Dems Took Way More Dark Money Than The GOP – Will They Now Swear It Off?

Posted on February 10, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Susan Crabtree for RealClearPolitics

Nearly a decade ago, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold warned that his party would “lose its soul” if it began taking unlimited corporate money with plans to wean itself off the addiction later – especially if the funds helped Democrats gain control of the White House and Congress.

Fast-forward to 2021 and that warning is facing its first big test.

Anonymous “dark money” donors provided $145 million to pro-Biden groups during the 2020 election, helping pave his way to the White House and dwarfing the $28.4 million spent on behalf of Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported in late January.

When it comes to control of the Senate, Stacey Abrams’ voter-registration groups, Fair Fight and its dark-money arm, Fair Fight Action, also are widely credited with helping Democrats win the Georgia runoffs.

Liberal dark-money groups, which (like conservative ones) don’t disclose the source of their funds, started out-spending their counterparts in 2018, according to a report by Issue One, an advocacy group calling for more restrictions on campaign fundraising.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a group that closely tracks campaign spending, found that liberal dark-money groups outspent conservatives ones in 2020 as well.

Despite benefiting from the anonymous largesse, Democrats have seemed uneasy – at least publicly — cozying up to these big donors whose identities are obscured.

During his presidential primary campaign last spring, Joe Biden said one of his first priorities would be signing a comprehensive campaign-finance reform bill that, among other things, would force dark-money groups to disclose their donors.

But in the first few weeks of the new administration, passing a COVID relief bill to help struggling Americans, along with impeaching Trump, have become the two main priorities set before Congress.

For now at least, the reform bills have been shunted aside despite Democrats giving them top legislative billing – dubbing them HR 1 and S 1 to signify their importance.

Instead of prominent Democrats, including Biden, aggressively pressing for more campaign-finance disclosure, there’s been a proliferation of news about plans by liberal groups to spend more dark-money to help congressional Democrats keep their majorities and push the party’s agenda to the left.

Just last week, American Bridge, which spent $62 million in 2020 on ads aimed at defeating Trump, announced it would relaunch next month with a nine-figure ad budget to defend Biden’s record and maintain Democrats’ congressional majorities in 2022.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez will serve as a co-chair of the initiative, along with former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Sixty-two liberal groups, including Demand Justice and Fix Our Senate (a trade name for the Sixteen Thirty Fund) — both organizations that hide their donors’ identities — sent a letter Friday to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling on him to abolish the Senate filibuster to help break any gridlock and advance a liberal agenda.

Demand Justice and several other dark-money liberal groups are also leading a separate effort called “Unrig Our Courts,” a push to undo Trump’s judicial legacy by pressing Congress to add seats to the Supreme Court, impose term limits on high court justices, and improve judiciary “ethics and transparency requirements.”

The hypocrisy of a group that obscures its donors calling for more disclosure wasn’t lost on conservatives who oppose campaign finance disclosure mandates.

“We now know that many of these dark-money groups are part of a massive operation on the left,” Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who serves as an outside counsel for Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, said in a statement.

“It’s not surprising that these and other progressive groups have set their sights on our courts, the last obstacle to complete power.”

Even though Democrats insist they are fighting fire with fire and will not “unilaterally disarm,” with their majority in both chambers of Congress they now have the power to advance the reforms they have long advocated, notes Michael Beckel, Issue One’s research director.

“The increased dark-money spending by liberal groups in recent years should make it clear to all members of Congress that neither party is immune from being pummeled by attack ads funded by anonymous donors,” Beckel told RealClearPolitics.

“Democrats and Republicans alike should be motivated to end secret spending in our elections. Lawmakers in both parties should be taking dark money seriously and working to bring more transparency to campaigns.”

Yet, as Feingold predicted, ending the addiction to big money is proving difficult for Democrats now that they’re playing the game better than Republicans.

Democrats always opposed Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 decision that allowed virtually unlimited money in politics.

They said opening the floodgates to unlimited donations flew in the face of their commitment to helping average Americans and those struggling to get by.

But Democrats also opposed Citizens United because they thought Republicans and their deep-pocketed corporate allies would benefit the most from the ruling.

“Their mantra of not ‘unliterally disarming’ was really their justification for learning how to master super PACs and dark money and all that, and they’re doing a better job of it right now than the Republicans,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the group Public Citizen, which advocates for stricter campaign-finance laws, told NBC News last fall. Holman went a step further, predicting more Democratic complacence on the issue if they were to win the Senate and the White House.

Under such a scenario — which became political reality — Holman said his group would have to “hold their word over their head.”

Now, Senate Democrats who sponsored S 1 are not pushing for prompt consideration of the bill. Sen. Jeff Merkley (pictured), an Oregon Democrat and the lead sponsor, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from RCP.

A spokesman for Schumer also did not respond to an RCP inquiry. Schumer is up for reelection in 2022 and could face a primary challenge from his left flank, perhaps from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Majority Forward, a nonprofit with ties to Schumer’s Senate Majority Pac, channeled $57.4 million into super PACs that helped Democrats regain the majority in the upper chamber.

The group received $76 million in anonymous donations from mid-2018 to mid-2019, the same year it passed tens of millions of dollars to other left-wing nonprofit groups devoted to funding “voter engagement” efforts.

The Senate Majority PAC sent its largest donation — $14.8 million — to America Votes, a group that Georgia election officials investigated for allegations it sent ballot applications to non-residents.

A spokesperson for America Votes has denied any wrongdoing, arguing that it sent absentee ballot applications to registered voters across Georgia, using an official list from the secretary of state’s office along with postal address data.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a vocal proponent of ending dark-money groups, also did not respond to an RCP request for comment. The Rhode Island Democrat has repeatedly described the impact of these “shadowy” groups as a “rot on our American democracy.”

Last fall Whitehouse testified during a House judiciary subcommittee hearing that conservative dark-money organizations unduly influenced the confirmation of conservative judges during Trump’s time in office.

But Whitehouse also has said he would accept campaign donations from dark-money groups and has delivered speeches to liberal groups that accept money from secret donors.

Last summer, the longtime senator trashed the judicial nominating process during Trump’s time in office as “rigged.”

He argued that Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh won confirmation because they were backed by a sophisticated dark-money advertising “scheme” funded by corporations and deep-pocketed GOP donors.

Whitehouse spokesman Rich Davidson told RCP at the time that the donor disclosure his boss is seeking should apply to all groups “regardless of ideological bent.”

Davidson made the comment the same day Whitehouse spoke about the evils of conservative dark-money groups at an event hosted by the American Constitution Society, a liberal dark-money group that doesn’t disclose many of its donors.

Over the last week, RCP reached out to numerous groups (or their political arms) that don’t disclose their donors, including Demand Justice and Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Only one, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which Politico labeled a “dark-money behemoth” after it raised $137 million from anonymous donors in 2019, came forward to say it supports efforts to force it and other groups that amass these “shadowy” funds to disclose their donors.

“We have lobbied in favor of reform to the current campaign finance system,” Amy Kurtz, the fund’s executive director, told RCP in an emailed statement. “But we remain equally committed to following the current laws to level the playing field for progressives.”

Kurtz referred to that statement when asked whether she supports passage of the disclosure mandates in HR 1 and S 1, considering the success that dark-money groups such as hers had this cycle in helping Biden win the White House and Democrats gain the Senate majority.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

The post Dems Took Way More Dark Money Than The GOP – Will They Now Swear It Off? appeared first on The Political Insider.

Constitutional Professor: Why Senate Cannot Bar Trump From Being President Again

Posted on February 9, 2021 by RealClearWire

By James Sieja for RealClearPolitics

Perhaps they are thinking about the next election or their political legacies, but Democrats and some Republicans intent on impeaching and convicting former President Donald Trump are not reading the Constitution correctly.

When the Senate trial begins Monday, there will be lots of grandstanding and lawyerly pettifogging, and we will find out if Democrats can convince 17 Republicans that they need to convict the former president.

Fortunately, I don’t think they’ll succeed. I say fortunately because impeaching Trump would be wrong, constitutionally speaking.

Forty-five Republicans recently voted that this second Trump impeachment trial is in itself unconstitutional. They are incorrect.

The bipartisan group of 55 senators who voted to proceed to the trial think that the Senate can apply a sanction after conviction. Constitutionally, they’re wrong, too.

Republicans are wrong because the plain text of the Constitution, as Michael McConnell, a Stanford professor and former federal judge, points out, makes no exceptions or qualifications to either the House’s “sole power of impeachment” or the Senate’s “sole power to try all impeachments.”

Therefore, the Senate clearly has the power — what legal scholars call jurisdiction — to try the case.

But, jurisdiction is not the only consideration enshrined in constitutional law.

Two other concepts, standing and justiciability, are central to any court’s decision-making at the beginning of a case. Along with jurisdiction, courts call them, collectively, “threshold questions.”

Because senators, especially the ones looking to convict, exercise judicial power when they try any impeachment, they would do well to take seriously the requirements for standing and the Supreme Court’s rules for justiciability.

Standing refers to someone’s ability to bring a case to court in the first place. In the 1992 case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the late Justice Antonin Scalia listed three factors that comprise the “irreducible constitutional minimum” basis for standing.

While people probably know Justice Scalia for his acerbic dissents, the Lujan majority today is likely his most widely cited uncontroversial opinion.

In the second Trump impeachment, the relevant element of the Lujan trio is the last one: The court must be able to give a final, binding judgment to the party that wants a punishment.

The House wants to punish Trump for his actions. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution plainly declares the required punishment: “The president … shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of … high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“Shall” means it must happen. The Senate can’t remove Trump from a position he no longer holds, which means it can’t punish him. Thus, the House lacks standing.

To be clear, the House retained standing while Trump retained the presidency. But, once he left, the case became moot — purely a matter for discussion, like the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

“Wait!” supporters of conviction cry out. “There’s also the bit in Article I about disqualifying a person who’s been impeached from holding office ever again.”

That is true, but the passage doesn’t improve the logic of a post-presidency Senate punishment in the least. No matter how long we “Wait!” the Senate will still not be able to render the required punishment, so the standing problem remains.

More importantly, the disqualification punishment presents a justiciability question. Justiciability refers to the ability of a court to effectively resolve the case.

Over several cases, the Supreme Court has identified a bunch of factors that lead to justiciability issues, but all of them stem from a single idea: It’s not the court’s job to decide this, but rather it’s somebody else’s job.

If the Senate tried to disqualify Trump from holding the presidency again, it would arrogate a privilege — determining who will not be president — that the Constitution explicitly reserves to another body: We the People.

Thus, there is a clear justiciability problem with disqualification if it tries to block anyone — Trump, you, me, anyone — from winning the presidency or other elected office.

Alexander Hamilton declared that the Constitution stood for the idea “that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.”

However imperfectly, this is what we do in districts and states throughout the country. And we choose through the Electoral College, a defense of which the current impeachment ironically springs from.

For the House and Senate, a mere 535 citizens, to absolutely bar nearly 160 million from a completely free electoral choice turns the Constitution upside down.

Ultimately, the Senate can exercise its clear jurisdiction to hear the case, complete with senatorial bloviations, and lawyerly dodges.

But, if the outcome is anything other than the status quo ante, meaning Trump remains eligible for the presidency in the future, the Senate will deal a grave blow to not just the Constitution but to every member of We the People who thinks they still have a choice.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

James Sieja, assistant professor of government at St. Lawrence University, studies the federal court system and teaches courses in the U.S. Constitution.

The post Constitutional Professor: Why Senate Cannot Bar Trump From Being President Again appeared first on The Political Insider.

Hiding Biden: How Democrats Crafted First Impeachment, Helping Defeat Trump With Media Help

Posted on February 5, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Mark Hemingway for RealClearInvestigations

By the numbers, Joe Biden is president of the United States because he won the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a combined total of some 43,000 votes.

But he also owes his victory to the groundwork laid by Democrats and their media allies one year before, during the first impeachment of Donald Trump over his supposedly strings-attached demand that the Ukrainian government investigate alleged corruption involving Biden’s son, Hunter.

The first impeachment failed to oust Trump from office, but it helped secure the White House for Biden.

It shielded him from scrutiny, enabling him and his supporters to cast allegations during the campaign about dubious Biden family business ties as rehashed Trumpian conspiracy theories.

Biden’s razor-thin swing state victories might not have materialized if the Trump campaign had been able to gain traction from its October Surprise – a series of articles it helped orchestrate in the New York Post that reported information from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden suggesting corrupt foreign business deals that may have involved his father.

As many as 45% of Biden voters said they were unaware of Hunter’s financial scandals before the election.

That’s likely because Democrats and much of the media discredited or did not report the accusations in the final weeks of the campaign – accusations that were bolstered after the election when Hunter admitted that he has been the subject of an ongoing federal corruption probe since 2018.

Once the Post ran its first laptop article on Oct. 14, Democrats and their allies immediately turned to the narrative they had long used against Trump: foreign interference.

Without evidence save for the claims of Democrat partisans and anonymous official sources — like those commonly relied upon during the debunked Trump-Russia affair — the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico ran stories suggesting the laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Joe Biden said the laptop was a “Russian plan” at the first presidential debate.

The FBI, which was a main driver of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, added to the narrative when word was leaked that the bureau was investigating whether the laptop emails were Russian disinformation.

Twitter and Facebook reacted by actively censoring the Hunter Biden story. Twitter went so far as to lock the New York Post out of its own account.

As the Senate prepares next week to take up a second impeachment of Trump, Republican objections to the Democrats’ handling of the first go-round loom large.

The record of those proceedings shows that they were conducted in a highly unusual manner. In retrospect, it seems clear that they were designed not just to target Trump – but to protect Biden.

Taking Early Aim

Some Democrats were bent on impeaching Trump from the moment he took office, on Jan. 20, 2017. Just 19 minutes after Trump was sworn in, the Washington Post published a piece headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.”

Those early efforts were spearheaded by Texas Rep. Al Green, who drew up articles of impeachment for alleged misdeeds ranging from Trump’s insulting kneeling professional football players to his firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

Green’s effort led to three different unsuccessful impeachment votes — one in 2017 and two more in 2019 after Democrats gained a House majority in the 2018 election.

Publicly, Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders said they did not approve of Green’s efforts.

“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” the House speaker told the Washington Post in March 2019.

Privately, Democratic leaders were betting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion would produce a clearly impeachable offense.

They were wrong.

After three years of thorough investigation – as well as thousands of breathless articles and untold hours of TV coverage keyed toward Trump’s prospective guilt – Mueller’s final report, issued in March 2019, concluded that the probe “[did] not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller did not make a determination of whether Trump had tried to obstruct his investigation. Looking at the evidence, Attorney General William Barr determined he had not.

Nevertheless, some powerful Democrats sought to use the Mueller report as the basis to impeach Trump, only to be rebuffed by Pelosi.

The speed of what happened next blindsided Republicans.

The Ukraine Affair

In early August, a CIA employee filed a formal whistleblower complaint against President Trump aimed at forcing Congress to address the matter.

He alleged that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 phone call to investigate the Bidens for political purposes, and subsequently made aid to Ukraine contingent on the probe.

Trump reportedly raised the issue because he believed there had never been any serious inquiry into why Hunter Biden, a lawyer with no experience in the energy sector, had been paid upwards of $80,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.

Hunter received the appointment in 2014, shortly after his father was asked to oversee Ukrainian affairs as Barack Obama’s vice president. In 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it fired a prosecutor widely considered to be ineffective.

The fired prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, testified that he was driven from office because he was investigating Burisma.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” Trump told Zelensky, “that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”

At the time of the whistleblower complaint, Biden was favored to win the Democratic nomination for president.

However, the allegations regarding the Trump phone call with Zelensky were problematic from the start. The man who brought the complaint was not really a whistleblower as the term is commonly understood.

He had no direct knowledge of the phone call but had been leaked details of it by one of the seven American officials who were on the call with the president.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose legal opinions are normally binding on these matters, soon concluded the whistleblower complaint did not meet the requirements of an “urgent concern” for it to be forwarded to Congress.

Meanwhile, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, worked to surface the details of the complaint publicly. He recast obstacles to legitimizing the whistleblower’s complaint as attempts to hide Trump’s malfeasance.

When the White House ultimately made a transcript of the call public, Trump’s rhetorical style, an odd combination of obliqueness and bluntness, made the idea of a quid pro quo – no Biden investigation, no aid — open to interpretation.

Officials from Ukraine, which did not open an investigation, said they never felt pressured by Trump.

Despite the procedural problems with the whistleblower complaint, it provided a semblance of formal process to buttress an all-new impeachment attempt.

Progressives and much of the media cast the call as an abuse of power by Trump who, they claimed, tried to extort a foreign leader to kneecap a political rival. A formal House impeachment inquiry was launched on Sept. 24, 2019, with the full support of Democratic House leadership.

From the beginning, the impeachment inquiry was rife with episodes suggesting Democrats had a larger strategy. To begin with, they took an unprecedented amount of control over the process.

With the 2020 election and the prospect of a second Trump term looming, there would be no years-long special counsel or nonpartisan investigation of this matter.

While the Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, was the traditional venue for impeachment, Democrats decided that Schiff would guide the impeachment inquiry through the Intelligence Committee.

Schiff, who had raised his national profile during the Mueller probe by repeatedly claiming that he had seen more than circumstantial evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia, had already acquired a reputation for fierce partisanship.

In early October, shortly after the impeachment inquiry began, the New York Times reported that Schiff’s office had helped shepherd the alleged whistleblower’s complaint.

The Washington Post fact-checker gave Schiff “four Pinocchios” for repeatedly denying his office’s contact with the man. Nevertheless, Schiff received glowing press coverage for his impeachment efforts.

The mainstream press further enabled impeachment by refusing to publish the whistleblower’s name, in line with Democrat admonitions, even though he wasn’t formally protected by any whistleblower laws.

News organizations disclosed no agreements of source confidentiality with the man, and his identity was common knowledge in Washington.

When Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported the evidence that the whistleblower was a then-33-year-old CIA employee named Eric Ciaramella, this news blackout by major media allowed them to ignore his history of partisan ties and anti-Trump statements.

Sperry reported that Ciaramella had served as an adviser on Ukraine to Vice President Biden and had been overheard in 2017 discussing with another staffer how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office.

That colleague was Sean Misko, who left the White House in the summer of 2019 to join House impeachment manager Schiff’s committee, where, sources say, he offered “guidance” to the whistleblower.

Aside from Schiff’s backstage dealings with Ciaramella, the Intelligence Committee chairman publicly tried to spin Trump’s alleged wrongdoing.

On Sept. 26, the day after the Trump-Zelensky transcript was released, Schiff gave an opening statement before acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified before his committee.

During the statement, Schiff, who had once been an aspiring screenwriter, characterized the president’s behavior on the Zelensky call as being like “a classic organized crime shakedown.” Instead of reading the plain text of the call, Schiff paraphrased what happened in hyperbolic and lurid terms.

“I have a favor I want from you,” Schiff said while seeming to read from a transcript. “And I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of it, on this and on that.”

Republicans were appalled.

“He makes up a conversation supposedly between the president and Ukraine which sounds like a script from a cheap comic book. Lies and innuendo. He was called out on it and said, well, I meant it as a parody. Geez, that’s great. The fun begins,” Utah Congressman Chris Stewart would record in his journal, as quoted in “Obsession,” Washington Examiner reporter Byron York’s book on Democrats’ years-long quest to remove Trump from office.

Leaking Testimony

To make the case for impeachment, it was crucial for Democrats to demonstrate the existence of a quid pro quo between Trump and Zelensky, which was ambiguous because Trump never mentioned aid on the call.

Schiff responded to the Volker testimony by taking even more unprecedented steps for Democrats to control the impeachment proceedings. Volker had sat for what was known as a “transcribed interview,” which allowed Republicans to speak about the testimony afterward.

After Volker, Schiff made sure all the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry were deposed, forbidding committee members from discussing what was said publicly.

But the secrecy rules had a convenient and glaring exception – the witnesses themselves could speak about what happened. “The sessions settled into a pattern of secret testimony accompanied by quick leaks of witnesses’ opening statements,” York observes in “Obsession.”

The leaked, one-sided testimonies allowed press speculation to run wild, while House Republicans who knew the particulars were subject to ethics charges if they told the public what had actually been said.

The DNC-Ukraine Nexus

For Democrats, Biden was a fraught issue in the impeachment proceedings. One obvious defense of Trump was for Republicans to argue that the president’s questions about Biden family corruption in Ukraine were legitimate and necessary to protect national security.

Under questioning, multiple witnesses called by Democrats conceded that Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma was concerning, leading to calls for Hunter to testify in the proceedings. (During the subsequent Senate impeachment trial, one Democratic senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, said Hunter Biden was a relevant witness.)

Democrats rejected calls to question Hunter Biden, Ciaramella, and others.

“I think we really could have torpedoed impeachment by making the whistleblower detail all of his prior contacts with Schiff and also his prior contacts with Biden as well,” said a Republican House staffer with intimate knowledge of the proceedings who requested anonymity because he did not want to speak for elected officials.

Democrats also shut down Republican attempts to probe the Democratic Party’s own troubling connections to Ukraine during impeachment.

A Politico investigation published in January 2017 “found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the [2016] race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.”

The article, written by David Stern and Kenneth Vogel, the latter now at the New York Times, reported that Ukrainian officials had helped Hillary “Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers,” including his campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Key to this effort was a Democratic National Committee operative, Alexandra Chalupa, who met with Ukrainian officials and American journalists in Washington and was invited to the White House by Biden’s Ukraine pointman – the future “whistleblower” Ciaramella.

(Chalupa wasn’t the only Democratic operative pushing Manafort dirt originating in Ukraine at about the same time. So was Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the Democratic contractor behind the discredited Steele dossier on Trump-Russia collusion. He has acknowledged feeding the media Ukraine tips in “Crime in Progress,” the book he co-wrote with his Fusion co-founder Peter Fritsch.)

But even though Politico’s reporting on Ukraine and the DNC was largely unquestioned for three years, the media once again sprang to Democrats’ defense as Republicans sought to make an issue of it.

In the end, Schiff’s secrecy and tight control over who got to testify allowed House Democrats to sidestep any explosive questions about the chairman’s role in instigating impeachment, the DNC’s involvement with Ukraine, and Biden’s potential role in his son’s corruption.

Ultimately, the Senate refused to convict Trump and many Republicans believed that it did little to harm him politically.

“Not a single Democrat speaker referenced impeachment during any of the convention, which is a really amazing thing,” the GOP staffer noted. “That just shows me they didn’t get a whole lot of political benefit out of it.”

Shielding Joe

But if impeachment failed to tarnish Trump as much as Democrats hoped, it appeared successful in delegitimizing valid questions about alleged Biden corruption.

After impeachment, the mainstream media showed almost no interest in investigating Biden family business ties, which were largely characterized as a series of unsubstantiated and debunked allegations.

Christiane Amanpour of PBS expressed the prevailing view in an interview with Republican National Committee spokesperson Liz Harrington when she said “there has never been any issues in terms of corruption” with the Bidens.

After Harrington disagreed and urged journalists to look into the story, Amanpour responded: “We’re not going to do your work for you.”

Some coverage transformed the potential scandals into a positive for Biden. At a campaign event in Iowa, a Democratic voter asked the candidate in December 2019 about allegations of his son’s corruption.

In response, Biden called the voter a “damn liar” and challenged him to an IQ test. CNN national political reporter Maeve Reston characterized the exchange this way: “In a human moment defending his son, Biden showed the authenticity, emotion and readiness for a fight that appeals to so many Democrats as they look for someone who can take on Trump.”

Last September, when a Senate intelligence panel report revealed that a firm co-founded by Hunter Biden received a $3.5-million wire transfer from the wife of a Russian politician, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC did not cover the story.

When Trump raised the issue at the first presidential debate, Biden claimed it had been “totally discredited” even though its existence was confirmed by Treasury Department documents.

This news blackout may have helped propel Biden to victory, but questions regarding the Bidens have not gone away.

There is the laptop, which, far from Russian disinformation, did indeed belong to Hunter Biden, who in December admitted he has been the subject of a federal corruption probe since 2018.

Other evidence and testimony implicate President Biden. Tony Bobulinski, a former naval officer and business partner with Hunter Biden, asserted in October that he met with the senior Biden as part of a plan to secretly give the future president a 10% stake in a deal with a Chinese conglomerate with ties to the country’s communist government.

Bobulinski has provided documents to back up his account and news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal have confirmed they are authentic.

President Biden seems aware of the danger of family embarrassments, including from a January 2020 FBI raid involving allegations of financial fraud at a company where Biden’s brother James was listed as “principal.”

Politico reported last week that the president had pulled his brother Frank aside last summer to tell him, “For Christ’s sake, watch yourself. Don’t get sucked into something that would, first of all, hurt you.”

On Inauguration Day, a law firm’s ad promoting Frank Biden’s relationship with the president caused a new stir.

Such Biden family matters, and Republicans’ awareness that their concealment may have helped seal Trump’s defeat, color Democrats’ long-shot efforts next week to convince at least 17 senators of the opposite party to join their legally and politically fraught effort to convict a president in an impeachment trial after he has left office.

Republicans think the Democrats’ handling of the first impeachment poisoned the well.

“Republican fence sitters are probably already on the record denouncing the unfairness of the House process last time around, since both GOP House members and senators were doing that,” says a GOP staffer who insisted on anonymity. “So if that process was unfair, how can you trust Democrats enough to sign off on impeachment 2.0, when there wasn’t even any process to speak of at all?”

A number of House Democrats involved in the first impeachment declined to comment on their Republican colleagues’ concerns.

In a recent vote, 45 Republican senators went on record saying they did not believe impeaching a former president was constitutional.

Even prominent Senate Democrats, such as 2016 vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, are advocating censuring Donald Trump for fear that a bitter and drawn out impeachment trial is not only futile but will hamper Biden’s ability to get his administration up and running during the crucial early months of the presidency.

Congressional Republicans, for their part, have shown no signs of dropping efforts begun in the first impeachment to investigate what they see as clear Biden family corruption – even after Trump’s second impeachment.

Prominent Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, recently told Fox News they plan to ask Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, Merrick Garland, about the Hunter Biden corruption probe during his nomination hearing.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post Hiding Biden: How Democrats Crafted First Impeachment, Helping Defeat Trump With Media Help appeared first on The Political Insider.

Dr. Ben Carson’s Plan For National Unity: American Cornerstone

Posted on February 5, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Ben Carson for RealClearPolitics

We have painted our fellow Americans as “deplorable,” “stupid,” and worse. It is this type of malicious, political rhetoric fueled by opportunistic politicians and profit-driven media organizations that has roiled our deeply divided nation.

We are better than this. Words such as compromise, compassion, and civility are twisted, maligned and tainted as somehow being dirty, or have magically disappeared altogether.

We must do better than this.

I miss the days when Americans fought united for freedom and justice for all — equally.

I miss when compromise, compassion, and civility were not only encouraged but celebrated, where individuals accepted the consequences of their actions, when politicians pursued the public good, not just their own good.

My time serving as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development over the last four years taught me many things, none more important than the necessity for collaboration and mutual understanding.

I saw first-hand that, when we work together as one nation, the American Dream becomes attainable for all and opportunity becomes limitless.

It is for these reasons — and many others — that I am launching a nonprofit conservative think tank with the goal of providing common-sense solutions to some of our nation’s biggest problems. The first step in healing is to start talking to one another again.

The American Cornerstone Institute will be dedicated to creating dialogue and smart discourse.

ACI will focus on promoting and preserving individual and religious liberty, helping our country’s most vulnerable find new hope, and developing methods to maximize government’s efficiency and effectiveness to best serve all our nation’s citizens.

ACI will focus on a diverse set of issues that influence important policy discussions. We will engage with local governments and work with communities to find solutions to our nation’s problems.

We must work to improve American cities. While many of the country’s large cities face similar problems — homelessness, a higher cost of living, and rising crime, to name a few — the causes of these problems, and the best ways to address them, will vary from place to place.

The institute will study in detail some of America’s largest cities, identifying the key drivers of their current issues and potential solutions that take into account the unique characteristics of each urban area.

We will serve as a check on political power in Washington. ACI will actively push and remind the powers that be to allow and even empower local communities to govern their own affairs.

Washington may be home to our political arena, but it is seldom a place for finding solutions; for those we must look to the American people.

For the preservation of this great nation, for ourselves, and the next generation, we will foster a renewed focus on education.

If there’s one thing I know to be true, it’s that education is the key to prosperity. Without it, our communities will falter and our institutions will crumble.

We are one nation, under God. We must not forget that. The United States of America is seen as a beacon of freedom and hope across the world, a place where the practice of one’s faith should be encouraged and protected, without trepidation.

ACI will promote the value of self-sufficiency and the idea of creating equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.

Providing individuals with opportunities to transform and improve their lives leads to better outcomes than subsidies and welfare programs.

We are a compassionate nation, the greatest civic experiment in history, the world’s guiding light of freedom and opportunity.

The Bible says, if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

There have been many calls to heal the divide that has polarized our great nation. The American Cornerstone Institute will be a leader and part of the solution. Our goal is simple: heal, inspire, and revive America.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Dr. Ben Carson is the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

The post Dr. Ben Carson’s Plan For National Unity: American Cornerstone appeared first on The Political Insider.

Biden’s Dilemma: Unify The Country Or Impeach President Trump?

Posted on January 12, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Susan Crabtree for RealClearPolitics

Congressional Democrats’ rush toward impeachment has put Joe Biden in a difficult position before he’s even taken the oath of office.

Does he follow the desires of his fellow Democratic Party leaders to punish Donald Trump for stirring up an angry mob that ran amok at the U.S. Capitol?

Or does Biden heed his own oft-repeated campaign promise to weigh the desires of those Americans who voted against him as well as the historic numbers who voted for him?

The nation is struggling to pick up the pieces and come to terms with last week’s insurrection at the Capitol building by Trump-supporting extremists.

At least five people, including one police officer, died. Hundreds more were threatened and terrorized. Another Capitol Police officer on duty that day died by suicide over the weekend, his family announced Monday.

Democrats are putting the blame squarely on President Trump’s shoulders – but not only Democrats. White House and administration staffers have resigned in droves, including three members of Trump’s Cabinet.

Many prominent Republicans — including several onetime supporters — have denounced Trump for instigating the Capitol attack.

But the rank-and-file are not yet convinced. A new Frank Luntz poll released Monday found that only 25% of Trump voters agree he is mostly responsible for the assault on the Capitol, while 62% said he was only “somewhat” or “only a little” to blame.

So, the question for the incoming president is pretty basic: In such a hyper-partisan political environment, is compromise even possible?

After the cataclysmic events of Jan. 6, lawmakers and pundits have frequently invoked the words of Ben Franklin — that the Founding Fathers rejected a monarchy in favor of “a republic, if you can keep it” — along with President Lincoln’s prophetic declaration that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Two months after winning the presidency, Biden’s post-election words intended to lower the temperature in Washington and across the country already seem dated as he declines to clearly state whether he backs his party’s pursuit of the 25^th Amendment or a second impeachment.

“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” Biden said Nov. 7 in his first speech after he was declared the victor. “This is the time to heal.”

But Biden didn’t count on a horrific attack on the Capitol, nor on Trump’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his defeat, which are testing that commitment to unity as he is being pressed by other party leaders bent on revenge.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are rejecting calls from a bipartisan group of House members to stop the drive to impeach Trump on his way out the door.

They want to put all Republicans on record as to whether they will protect Trump from being removed from office even though he will be out anyway in eight days.

With roughly a week left before Biden is inaugurated, House Democrats are set to impeach Trump for a second time this week.

The only question is whether they will send the impeachment articles over to the Senate right away or wait for Biden to complete his first 100 days and have most, if not all, of his Cabinet confirmed.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has suggested Democrats wait for that period to allow Biden to assemble his administration and begin work on his agenda, while House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has said he wants to send the articles to the Senate immediately.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” a veteran Democratic operative told RealClearPolitics.

Pelosi has admitted that her interest in impeachment is to prevent Trump from running again in 2024 — so the impeachment push has become a way for Democrats to permanently cancel Trump and any chance for a political resurgence.

Plenty of voices, so far going unheeded, are pressing for a less polarizing beginning to Biden’s presidency.

Members of the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, along with a several centrist senators, are pushing for a congressional censure of Trump instead, arguing that a last-ditch impeachment effort will backfire on Biden and Democrats by inciting more violence while turning Trump into a martyr.

Rep. Tom Reed, a New York Republican, has circulated a letter imploring Biden to reject what he’s calling “snap” impeachment, which would go to a vote without the deliberations of a traditional hearing.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has argued that such a step would only “inflame political divisions in our country,” and he urged that Trump’s future should be left to “history and the voters to decide — not canceled by congressional fiat.”

Turley, who also argued against the first impeachment, denounced Trump’s Jan. 6 speech to his supporters as “reckless and wrong” even before they stormed the capitol.

He also praised Vice President Mike Pence for defying Trump in rejecting his claim that electoral votes could be “sent back” to the states.

“Yet, none of this is license for Congress to rampage through the Constitution with the same abandon as last week’s rioters did in the Capitol,” Turley wrote Monday.

Nonetheless, Pelosi is moving forward with a demand that Pence invoke the 25^th Amendment to declare Trump unfit and remove him from office.

Such a move would require Pence to convene the Cabinet, a majority of whose members would then need to declare Trump unable to perform as president.

With the three Cabinet members already gone, it seems a futile ultimatum, especially after Pence and Trump met Monday and agreed to work together for the final week of the presidency.

Pence’s rejection of this Democratic demand means House Democrats will move forward with a vote on a single article of impeachment as soon as Wednesday.

As his presidency is set to begin, Biden seems torn by these developments. He could try to change the tone in Washington by leaning on his party’s leaders to forgo another divisive impeachment fight against Trump.

But so far he hasn’t. On Monday, he signaled a willingness to entertain a “bifurcated” first 100 days, sharing progress on his initiatives with a Senate impeachment trial.

“Can we go half day on dealing with impeachment and half day getting my people nominated and confirmed?” he pondered Monday when pressed on the matter after receiving his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine.

“I haven’t gotten an answer from the parliamentarian yet,” he said.

Others quickly filled in the leadership vacuum to remind Biden that the Senate operated in the same dual-track way during the early 2020 unsuccessful impeachment trial.

Laurence Tribe, a fiery anti-Trump Harvard law professor, said the Senate, “if halfway responsible,” will hold a short impeachment trial as soon as possible.

Tribe authored a book on the case for impeaching Trump along with Joshua Matz, who served as the counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s impeachment proceedings in late 2019.

“An impeachment trial needn’t get in the way of a forward-looking agenda for the Senate,” Tribe tweeted Monday night. “It’s increasingly looking like that’s the way forward: bifurcated days, half impeachment trial, half other business.”

So much for unity and turning the page on Donald J. Trump.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

The post Biden’s Dilemma: Unify The Country Or Impeach President Trump? appeared first on The Political Insider.

Georgia Wins Pave Way For Biden Cabinet Picks, Policies

Posted on January 7, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Susan Crabtree for RealClearPolitics

Republicans threw everything they had at holding the line in the Georgia Senate runoffs, but it wasn’t enough.

The traditional political lines in the once ruby red state have shifted with the cities and suburbs now controlling political outcomes – and in this fateful year, they appear poised to hand President-elect Joe Biden the power to advance his agenda in Washington without Republican roadblocks.

In a repeat performance of the presidential election results in the Peach State, the substantial leads of Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler evaporated in the middle of the night as votes from Atlanta and its suburbs poured in.

At 2 a.m. media outlets began declaring Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock the winner over Loeffler, as his fellow Democrat, Jon Ossoff, began building a lead over Perdue.

That lead reached more than 17,000 votes by morning and is expected to grow throughout Wednesday.

The impact of twin Democratic wins, if both hold, is devastating to Senate Republicans and their ability to serve as a check on both Biden’s agenda and his ability to assemble a team of Cabinet picks and top-level officials throughout the federal government.

Biden had waited to choose his attorney general until after the Georgia runoffs as he calibrates who can most easily win confirmation in the upper chamber.

Now he can have far greater latitude in selecting his nominee for the nation’s top law enforcement official and many other positions in the new administration.

The Democratic wins help smooth the way for two controversial nominees in particular: Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general who was tapped to become Health and Human Services secretary, and Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, named to helm the Office of Management and Budget.

Flipping control of the Senate also ushers in a new era in Washington and a changing of the leadership guard.

The Democratic wins in Georgia will deliver unified Democratic control in Washington for the first time in a decade and give Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York control over the chamber’s schedule and priorities.

Schumer will be the first Jewish Senate majority leader while Warnock will be the first black Democratic senator from the South and Ossoff the first Jewish senator representing Georgia.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will turn 79 next month and may have little desire to continue leading his conference with a return to the minority.

“Buckle up!” Schumer tweeted triumphantly Wednesday morning.

Biden put a positive spin on full Democratic control of Washington while campaigning for Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia on Monday.

“By electing Jon and the reverend, you can break the gridlock in Washington and this nation,” he said. “With their votes in the Senate, we’ll be able to make the progress we need to make on jobs and health care and justice and the environment and so many other things.”

If Ossoff maintains his lead, Schumer and his Democratic caucus can now put a number of their longtime legislative priorities to a vote, including a minimum wage increase, universal background checks for gun ownership, Obamacare expansions and the lifting of Trump-era restrictions on illegal immigrants.

Because Senate rules now only require a simple majority when approving the appointment of judges, Biden also can begin to reverse the gains Trump and McConnell made in filling out the federal bench with conservatives.

During the Senate campaign, Perdue and Loeffler cast themselves as the last line of defense against a far-left socialist Democratic agenda.

They predicted that the opposition party would try to pack the Supreme Court and grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico while stripping away Second Amendment rights.

But some Democrats cautioned that with the very slim new majority, centrists like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia would have increased power to block sweeping liberal goals, especially around energy and climate policy.

Manchin vehemently opposes ending the filibuster, the Senate process that requires a 60-vote threshold to pass most legislation, and will likely block efforts to eliminate it.

Manchin also has a long history of working across the aisle with GOP moderates such as Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

When it became clear that Warnock would win and Ossoff would likely prevail early Wednesday, Manchin’s name began trending on Twitter.

Republican recriminations began before sunrise, with most blaming President Trump and his constant focus on election fraud allegations over the last two months amid spiking COVID cases and deaths, and more broadly, his chaotic four-year takeover of the Republican Party.

“Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs. I feel like a one trick pony but here we are again,” tweeted Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former chief of staff and a GOP consultant.

“We went from talking about jobs and the economy to Q-anon election conspiracies in 4 short years and – as it turns out – they were listening!”

Even before any definitive results were in, Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office and a Republican, said if either GOP senator loses, the blame “falls squarely on the shoulders of President Trump.”

Markets don’t like one-party control of Washington and showed signs Monday of unease about a possible Democratic takeover with a sharp sell-off that managed to mostly correct itself Tuesday with hopes of a bigger COVID relief package in play.

The prospect of full Democratic control has supply-side Republicans bracing for economic hits as they fret over Senate Democrats’ ability to use a 50-vote threshold allowed in the budget process to push through tax increases.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the leader of the progressive wing of the party who successfully pushed mainstream Democrats to the left in recent years, is in line to become chairman of the Budget Committee.

David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth, predicted that repeal of the Trump tax cuts and additional tax increases will become Democrats “No. 1 agenda item” along with green-energy regulations that curtail U.S. energy production and exports.

“I think it will basically mean that we’re going to be stuck with the COVID economy” over the long term, McIntosh told RealClearPolitics, noting that the stock market should remain “exuberant” with more stimulus packages expected under Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but jobs and corporate earnings could trail off as tax increases become law.

In the short term, Democrats will likely move to pass $2,000 stimulus checks for most families, up from the $600 checks Congress passed before its Christmas break.

McConnell opposed the larger number, refusing to allow a clean vote on the proposal after Trump’s last-minute push, which put Loeffler and Perdue in a tough spot as they rushed to support the higher payments after voting for the lower ones.

“Joe Biden & the entire Dem Party were incredibly clear of the stakes here, starting with the $2,000. Checks and massive economic relief policies that put money and resources in the hands of the people,” Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, tweeted Wednesday morning. “They are going to have to deliver that, starting with the checks on day one.”

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

The post Georgia Wins Pave Way For Biden Cabinet Picks, Policies appeared first on The Political Insider.

Intelligence Panel Republicans: Swalwell ‘Compromised’ by Fang Ties

Posted on December 28, 2020 by RealClearWire

By Philip Wegmann for RealClearPolitics

In the 21^st century, even spies have a social media presence, and while Christine Fang has not been heard from or seen since she fled the United States more than five years ago, the Chinese national still keeps her Facebook account active.

Fang made two posts in November. The first, a candid photo of her face in shadow and light. The second, a picture of the inside of the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, perfectly capturing the “Apotheosis of Washington.”

Painted by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi in 1865, the fresco depicts George Washington rising into the heavens and is immediately familiar to every member of Congress.

This includes Rep. Eric Swalwell, but unlike the other members of Congress, the California Democrat is also very familiar with Fang.

The lissome Chinese spy cultivated relationships, some of them apparently sexual, with several local and national politicians and, if anything, her picture now reminds Swalwell not of glory but of his current hellish controversy.

Swalwell won’t say whether his relationship with the spy included physical intimacy or disclose much about their shared past. The normally chatty congressman won’t say much of anything.

When confronted by a reporter after a jog Thursday morning, the sweaty former presidential candidate kept his head down as he hustled up the steps of his Washington, D.C., home.

He hasn’t been able to run as easily away from the controversy.

After Axios broke the Fang story on Dec. 8, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy quickly labeled Swalwell, who eagerly sought the spotlight during the impeachment of President Trump, “a national security threat.”

The rest of the caucus has followed suit, with GOP leaders sending a letter this week to Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding that she remove him from his post on the House Intelligence Committee.

But even if he is removed, which seems unlikely, Republicans say the saga calls into question not just the credibility of Swalwell but the judgment of Pelosi.

It is the perfect curtain raiser for their coming argument in the Joe Biden era that Democrats don’t take threats from China seriously.

It’s a story too tempting to pass up. It reads a little like a spy novel because, well, it involves a spy. An attractive one.

Fang went by Christine in the U.S., enrolling in early 2011 at California State University, East Bay, and quickly took an interest in Bay Area politicians.

By 2014, according to Axios, Fang had developed close ties to Swalwell, then a little-known Dublin City Council member. She showed up at events.

She bundled contributions for him, connecting deep-pocketed donors with his congressional election campaign. She placed an intern in his office.

It was the long game, one that counter-intelligence experts warn China is so good at playing.

Swalwell was an obvious mark. In 2012, he had risen from relative obscurity, defeating an octogenarian Democratic incumbent who had represented the Northern California district since before Swalwell as born.

In some quarters, and certainly in his own mind, Swalwell was seen as a young rising star in Democratic politics.

But in his second term in office, U.S. intelligence took notice of something else. According to Axios, it gave Swalwell a “defensive briefing” about Fang.

Swalwell reportedly cut off ties. Fang left the country, suddenly, in mid-2015.

The same year, somewhat unexpectedly given his junior status, Pelosi named Swalwell to the House Intelligence Committee, a plum and important appointment given the committee’s role overseeing the nation’s intelligence community, including the CIA.

While his office refused to comment for the Axios story, the congressman insisted he was innocent of any wrongdoing in a brief interview with Politico.

He suggested the story was a hit job from a vindictive Trump White House: “I’ve been a critic of the president. I’ve spoken out against him. I was on both committees that worked to impeach him. The timing feels like that should be looked at.”

He said that he cooperated with the FBI and that “if intelligence officials are trying to weaponize someone’s cooperation, they are essentially seeking to do what this person was not able to do, which is to try and discredit someone.”

Swalwell also predicted that he wouldn’t lose his seat, saying “this goes back to the beginning of the last decade, and it’s something that congressional leadership knew about.”

Swalwell hasn’t elaborated about the nature of his relationship with Fang, and his office continues to stonewall media inquiries. RealClearPolitics’ calls to his office were unreturned.

But two Republicans on the Intelligence Committee separately told RCP they don’t want Swalwell anywhere near state secrets.

Sitting on the committee makes members of Congress even more of a target. This changed the habits of Rep. Rick Crawford.

After joining the panel, the Arkansas Republican says he has severely limited the number of meetings he takes with representatives from foreign countries, keeps a closer eye on who comes into contact with aides, and regularly has Capitol Police sweep his office for bugs.

And with good reason: Earlier this year, National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe warned Congress that as many as 50 members have likely been targeted by foreign influence.

Crawford’s reaction to the Swalwell news? “Quite frankly, I am not even remotely comfortable with him in the room,” he told RCP, given the sensitive nature of the material the committee oversees.

Crawford doesn’t make much of his colleague’s insistence that he is working with the authorities: “It’s a redirect. Nobody’s trying to suggest that he’s not cooperating. But being cooperative doesn’t change the fact that you’re compromised.”

What’s more, he added, Swalwell could still be a liability given that “we don’t know the extent to which their relationship might have put him in a position to be blackmailed.”

Another colleague who doesn’t make much of Swalwell’s cooperation is Rep. Elise Stefanik. The New York Republican told RCP that “Swalwell should step down from the House Intelligence Committee and appear before the House Ethics Committee.”

So far that seems unlikely, but Stefanik notes that Pelosi appointed Swalwell and Pelosi can boot Swalwell.

She wants to know why the Democratic speaker even entrusted him with the position given that “this is not a recent infiltration — this goes back to when he was initially running for office when this Communist Chinese spy infiltrated his campaign.”

Crawford and Stefanik and the rest of House GOP caucus are likely to be disappointed. Asked about the Axios story last week, Pelosi responded, “I don’t have any concerns about Mr. Swalwell.”

At the same time, many other Republicans will be delighted.

After listening to Swalwell lambast Trump for his alleged collusion with Russia only a few years after coming in direct contact with a Chinese agent, they are ready to turn the tables.

If he stays on the Intelligence Committee, the GOP stands ready to make him a poster boy. “The situation with Swalwell, just like the situation with Hunter Biden, ties together the biggest weakness Democrats have: That they’re soft on China,” a former White House official said. “This is going to be an ongoing issue for Democrats.”

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post Intelligence Panel Republicans: Swalwell ‘Compromised’ by Fang Ties appeared first on The Political Insider.

Why The 2020 Election Was Neither Free Nor Fair

Posted on December 8, 2020 by RealClearWire

By Joel B. Pollak for RealClearPolitics

The 2020 presidential election was neither free nor fair.

Much of the debate has focused on the question of “voter fraud” — whether alleged violations of the rules moved enough votes in key states to overturn the outcome, or whether speculative theories about hacked voting machines and software should be taken seriously.

These claims remain unproven.

But while voting is the most important event in an election, it is not the only event, but the culmination of a process.

There are common international standards about what makes an election “free and fair.”

These criteria, summarized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, include: the “absolute” right to a secret ballot; the right to “express political opinions without interference; [t]o seek, receive and impart information and to make an informed choice”; the right of candidates to “equal opportunity of access to the media”; the “right of candidates to security”; freedom of association, and others.

Many of these were violated in 2020.

“Fraud” was not as important as what Democrats were able to accomplish legally, for example, by pushing the country to adopt vote-by-mail on a massive scale.

The scientific basis for doing so was always dubious. South Korea and Israel both had national elections at the height of the pandemic in March and April, and both used in-person voting, almost exclusively.

Neither could be accused of a lax approach to COVID-19.

Never before had the country adopted an entirely new system of voting in the middle of an election, at the urging of one party, and over the objections of the other.

Democrats also sued to lower the safeguards against fraud in absentee ballots.

The attorney leading many of those lawsuits, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, was also the key figure in hiring Fusion GPS to produce the fraudulent “Russia dossier” in an attempt to smear Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Democrats preferred vote-by-mail because it allowed them to turn out low-propensity voters.

Republicans preferred voting in person — the standard practice worldwide — partly because of an attachment to tradition, but also because many Republican voters did not trust that mail-in ballots would remain secret or would be delivered at all by postal workers whose union had backed Democrat Joe Biden.

Republicans turned out voters; Democrats turned out envelopes.

Beyond that unfair advantage to Democrats, there were flagrant abuses of the principles that make an election free and fair.

Political violence was widespread, carried out almost entirely by left-wing groups alongside Black Lives Matter protests. Though most protests were peaceful, hundreds were not.

Forty-eight of the 50 largest U.S. cities experienced riots, as did many smaller towns.

Democrats minimized the violence and blamed police, or the president, for the unrest.

With the riots came a national panic that came to be known as “cancel culture.”

Conservatives feared speaking out lest they lose their jobs, their social media accounts, or their lives. A poll in July revealed that 77% of Republicans were afraid to share their political views.

The extreme bias of the mainstream media also suppressed conservative and pro-Trump views.

Media fact-checkers cast Trump as a liar while ignoring Biden’s lies about Charlottesville and much else.

The 2020 election also featured unprecedented censorship. Google manipulated its search algorithm to bury conservative news.

Facebook and Twitter suppressed debate about the coronavirus.

In October, when the New York Post published credible allegations about Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails, which exposed Joe Biden’s past dissembling, Twitter and Facebook both censored the story.

Mainstream media applauded the censorship, and demanded more.

Other factors also made the 2020 election unfree and unfair.

The Commission on Presidential Debates was stacked against Trump, with one moderator caught conspiring with a prominent Trump critic.

An election-year impeachment, based on claims by a “whistleblower” whose very name was censored voluntarily by the press, cast the president as illegitimate.

Former military leaders, like Admiral William McRaven (Ret.), called for his removal, “the sooner, the better.”

Most of these abuses were legal. That is why the results of the election cannot simply be set aside.

When laws were broken — as in the nationwide riots — voters arguably delivered their own verdict, punishing Democratic candidates for the violence and for the party’s waffling on “defund the police.”

But we cannot pretend that what happened in 2020 was acceptable. It leaves many Republicans convinced that the system is “rigged” — even against a “red wave.”

We need to make urgent changes.

If vote-by-mail cannot be reversed, it must be made more secure, or replaced with a secure, 100% American, and politically independent remote voting system.

Political parties must condemn violence unequivocally.

Big Tech must lose its immunity under Section 230, which it has abused. The Commission on Presidential Debates should be replaced.

Above all, “free and fair” must be the standard to which American elections are held.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Joel B. Pollak is senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the host of “Breitbart News Sunday” on Sirius XM Patriot. His newest e-book is “Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.” He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

The post Why The 2020 Election Was Neither Free Nor Fair appeared first on The Political Insider.

What If Biden Were Seeking Recounts? We Know Exactly What Would Happen

Posted on November 20, 2020 by RealClearWire

By J Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

Imagine if Joe Biden had enjoyed a healthy lead on election night only to see it evaporate as the numbers dripped in from Republican strongholds.

Does anyone believe the mainstream media would have rushed to anoint Donald Trump the winner?

Would the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and other outlets have cast the inevitable Democrat demands for ballot reviews and recounts as a constitutional crisis or would they have run wall-to-wall coverage about the inherent problems associated with mail-in ballots?

We don’t have to imagine the answer – just recall 2016 when the same liberal news organizations that are damning Trump as a tyrant and suggesting he might be planning a coup cheered and facilitated Democrat efforts to delegitimize Trump’s victory by claiming he was a crooked businessman who had colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the election.

After early efforts failed to convince electors to defy the will of their states and cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, talk turned to impeachment before Trump was even sworn in.

On the morning of his inauguration – which was boycotted by several dozen Democrat members of Congress because, as Rep. Jerrold Nadler said, he was not “legally elected” – a Washington Post article reported, “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”

Democrats and their media allies fulfilled that promise, spending the next three years using salacious smears funded by the Clinton campaign to claim Trump was Putin’s puppet.

When Special Counsel Robert Mueller dismissed that conspiracy theory in March 2019, Democrats impeached Trump on other grounds that did not include high crimes or misdemeanors.

At a May 2019 event, Biden agreed with a woman who said Trump was “an illegitimate president.” A month later, former President Jimmy Carter said the same.

Nothing in our history has done more to destroy norms and undercut the rule of law.

This history does not bolster Trump’s claims that massive voter irregularities caused his 2020 defeat – though we owe it to our country to review the results from this highly unusual election.

It does suggest that one reason millions of Americans are skeptical about Biden’s victory is the insistence of a highly partisan media that he won fair and square – no questions asked.

Presidents come and go, but the media is forever. The transformation of leading news outlets from liberal voices into propaganda arms of the left may be the most consequential legacy of the Trump era.

It’s not surprising that the media so causally compares Trump to Hitler while branding Republicans as racists – these are now articles of faith among the leftists they support. This is apparently what they believe.

Gallup polls illustrate the partisan shift. During the Obama years about 55% of Democrats felt the “mass media” reported the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” About 30% of Republicans agreed.

In 2017 the number of approving Democrats rose to 72% – where it has roughly stayed – while the number of approving Republicans dropped to just 14% in 2016 and is now at 10%.

No doubt many Democrats tell themselves they are reality-based while Republicans have been brainwashed by Trump’s “fake news” lies.

But that position is hard to defend given the Trump/Russia fiction they perpetrated, the ugly accusations they launched against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and the contempt with which they view those who disagree with them.

Free nations need an honest press. We no longer have one. Heaven help us.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post What If Biden Were Seeking Recounts? We Know Exactly What Would Happen appeared first on The Political Insider.

Who Wants to Blow Up Our Constitution? (Spoiler: It’s Not Trump)

Posted on October 6, 2020 by RealClearWire

By Charles Lipson for RealClearPolitics

The most profound attacks on Donald Trump are that his presidency is illegitimate and that he wants to destroy our constitutional structure.

The Democrats have leveled those accusations for four years, accompanied by charges he is a wannabe dictator, elected thanks to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin.

These frenzied charges, we now know, were invented and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then funneled to the U.S. government through the FBI, Department of Justice, and State Department.

Meanwhile, the CIA and then the FBI were busy spying on the Trump campaign (and, later, in the FBI’s case, on the Trump presidency), trying to find “collusion” with Russia.

Their relentless effort led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose partisan team knew almost immediately there was no proof of these damning allegations.

They should have told the public immediately.

Instead, they spent the next two years trying — and failing — to catch President Trump on a “process” crime of obstructing justice, without any underlying crime to investigate.

They were pursuing a person, not a crime, violating our most basic idea of legitimate law enforcement.

Trump actually cooperated fully with the collusion investigation, providing millions of otherwise-privileged documents, but he didn’t bite on a personal interview designed to catch him in a purported false statement.

(His promise to cooperate fully with Mueller’s collusion investigation was based on the special counsel’s explicit promise to complete the investigation quickly. Mueller’s team reneged on that assurance after they received all the White House documents and testimony they sought.)

Why bother trying to lure the president into a false-statement trap if you can’t indict him?

Simple: because Mueller’s team, effectively led by his zealous deputy, Andrew Weissmann, wanted to help House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so she could impeach the president.

That effort failed because the special prosecutor’s office didn’t come up with convincing evidence. The investigation by Pelosi acolyte Adam Schiff also failed.

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff had already elicited testimony, under oath, from Obama administration officials, all of whom said there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

He kept that testimony secret for two years so the public would never find out.

With these failures accumulating, Schiff’s team suddenly spied another pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: alleged malfeasance by Trump regarding Ukraine.

It was fool’s gold, but it was enough for House Democrats, who voted to impeach the president on a party-line vote. The public wasn’t convinced.

House Democrats never won the broad support they needed to convince senators to remove a duly-elected president. How badly did this impeachment effort fail?

The Democratic National Convention, held just six months later, simply ignored the whole embarrassing episode.

Even the most rabid partisans didn’t care.

These repeated attacks may not have forced Trump out of office, but they succeeded in another way: They hobbled his presidency for four years. Today, the cumulative damage makes his reelection an uphill struggle.

So does the COVID pandemic and Trump’s response to it, which the public considers mediocre (or worse) and confusing.

Trump’s narcissism/constant self-promotion doesn’t help, either. It repels many educated voters, especially with women.

The vitriolic conflicts surrounding Donald Trump have obscured two crucial issues, which voters ought to weigh carefully as they choose the next president.

One is the difference between Trump’s impulsive, divisive personality and the policies he has actually pursued. The other is the Democrats’ threat to significantly change the structure of American government.

The two issues are intertwined since Trump’s policies are, at bottom, an effort to restore America’s traditional federal structure and limit the power of unelected officials in Washington.

His efforts to roll back the regulatory state also curtail the power of lobbyists and their powerful employers, since they hold the greatest influence over detailed rules and regulations, not general laws like tax rates.

Trump’s tweets and rambling public comments project strong, personalized, centralized power. That’s the essence of the “wannabe dictator” charge against him.

In fact, his basic policies are quite different from that self-inflated persona.

For all Trump’s braggadocio, he has tried to move the country away from Washington’s centralized control, away from control by executive branch bureaucracies (though not from the White House itself), and toward federalism and policymaking by the elected officials.

No president in modern times has waged a more sustained battle against powerful entrenched interests and their phalanx of lobbyists, who rotate in and out of government.

Trump’s most important domestic policies are aimed squarely at wresting control from these special interests and their apologists in the mainstream media.

To do so, Trump has tried to return policymaking to elected officials and senior Cabinet appointees and away from the lower-level bureaucrats, whose regulations dominate Americans’ everyday lives.

Likewise, he has tried to wrest control of the federal courts away from judges who act like unelected legislators and return them to judges who see a more modest role for themselves: interpreting laws and the Constitution as written.

Taken together, Trump’s major initiatives are an effort to restore the traditional balance between Washington and the states, between those elected to make laws and those responsible for executing them or adjudicating disputes.

Not surprisingly, these efforts have met ferocious opposition, led by liberals who established the bureaucratic behemoths in the mid-1960s, by progressives who want to expand them still further, and by interest groups that profit from these massive programs.

These disputes, not Trump’s personality, are the heart of America’s modern political divide.

Joe Biden is simply the familiar face of the old guard, repeating hoary nostrums by rote. Their last ideas died decades ago.

Their only answer now is to enlarge the programs and spend more money.

The new ideas come not from this nomenclatura but from the progressive and socialist left, who want to take giant strides toward centralized, regulatory government, paid for with higher taxes and more debt.

They are determined to redistribute wealth on an unprecedented scale and impose vast regulatory schemes, beginning with health care and energy.

They want to “reimagine” policing, jails, and immigration, without so much as deigning to explain why this wouldn’t result in letting violent criminals run loose in our cities and states, while opening the Southern border to an influx of illegal migrants (who would then receive the bounty of larger government welfare programs).

Since these ideas lack broad voter support, Biden is not running on them.

He is running an almost entirely on one idea: Trump is dreadful and needs to be replaced. Biden’s own prospective policies are as well hidden as the Wizard of Oz.

There are three reasons Biden and the Democrats won’t say what they will do. Despite what happened to them in 2016, they believe a purely negative campaign can win the White House.

They are betting that revulsion with Trump is that high. Second, the more Biden and Kamala Harris say, the more likely they are to alienate either progressive activists or center-left independents – and they need both groups to win.

Third, the media doesn’t press them for answers, so why give them? The mainstream media want Democrats to win, and they have behaved more like adjuncts of the Biden campaign than neutral reporters.

A negative campaign does not mean the Democrats won’t enact a positive agenda if they are elected.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill have already floated ideas that would fundamentally alter both Congress and the courts — that is, Articles I and III of the Constitution.

To do that, they must not only win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they must change the Senate’s long-established rules, which allow a sufficiently large minority to stop radical legislation.

If that minority is 40 votes or more, its members can “filibuster” the bill and prevent its passage.

What Democrats are suggesting is they will abolish the filibuster in order to pass sweeping legislation with just 50 votes and Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.

Since the filibuster is a Senate rule, not a constitutional requirement, it can be changed by a simple majority as the first act of the new Senate.

With the minority neutered, a Democratic Senate could move quickly to enact their party’s agenda, just as the House would. The Senate without a filibuster would resemble the House, only with longer terms.

Those who propose these changes are weighing short-term goals: the policies they want to implement.

Whatever you think of those goals, the means they propose would eliminate a vital element of the Founders’ constitutional structure, which set up a Senate to slow (or stop) impetuous action and required large majorities to enact new laws.

Although the Founders wanted a more energetic government than the Articles of Confederation, their new structure included multiple “veto points,” plus the Bill of Rights, all designed to prevent an overly aggressive government from trampling citizens’ liberties.

Changing the Senate rules is not the only major change being floated. Democratic leaders apparently want to add two new states to the union, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

The goal, obviously, is to lock in their party’s control of the Senate for years to come. Again, Democrats would need to eliminate the filibuster since all Republicans (and perhaps a few Democrats) would object.

Some Democrats also propose yet another institutional change, this one to the third branch of government.

They want to expand the Supreme Court beyond its current nine members, which it has had since 1869. Thanks to Republican presidents and Republican Senates, the court now has a conservative majority.

Democrats have suggested packing the court with several new, liberal justices to outvote the conservatives.

Given the scope of these proposed changes, you would think the party floating them would be forced to say whether they were really determined to blow up Articles I and III of the Constitution.

In fact, they won’t say. It would be “a distraction” even to discuss it, declare Biden and Harris. The Democrats’ Senate leader won’t say, either. His coy line is that “everything is on the table.” Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

What about Democrats running for Senate in hard-fought races in Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Iowa, and Maine? Have they been pressed to say yea or nay on these issues?

No.

The result is that the biggest issues lay hidden in the shadows as we enter the final stages of the election, the most consequential one of the modern era.

The institutional changes being proposed mean we are not just voting for a president, a senator, and a representative. We could be voting on the basic structure of our central government, the role of the courts, and the relationship between Washington and the states.

Yet the presidential debate said little about it. It was simply a flurry of crude interruptions, mostly by Trump, and mud-slinging by both candidates.

They never engaged each other directly on the fundamental issues. That was a travesty for the country and a missed opportunity for Trump.

We are being kept in the dark as we vote on what could be monumental changes. Let’s debate those changes openly. Turn on the damned lights.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

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