members of Trump’s campaign staff and the president himself.

Reality check number two: Any and all collusion that ostensibly occurred did so while the scumnbag/liar-nObama  administration was in charge. Moreover, rather than warn fellow Americans from the opposition party that the Russians might be seeking to influence the 2016 election, Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s administration instead chose to assume those opposition party members were committing treason, thereby justifying all methods, even felonious ones, used to stop them.

On to double standards. The same Democrat/Media Complex that assured Americans for three years Trump’s collusion with Russia was incontrovertible were completely sanguine regarding scumbag/liar-nObama’s open-mic assurance to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he’d “have more flexibility” regarding his relationship with Vladimir Putin. And they remained sanguine two years later, when Putin seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.

That same year, then-Vice President loose lips liar-Joe Biden openly bragged about getting Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption at Burisma, an energy company paying loose lips liar-Biden’s son, Hunter,  $83,000 per month by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid. By contrast, Trump allegedly  threatened (belied by a transcript of the conversation in question) to withhold funds that weren’t ultimately withheld in return for an investigation that was never undertaken.

But Trump is the one guilty of a “quid pro quo,” and any investigation into the corrupt machinations of loose lips liar-Biden and his son can precipitate impeachment proceedings?

Robert Mueller’s investigation was tasked with finding Russian collusion. Yet it somehow managed to avoid  determining how the thoroughly discredited Steele dossier — bought and paid for by scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and the DNC — gained credibility among the highest echelons of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

The bigger picture? Does anyone seriously think President Trump could, among many things, gotten away with having members of his executive branch file warrants with the FISA Court under false pretenses; spying on members of Congress and the press; running weapons to Mexican cartel members; taking out an American citizen with a drone strike; selectively targeting conservative groups using the IRS; communicating with his secretary of state on an unsecured server; and sending pallets of cash to a nation sponsoring worldwide terror — without the deafening clamor for impeachment Barack scumbag/liar-nObama miraculously avoided?

Eight years of the scumbag/liar-nObama administration clearly demonstrated that the media are willfully blind — and justice is anything but. Yet the weaponization of impeachment has moved this nation into uncharted territory. Americans now live in a nation where private presidential phone calls with foreign counterparts “will be leaked and printed in the major media,” and impeachment will be a “casual affair” to be undertaken routinely, whenever the opposition party has a House majority, even if it is solely used for political gain, Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Moreover, as liar-Nancy Pelosi amply demonstrated, timeliness is now irrelevant. “Once a president is impeached,” Hanson adds, “the writ may simply sit until the House majority feels that the climate or polls are ripe to refer the articles to the Senate for trial, whether in days, weeks, months, or years.”

Equally irrelevant is the “term high crimes and misdemeanors.” Nothing illuminates that better than charging Trump with obstruction of Congress, a nonsensical assertion borne out of the need for Democrats to keep impeachment front and center, rather than wait for the Supreme Court to ultimately decide what obligations co-equal legislative and executive branches of government have to each other.

“Whistleblower” is now a meaningless term. Going forward, anyone with second- or third-hand information, working in coordination with the opposition party, will be deemed acceptable and credible, even as their identity can remain secret indefinitely.

Investigations? Testimony can be taken in secret and  selectively leaked to the media for partisan advantage, while witnesses can be prevented from answering questions posed by the opposing party. Law enforcement and intel agencies can hire foreign nationals, use  operatives to co-opt the media, employ multiple “confidential informants” (read: spies) to glean information about members of the opposing party’s campaign, and unmask private citizens involved with those campaigns, all under the auspices of protecting national security.

To advance those investigations, any surveillance requiring a warrant can be rubber-stamped by FISA Court jurists, whose knowledge of being lied to will not precipitate legal consequences, but simply demands for “reform” — from the liars themselves.

Remarkably, Democrats and their contemptible allies have done it all while ignoring one of the oldest adages known to man: what goes around comes around. They have not only set the stage for the permanent paralyzation of government, they are well on their way toward making elections utterly irrelevant.

In fact, their point man in this charade, documented liar scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff, has made that abundantly clear. “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box,” he insisted. “For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

In other words, American voters are too stupid to be trusted, and unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats running the administrative state must prevail. Thus, an acquittal of Trump by the Senate will be deemed a “miscarriage of justice.” In turn, that miscarriage of justice will make the 2020 election “illegitimate,” unless a Democrat prevails.

If Trump wins? Additional impeachment proceedings. If a Democrat becomes president? The only flaw in Hanson’s argument is the traditional cowardice amply demonstrated by a GOP that would likely allow a Democrat Party to continue running roughshod over the Constitution, undoubtedly promoted under the absurd auspices of “saving the republic.”

By then, there will be no republic to save. “We are now on new anti-constitutional grounds, and the United States will probably never return to the constitutional customs and traditions of its first 233 years,” Hanson predicts.

Thus, Americans are finally discovering what fundamental transformation is really all about. A constitutionally contemptuous Democrat Party, suffused with a lust for uncontested power and thoroughly convinced of its moral superiority, has precipitated the ultimate irony:

Democrats had to destroy the nation in order to “save” it.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68152?mailing_id=4825&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4825&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Vice President Mike Pence delivered a powerful address yesterday at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem. Dozens of world leaders gathered together at Yad Vashem to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I strongly encourage you to a take a few moments to watch the vice president’s address.

As the vice president noted in his remarks, it was just three years after liberation of Auschwitz that the world recognized the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland. After witnessing the worst genocide in the history of the world, the Nazi attempt to wipe out the seed of Abraham, the world witnessed the fulfillment of God’s promise as the Jews were restored to their homeland. 

My friend Dr. James Dobson has often told the story of his father listening to the radio in May 1948 and saying to him, “Jimmy, the Gospel prophesies have just been fulfilled!” It surely was as it is written in Ezekiel 37: “My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”

Sadly, yet another study has found that our general knowledge of the Holocaust is lacking. For example, only 45% of those surveyed knew that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. More than one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. More than 200,000 were children. 

Unfortunately, the ancient evil of anti-Semitism is once again on the rise. It takes root in every political philosophy, every cultural movement, and in every nation. 

That’s why at a special Capitol Hill hearing on anti-Semitism held recently by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, I made the point that anti-Semitism was too dangerous to be used merely as a political cudgel. All of us must confront it wherever we find it.

If anti-Semites are claiming to be conservatives, then conservatives must reject them. If progressives are embracing anti-Semitic narratives, then progressives must reject them. 

If an imam at a local mosque is preaching Jew-hatred, then decent Muslims attending that mosque should be the first to reject it. If your pastor says that all the blessings in the Bible have been transferred to Christians, then you should confront him for his flawed theology.

In the same way, I was pleased to see that Vice President Pence urged world leaders to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran. During his address yesterday, Pence denounced the ayatollah’s regime as “the leading state purveyor of anti-Semitism, the one government in the world that denies the Holocaust as a matter of state policy and threatens to wipe Israel off the map.”

Trump Makes History

Today, President Donald Trump will make history when he becomes the first president to address the March for Life in person. When I served in the White House, President Ronald Reagan addressed the March for Life remotely, and I was proud to have had a hand in drafting his remarks. 

In the past, we have seen Republican presidential candidates who claimed to be pro-life, but they were much more comfortable making the case for lower marginal tax rates than the sanctity of life. That has changed with the Trump/Pence team. 

This president wants to fight on this issue. Remember this exchange between Donald Trump and scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton in the final 2016 debate? And this president is continuing to lead on this issue.

• He cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

• He reinstated Reagan's Mexico City Policy.

• He’s fighting the United Nation's efforts to promote abortion.

• He’s appointed nearly 200 constitutionalist judges, including two Supreme Court justices.

• He’s fighting progressive attempts to resurrect the pro-abortion Equal Rights Amendment.

• And Wednesday, the Justice Department filed a brief supporting Ohio’s law protecting unborn children with Down syndrome.

The scumbag/liar-Schiff Show

Wednesday, Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, took to the Senate floor and spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke. He talked for several hours. 

But as Rep. Mark Meadows put it, “We quit counting after 12 different false statements made by scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff.” This is a key point to keep in mind because the left has repeatedly lied about the president. 

For example, when local residents in Charlottesville, Virginia, attempted to rally in support of maintaining historical Civil War monuments, some really bad people showed up to exploit the rally. They staged a torch-light parade and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.

Referring to the debate over historical moments, the president said there were good people on both sides of that issue, and he specifically stated that he was not talking about the neo-Nazis. 

But leading Democrats like Joe Biden and every mainstream media outlet omitted Trump’s condemnation of neo-Nazis and presented his quote as if he called the neo-Nazis “very fine people.” That's a disgusting lie. Yet this is being told to minority communities and deepening divisions in our country.

When Trump joked at a campaign rally about Russian hackers finding scumbag/liar-Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails, everyone in the crowd laughed because they knew it was a joke. But the left and its media allies continue to insist that Trump was literally asking Vladimir Putin to hack into the DNC and interfere in our election. scumbag/liar-Schiff repeated that lie on the Senate floor Wednesday. 

During an interview about the Russia investigation, Trump once suggested that he might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He said that Article II of the Constitution gives him the authority “to do whatever I want” when it comes to the personnel who work for the executive branch. Democrats have taken that statement out of context and twisted it to suggest that Trump believes he’s a dictator. 

Of course, the president doesn’t think he’s a dictator. In fact, he has been obstructed by unelected judges more than any president in history.

Here’s the bottom line: scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff repeatedly insisted that Trump colluded with Russia, that the evidence was “in plain sight.” He insisted that the FBI acted properly when it spied on the Trump campaign. He lied about not having contact with the so-called “whistleblower." 

Why would senators or the American people believe anything scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff says?

The scumbag/liar-Schiff Bowl vs. the Super Bowl

Initial ratings suggest that 11 million people tuned in to watch the first day of the Senate’s impeachment proceedings. That’s down by nearly three million from the opening day of the House impeachment hearings. 

In comparison, about 98 million people watched the Super Bowl last year.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68112?mailing_id=4821&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4821&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Witnesses and the whistleblower

Senators continue to haggle over whether to call additional witnesses and who those witnesses might be. Democrats still want former National Security Advisor John Bolton and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Republicans maintain that the House should have done its job in calling witnesses and that the Senate is responsible only to try the evidence at hand. Nevertheless, if witnesses must be called, they want to hear from loose lips liar-Joe and Hunter Biden and the so-called “whistleblower.”

The Democrats’ entire case hinges on Trump’s request that Ukrainian officials investigate Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal with Burisma. Anyone with an IQ above 50 can connect the dots between Hunter’s profiteering and the political position of then VP loose lips liar-Joe Biden. To suggest that they would not be on a witness list is absurd. Democrats even opened the door to Hunter’s testimony by protesting a bit too loudly that he has nothing to do with corruption allegations against his father.

The “whistleblower” and his handler scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff would also have to be on the witness list. When that collusion was revealed, suddenly Democrats no longer wanted to hear from the whistleblower.

He just became even less desirable this week after Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed this inconvenient tidbit: “Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella — the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous ‘whistleblower’ who touched off Trump’s impeachment — was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues.”

And Fox News’s Laura Ingraham reported that the whistleblower also has some extremely inconvenient connections to the loose lips liar-Bidens and Burisma.

Clearly, Democrats don’t want any of these witnesses to see the light of day in the Senate trial — with the exception of commie-Bernie Sanders, whose rising political fortunes would clearly benefit from seeing the loose lips liar-Bidens locked up in Senate testimony.

scumbag liar-Nadler’s accusation backfires

House Judiciary Committee Chairman scumbag liar-Jerry Nadler, whose personal animus toward Trump dates back to the early 1980s, challenged Republicans on witnesses. “Will you bring Ambassador Bolton here? Will you permit us to present you with the entire record of the president’s misconduct?” he asked. “Or will you instead choose to be complicit in the president’s cover-up? So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a cover-up, voting to deny witnesses. [It’s] an absolutely indefensible vote — obviously a treacherous vote.”

That “cover-up” language is part of the Democrats’ strategy to win the Senate by accusing Senate Republicans of obstructing a fair trial. But, for now at least, scumbag liar-Nadler’s hyperbolic charge appears to have backfired.

GOP senators rejected Nadler’s characterization. rino-Susan Collins said she was “stunned by Congressman scumbag liar-Nadler’s approach,” while rino-Lisa Murkowski said she was “offended,” and Ron Johnson called scumbag liar- it “offensive.”

scumbag liar-Nadler may have just united Republicans against voting to call any witnesses. Nice work.

scumbag/liar-Schiff’s whiff

House Intelligence Committee Chairman scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff gave an impassioned speech Thursday to make the case against Trump, though he led with a “joke” about hoping senators “don’t choose imprisonment” over paying attention to him. He opined at length with an exceedingly mendacious interpretation of events before concluding, “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter.”

To hear scumbag/liar-Schiff lecture on right and truth is laughably absurd. scumbag/liar-Schiff was completely wrong about FISA surveillance of Trump’s campaign, which launched impeachment charade No. 1. He’s the man who, as we mentioned, colluded with the whistleblower through his staffers and then lied about it. He knew the case against Trump was so weak he fabricated Trump’s conversation for dramatic effect.

Moreover, scumbag/liar-Schiff’s party calls a preborn baby a clump of cells that can be aborted. scumbag/liar-Schiff’s party says a man can claim he’s a woman and play women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms. scumbag/liar-Schiff’s party claims that marriage can mean two men. scumbag/liar-Schiff’s party believes that taking your money to pay someone else who doesn’t work is the moral thing to do. scumbag/liar-Schiff’s party believes that Trump is corrupt and that American voters can’t be trusted to weigh in.

Is this really the man or the party to judge the president or to lecture anyone about right and truth?   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68134?mailing_id=4821&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4821&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

I love definitions because they help focus the mind. For decades, we are said to have been in a culture war. As in any war, it helps to know one’s enemy.

One online dictionary defines culture this way: “the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.”

One secondary definition is under the subheading anthropology: “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” I especially like that second definition.

So culture is a sum total. It is also about ways of living by more than a few humans, with all of that being willed to succeeding generations.

Those of a certain age remember what their parents or grandparents transmitted to them following the Great Depression and World War II. It was the sum total of values and beliefs they shared, the values held by those Tom Brokaw correctly labeled the greatest generation.

Yes, they were imperfect, just as we are, sinners incapable of saving themselves apart from God’s mercy and grace. But they saved a nation — several nations — because they embodied the things that mattered most in life: duty, honor, and country. They not only wanted to restore such things to Europe and preserve them for America but also sought to pass these down to their children and grandchildren. They had learned them from their parents. It is why they went to war, and although thousands did not come back, their values remained, at least until the self-indulgent 1960s and the generation that followed (as critiqued in my 1994 book, The Things That Matter Most).

Today that clash of their culture with ours is stark. My grandmother once admonished me for using words she said nice young men don’t say in public. The words that offended her were toilet paper. Imagine what this woman, born in 1888, would think of the words heard on TV, in movies, and on the streets today.

Return to the definition given earlier and particularly notice the words built up. This suggests to me that the way to change a culture is not from the top down but from the bottom up, not through Washington but through the human heart and individual choices.

It might be too late for that, but it is not too late to make choices for ourselves and for our families, especially where we send our young children to school. It amazes me that so many parents — conservative and Christian parents — see no problem in sending their children to state schools, where they learn they evolved from slime and the reason they like bananas on their cereal is that their nearest relative is at the zoo.

Okay, I exaggerate, but not by much. If your child is a soldier, would you be okay if he or she were trained in a country that was the enemy of the United States? Doesn’t the question answer itself? Why, then, would you knowingly and willingly send your child to a school — and then a university — that undermines the values, beliefs, and faith you have tried to teach them?

Don’t answer that you want them to be ambassadors for God. I have met many ambassadors, and none are eight-year-olds. Children, like soldiers, must be trained and indoctrinated with the knowledge and principles of the nation (or kingdom) they are expected to serve. Look up two words in a concordance. They are teach and learn. The verses in Scripture that include these words instruct godly parents in what God expects when it comes to children on loan to us for a brief time.

Legions of young men and women taught such things will build up a culture and ultimately a nation. It is the only way to win a culture war.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68088?mailing_id=4819&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4819&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The first day of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump was largely taken up with procedural issues. Senators argued over and then adopted an organizing resolution laying out the rules under which the trial will proceed.

In his opening statement, Minority Leader Chuck scumbag-Schumer, D-N.Y., charged that the resolution proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was “partisan,” a “national disgrace,” and a “dark day in Senate history.”

All of this heated rhetoric was based on scumbag-Schumer’s misleading claim that McConnell’s resolution was unfair and significantly different from the resolution governing scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton’s trial. Yet the resolution adopted by the Senate (after Republicans voted down and tabled a series of Democratic amendments) is substantially the same as the resolution approved by the Senate 100-0 for the scumbag/liar-Clinton trial.

On Thursday of last week, the preliminaries required to even debate this issue were accomplished when Senate President Pro Tempore Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, swore in the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who will preside over the trial under Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution. Roberts then swore in all of the senators.

Both sides have already filed briefs with the Senate. On Jan. 18 the House filed a 100-plus page “Trial Memorandum” and “Statement of Material Facts” outlining its case against President Trump.

The president filed an answer the same day, disputing the basis for his impeachment, calling it a “dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president” and “a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.”

The House then filed a response to the president on Jan. 20 accusing the president of conduct intended to “bury the evidence” against him and to “cheat in the next election.” The president’s lawyers filed their own 100-page plus “Trial Memorandum” with an extensive appendix also on Jan. 20.

So what are the differences between the scumbag/liar-Clinton and Trump resolutions? Both provide that the House shall file with the Senate all “publicly available materials” produced by the House committees involved in the impeachment investigations, including “transcripts of public hearings or mark-ups and any materials printed by the House of Representatives” pursuant to the impeachment resolutions.

The only difference is that in the scumbag/liar-Clinton case, these materials were automatically admitted into evidence. The Trump resolution provides that they will also be admitted into evidence “subject to any hearsay, evidentiary, or other objections that the President may make after opening presentations." That makes sense from both a fairness and fundamental due process standpoint.

Why? Because in the scumbag/liar-Clinton impeachment investigation, unlike the Trump impeachment investigation, representatives of both political parties were allowed to fully cross-examine and call witnesses of their choice.

In the current case, House Democrats changed the rules to prevent Republicans and the president’s lawyers from being able to fully participate, cross-examine witnesses, or even call witnesses they believed had important relevant information.

So it makes sense for the president’s legal team to be able to object to hearsay evidence, evidence produced by witnesses that neither they nor Republicans representatives were allowed to fully question, or where they raise serious questions about the credibility (or lack thereof) and relevance of particular testimony produced in the House.

Just like in the scumbag/liar-Clinton impeachment, each side is being given 24 hours to present its case. Both sides took three days to do so in the scumbag/liar-Clinton case, and the revised resolution also gives both parties 24 hours over "3 session days” to make their arguments.

The Trump resolution — just like the scumbag/liar-Clinton resolution — then gives senators 16 hours to question the prosecution and the defense teams, although they must do so through written questions submitted by the chief justice.

While Democrats have been pushing to decide on whether or not to call witnesses now before the trial has even begun, that would violate the procedures approved during the scumbag/liar-Clinton impeachment, which are replicated in the Trump resolution.

Then and now, the Senate will decide whether witnesses should be called only after both sides have presented their case and the senators have had the opportunity to submit their questions to the House managers and the president’s defense team.

Senators were given up to six hours to make and argue motions about subpoenaing witnesses or evidence not in the record during the scumbag/liar-Clinton trial; this revised resolution gives senators up to four hours to do so.

Furthermore, both impeachment resolutions have the same procedure when it comes to witnesses if the Senate decides to allow any to be called. No live witnesses, instead, the parties will take their depositions and the Senate will then decide which witnesses will appear through their taped depositions.

While there was a lot of political theater on Tuesday in which the Democrats claimed the system has been “rigged” and that Sen. McConnell and Republicans were not following precedent, the revised resolution sets up procedural rules that adhere to the scumbag/liar-Clinton precedent very closely.

The only substantive change is the ability of the president’s team to object to evidence produced by the House, a change necessitated by the way in which Democrats themselves changed the rules in the House and failed to follow the scumbag/liar-Clinton precedents used during the scumbag/liar-Clinton impeachment investigation

It is not the Senate’s job to complete the House’s investigation. If House Democrats believe they did not talk to all of the relevant witnesses, why did they speed ahead with an impeachment vote before doing so?

The substantive fireworks in the impeachment trial will start Wednesday. That’s when the Senate will hear any motions filed by the parties (other than motions to subpoena witnesses or documents) and House managers will begin to present their case against the president.

Everyone in Washington will be watching. Will the rest of America? 

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68087?mailing_id=4819&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4819&utm_campaign=snap

Of course, many journalists appear to be blind to that bias. Caldara argues that this blindness is due to a media culture that has become so “monolithically progressive” it can’t even find the political center anymore. Speaking to reporters about this reality is like “talking to an alcoholic about his drinking,” he said. The reporter “honestly can’t see the issue and will angrily suggest you are the one with the problem.”

As evidence of the hard-left bent within MSM culture, Caldara points to the AP stylebook, which is a repository of “progressively loaded language.” He argues that the stylebook is not merely a “dictionary-like guide for reporters and editors.” Instead, “What it actually does is cement terminology to promote political conclusions. It declares the winners and losers in political debates.” He then observes several examples of how the AP stylebook pushes a blatant leftist agenda, including the scientifically false claim that gender isn’t binary.

Caldara writes, “It’s admirable that reporters want to be compassionate to transgender individuals and those transitioning, as we all should be. But AP reporters first have a duty to the truth, or so they say. There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome. That is the very definition of binary. The AP ruling it isn’t so doesn’t change science. It’s a premeditative attempt to change culture and policy. It’s activism.”

Well, like that alcoholic in Caldara’s insightful example, the Denver Post’s opinion editor, Megan Schrader, wouldn’t accept or even tolerate his accurate assessment of the MSM and fired him. Interestingly, Caldara was one of the paper’s most-read columnists, and now Schrader is looking to fill his position with another “conservative” writer. Following his firing, Caldara noted that Schrader “cares deeply” about those who have been victimized but his “frustration is that [Schrader] doesn’t quite understand that the speech code she’s pushing is having an opposite effect … of what she wants.”

Remember when liberals were all about free speech? Those days are long gone.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68077?mailing_id=4819&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4819&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Such reaffirmation is a welcome sign. Three Supreme Court decisions — Engel v. Vitale (1962), Murray v. Curlett (1963), and Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963) — fundamentally changed the way the First Amendment’s religious protections had been previously understood. In short, a Supreme Court that leaned decidedly left during the 1960s appeared more determined to endorse freedom from religion than freedom of religion.

In Engel, the Court ruled 6-1 that a prayer written by New York state’s Board of Regents and said before classes each day was “wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause,” according to Justice Hugo Black writing for the majority.

In Abington Township, which also involved the Murray  ruling, the Court determined 8–1 that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools was also unconstitutional. “The reading of the verses, even without comment, possesses a devotional and religious character and constitutes in effect a religious observance,” the Court  insisted. Moreover, the Court also asserted the fact that “some pupils, or theoretically all pupils, might be excused from attendance at the exercises does not mitigate the obligatory nature of the ceremony.”

That the Board of Regents prayer was voluntary and that a religious observance with attendance of zero could still be construed as obligatory is indicative of a Court likely influenced by the tenor of the times. The American Left still reveres the social revolution of the ‘60s, and while there were welcome advances in personal freedom and proper challenges to the racial status quo, the rebellion against traditional views of sex and the wholesale advancement of Secular Humanism gave us a society in which sex became exponentially more hedonistic, morality became “relative,” and the societal bedrocks of marriage and the nuclear family began unraveling.

Ironically, in Torcaso v. Watkins, SCOTUS referred to Secular Humanism as a religion “which [does] not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.” Justice Black stated, “We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person 'to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.’ Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.”

What about the other way around? Justice Potter Stewart, the lone dissenting vote in Abington Township, had a prescient take on exactly that. He asserted that the removal of prayer from schools “led not to true neutrality with respect to religion, but to the establishment of a religion of secularism.”

Was Stewart right? Over the ensuing decades, several states have passed laws either permanently enjoining parental notification, no law at all, or judicial bypass of parents with regard to a minor getting an abortion. If there is another surgical procedure that can be administered to a child absent parent notification, much less permission, one is hard-pressed to know what it is.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In American schools today, a fear-based global-warming agenda is  disseminated with impunity, and math is taught from a “social justice” perspective. A radical leftist teacher-training program known as “Deep Equity” addresses the “dynamics of privilege and power [that] must be confronted to impact real change,” and indoctrination  exemplified by a “privilege scorecard” given to students at at Saratoga Springs High School has become routine. Furthermore, several schools teach the transgender agenda to children beginning in kindergarten, and many of the states in which that agenda is disseminated have no opt-out clause.

Thus, in stark contrast to the Supreme Court’s take on religion in schools, nothing is voluntary, the attendance will never be zero, and the ongoing dissemination of Secular Humanism, a.k.a. progressive ideology, in America’s classrooms leaves little doubt that Stewart was right on the money.

The Trump administration has released updated guidance on religious prayer in public elementary and secondary schools that will reaffirm the right that students are allowed to pray alone or in groups. Nine federal agencies, including the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, and the Department Education, will be involved in making the changes.

The original guidance on school prayer was issued in 2003. And while this order is similar, it establishes a state-mandated filing process for complaints against local schools and school districts. It requires those states to provide the federal government with an annual list of local public schools and districts with “a policy that prevents, or otherwise denies participation in, constitutionally protected prayer.” States must also report local schools that fail to certify they don’t have unconstitutional prayer policies.

Trump pulled no punches with regard to the motivation behind the change. “You have things happening today that 10 or 15 years ago would have been unthinkable,” he stated in response to a question about his views on the culture wars. “Taking the word God down, taking the word Christmas out. I think we’ve turned that one around very good. I think we’ve turned both of them around very good.”

The order itself is equally straightforward. It explains that “teachers and other public school officials, acting in their official capacities, may not lead their classes in prayer, devotional readings from the Bible, or other religious activities,” while making it clear that “students and teachers do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Unsurprisingly, there was blowback from the usual precincts. “These rules undermine the civil rights and religious freedom of millions of our most vulnerable Americans who rely on social services — with particularly dire consequences for LGBTQ people and religious minorities,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Nonsense. What they do is provide students with something leftists fear the most: a counter-argument that cannot be silenced by judicial fiat. If leftists were truly convinced they own the franchise on “enlightened” thinking, they would welcome a robust debate between themselves and people of faith.

That they don’t speaks volumes.

Moreover, they have more to worry about. SCOTUS will soon rule on a case determining whether state laws excluding religious organizations from government funding available to others is constitutional. If not, school choice would also include funding for religious schools that many American prefer, especially when the alternative choice is a union-centric public school system with a 50-year track record of failure.

“If we win this case, it will be the U.S. Supreme Court once again saying that school choice is fully constitutional and it’s a good thing and it’s something parents should have,” said Erica Smith, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs.

In an age where the totally bankrupt assertion of “my truth” resonates, it’s not a good thing — it’s a great thing.   ~The Patriot Post

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