All The Biden Border Policies That Have Illegal Immigrants Heading North

Posted on May 3, 2022 by RealClearWire

By James Varney for RealClearInvestigations

While a federal court has stayed the Biden administration’s attempt to lift pandemic-prompted restrictions on immigrants pouring across the southern border, that is just one setback in a largely successful push by the president to make it easier for migrants to enter, live, and work in the U.S.

Since Joe Biden’s first day in office, when he signed seven executive orders on immigration that, among other things, suspended deportations and ended the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program that had eased the crush of those awaiting asylum hearings, the president has in word and deed sent signals that migrants have interpreted as welcoming.

The initiatives include reviving the Obama-era policy known as “catch and release,” “paroling” illegal border crossers so they can enter the country, resettling migrants through secret flights around the country, and ending the “no match” policy that had helped the government identify people who were using fraudulent credentials to find work.

At the same time, the administration has deflected responsibility for the surge of immigrants. Initially, Biden’s team claimed there was no significant spike in immigration, later attributing it to “cyclical” and seasonal trends. Even as a record number of migrants from around the world were streaming across the border, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declared last year that “the border remains closed.”

Last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said the administration had “effectively managed” the border crisis while also blaming “a broken and dismantled system” the administration had inherited.

Many people on the front lines of the border – where a record 1.9 million people were apprehended during fiscal 2021, hundreds of thousands of whom were then released into the county – say the Biden administration’s policies have exacerbated the surge.

“We’re stopping nobody coming into our country,” said Clint McDonald, the executive director of the Texas/Southwestern Texas Border Sheriffs’ Coalition, “and we have no idea who is in our country.”

McDonald and other critics blame what they see as an ideological crusade by Biden officials to dissolve or ignore various laws and regulations that once checked or limited the influx of illegal immigrants – whom the administration now refers to as “irregular migrants.”

“We don’t know how else to put it,” said Spencer Raley, the director of research for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors curbs on illegal immigration. “Since the day he took office, Biden has not signed a policy that would enhance border security. Instead, everything that has been put into place was designed not just to undo policies of the Trump administration but to reflect an unending desire to bring more and more people into our country.”

Biden’s presidential campaign was perhaps more transparent about his intentions than the official line since his inauguration. At several points in 2020, the campaign signaled that enforcement of the U.S. border would be significantly relaxed and opportunities for amnesty expanded. Criticism of the Trump administration’s allegedly harsh border policies were a staple of Biden and his fellow Democratic Party candidates throughout that election year.

Within hours of taking office Biden began to make good on his signals, moving aggressively against the existing infrastructure that dealt with illegal immigration at the southern border. In addition to temporarily suspending deportations and ending the “Remain in Mexico” program, he issued an executive order stopping work on Trump’s border wall.

Policy memos from the Homeland Security also gave Border and Customs Protection and ICE agents more latitude in how they handle people encountered crossing the southern border without papers. These policy directives effectively ended ICE’s usual practice of taking custody of immigrants released from local or state jails, and placed more restrictions on the ability of federal authorities to arrest illegal immigrants.

During Trump’s last three months in office, apprehensions along the southern border held steady at an average of 75,000. In the first two months of Biden’s tenure, that number shot up by 120%, reaching a peak of 213,593 last July.

Despite those sharp increases, the Biden administration continued its relaxed border policies. Agreements the Trump administration had reached with Mexico and Central American countries, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, which were designed to constrict the flow of immigrants, were scrubbed so that immigrants no longer needed to request asylum in the first country they enter after leaving home.

The administration also reinstituted an Obama-era policy known as “catch and release.” It moved in the opposite direction of the Trump administration by lifting travel bans on some countries – bans upheld by the Supreme Court. Biden’s team has also expanded the list of countries whose residents can be granted “Temporary Protected Status” – which prohibits deportation because those countries are deemed unsafe – and extended the safe harbor period for residents of nine covered countries.

The Pew Research Center estimated last year that at least 700,000 immigrants from 12 countries were covered by the program, including Haiti, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Yemen.

The Biden administration has once again expanded the ability of Border Patrol and ICE agents to grant illegal immigrants what is known as “parole.” Although the law granting this power is specific – it allows the government to temporarily admit people on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian or medical reasons” – various administrations have interpreted the law differently.

The Biden administration has reversed Trump’s strict interpretation of that language, reverting to the policy in place under President Obama that allows much wider discretion for granting of “parole” to accept hundreds of thousands of migrants.

Some states have challenged the Biden administration’s expansion of parole, although those cases are still being litigated.

In yet another policy change that facilitates illegal immigration, the Social Security Administration quietly announced on its website last May that it would cease to issue what are known as “no-match” letters, which informed employers of discrepancies between its records and information provided by employees. Critics of the system said it targeted immigrants and claimed the letters were often sent in error. The SSA reportedly sent 791,000 no-match letters in 2020.

The Biden administration has even further euphemized liberals’ use of language regarding immigration. Advocates of more open border policies long preferred “undocumented aliens” to “illegal immigrants,” but now even that has been abandoned for the new phrase, “irregular migrants.”

RealClearInvestigations reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, its subordinate organizations of Customs and Border Protection and ICE, and the SSA for comment on the overall impact of Biden administration policies, but did not receive a response. An ICE spokesperson responded that it would defer to CBP, which did not respond.

Most recently, the Biden administration insisted on ending Title 42, a clause from a 1944 public health law the Trump administration had used to limit illegal immigration during the COVID pandemic. Experts predicted its removal would lead to a tsunami of more illegal immigrants, and at least 10 congressional Democrats, including those up for reelection this year such as Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, have voiced reservations about lifting it.

When pressed last month on the reasoning behind the plan to do away with Title 42, White House spokesperson Vedant Patel said: “As always is the case, this administration is working every day to provide relief to immigrants, restore order, fairness and humanity to our immigration system and bring it into the 21st century.”

Critics such as Raley of the Federation for American Immigration Reform say such language shows that Biden’s team sees the issue from the perspective of migrants rather than that of American citizens. “They’re changing the terms because they want to conflate illegal immigrants at the southern border with legal immigration,” he said.

Although there have been rumblings that Republicans might move to impeach Mayorkas if they regain the House next year, most of the pushback to the administration’s immigration policies has come from the states. Various lawsuits filed by Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Arizona, Alabama, and Montana have sought to check ICE’s refusal to take custody of immigrants released from prison, and another suit this week seeks to block the administration’s plan to give asylum granting powers to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees rather than immigration court judges.

The administration claims the new rule would “streamline” the process and help unclog a huge backlog in immigration court of nearly 1.7 million cases, according to a recent study by a team at Syracuse University.

Lawyers for the state of Texas contend, however, that the rule violated the Administrative Procedures Act and unduly shifts power from immigration courts to UCIS workers. Their lawsuit argues that the proposed rule “upends the entire adjudicatory system to the benefit of aliens,” the lawsuit said.

In some instances, most recently with the effort to lift Title 42, the Biden administration has been rebuffed in court – as it was last year, when a federal appeals court rejected its effort to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy. The Supreme Court heard arguments on that case last month.

The impact of the administration’s policies is clear to would-be migrants around the world, Sheriffs’ Coalition leader McDonald said. “There is a widespread idea among them that the border is open,” he told RCI. “Last week, illegal immigrants on the Rio Grande wanted to take pictures with sheriff’s deputies they encountered. They were FaceTiming people back in their home countries shouting, ‘We’re here! You can come!’ They know our government is not going to do anything about it.”

McDonald spent 21 years as sheriff of Terrell County, Texas, and when he first won his badge he said that perhaps two corpses a year would be found along the border. Last year it was 22. “It’s just unreal,” McDonald said. “Some of these small counties can’t even cover their morgue bills anymore.”

The post All The Biden Border Policies That Have Illegal Immigrants Heading North appeared first on The Political Insider.

Biden And Obama Must Answer For Russiagate

Posted on March 15, 2022 by RealClearWire

By J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

What did Barack Obama and Joe Biden know about the Russiagate collusion hoax their fellow Democrats ginned up to kneecap Donald Trump – and when did they know it? How much did their chicanery contribute to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade the Ukraine?

Those questions are coming into sharp relief following a definitive report by my RealClearInvestigations colleague Paul Sperry last week that places the worst political scandal in our nation’s history and Putin’s brutal war directly inside the White House.

Drawing on a wide range of documents, many never previously reported, Sperry details how the Obama administration worked closely with the Clinton campaign and a foreign government – Ukraine – in a “sweeping and systematic effort” to interfere in the 2016 election. It turns out Democrats were guilty of every false charge they lodged against Trump.

Their maneuverings began in 2014 when Obama officials supported the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych because he was too close to Putin. Biden, then the vice president, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. Sperry reports that leaked transcripts of conversations between two high-level officials in both the Obama and Biden administrations – Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan – reveal that Biden gave his blessing to the formation of a new coalition government.

Sperry writes that Nuland even “traveled to Kiev and helped organize street demonstrations against Yanukovych, even handing out sandwiches to protesters.”

A few months after the anti-Putin government took power next door to Russia, Putin marched into Crimea. Eight years later, he invaded Ukraine.

Top Obama administration officials continued to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs. Biden, for example, would later boast of threatening to withhold aid until the government fired its chief anti-corruption prosecutor – who, among other matters, was investigating the gas company Burisma that was paying his son, Hunter Biden, $83,333 a month for a largely ceremonial position for which he had no qualifications other than his family name. [In 2019, House Democrats would impeach Trump for temporarily withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure it to investigate the Biden family’s dealings there.]

During its final two years, the Obama administration’s dealing with Ukraine became increasingly focused on the 2016 election. Sperry reports that Nuland received some 120 reports on Ukraine from an outside contractor – Christopher Steele.

A former British intelligence officer, Steele would soon start working for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion’s crown jewel was the so-called Steele dossier, a series of salacious and false memos allegedly cobbled together by Steele that formed the basis of the Trump/Russia collusion theory.

Steele and his Fusion colleagues weren’t the only political operatives working behind the scenes in the Obama administration. In April 2015, the Democratic National Committee hired a Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa as a $5,000-a-month consultant.

Chalupa was convinced that Trump’s Achilles heel was Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who had done work for the party led by Viktor Yanukovych. Her effort to attack Trump by exposing Manafort’s alleged Russian ties was the seed of the collusion hoax. Sperry reports that the DNC operative visited the White House at least 27 times during 2015 and 2016.

Among the government officials she worked closely with was Eric Ciaramella, the CIA detailee to the White House who would later be the “whistleblower” regarding Trump’s 2019 call with the Ukrainian president that led to his first impeachment.

At the same time, the Obama administration was politicizing its foreign policy for domestic goals. In one of the more damning passages in his article, Sperry reports:

The Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Manafort, shifting resources from an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarch who paid Biden’s son hundreds of thousands of dollars through his gas company, Burisma.

“Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” said a former senior NSC official who has seen notes and emails generated from the meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

As it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Chalupa and the administration ratcheted up the pressure on Ukrainian officials to denounce Clinton’s rival in order to sanitize their dirty tricks. [Fusion GPS did the same with Steele, having him present himself as an independent former British intelligence agent – while hiding his ties to Clinton – so that his smears would seem apolitical.]

Democrats collaborated with several Ukrainian lawmakers who supported them. This is not surprising because, Sperry reports, while Ukraine might have been a relatively small and poor nation, one of its oligarchs contributed more money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state than any other group of foreign nationals, including the Saudis.

On March 30, 2016 Chalupa wrote to her contact at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington requesting that they express their grave concerns about Trump and Manafort. “Within minutes of sending the email,” Sperry reports, “Chalupa wrote the DNC’s communications director Luis Miranda, ‘The ambassador has the messaging.’ Then she reached out to a friend in Congress, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, about holding hearings to paint Manafort as a pro-Kremlin villain.”

Sperry reports that these efforts paid dividends in August 2016, when Manafort was forced to resign as Trump’s campaign manager because of his previous work in the Ukraine. [Manafort would later be sent to prison on various tax and other charges, none of which involved him doing Russia’s bidding.]

After Trump’s election that November, a Ukrainian lawmaker who had worked with Fusion GPS in the effort to damage the Republican told the Financial Times that his nation believed “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy.” He said that most of Ukraine’s politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

That, of course, was not the end of the story. Democrats, their allies in the FBI, CIA, and other branches of the government, as well as Never-Trump Republicans – all with the active collaboration of the media – would continue to peddle the Russiagate hoax to damage the commander in chief. On Jan. 5, 2017, just days before they left office, President Obama, Vice President Biden, and others met with then-FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office.

The next day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the bogus Steele dossier. CNN then used that meeting as a pretext for trumpeting the false claims of collusion, sparking a media feeding frenzy that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate the charges bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.

Sperry’s reporting strongly suggests that Obama and Biden were involved in this scandal well before then. The hydra-headed smear campaign against Trump deployed the powers of the executive branch to take down a political rival.

It is long past time for the media to begin the process of restoring its integrity. It could start by correcting the record – and then pressing Barack Obama and Joe Biden to explain why they accused Donald Trump of doing precisely what they did so effectively, which was involve a foreign nation in a U.S. presidential election.

Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

The post Biden And Obama Must Answer For Russiagate appeared first on The Political Insider.

Are Democrats Really Going To Cross The Rubicon?

Posted on March 8, 2022 by RealClearWire

By J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

While the world focused on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last week, little attention was paid to the ineffably consequential decision by Democrats to go all-out in their assault on American democracy.

Just as Julius Caesar invited civil war by crossing the Rubicon, the partisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol let it be known that it will recommend bringing two sets of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election.

One allegation is that that he tried to obstruct the lawful counting of votes. The other is that he engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States through his false claims of a stolen election.

Given how divided our country is, and the wide support Trump still enjoys, his indictment would be an incalculably reckless act. It would be tantamount to the first round of live fire across the bow. Even if the left honestly believes its claims that conservatives are itching to take up arms against the Republic – that Jan. 6 was just a dress rehearsal for a second civil war – why would they consider striking this match?

If Democrats had a slam dunk case against Trump, one could argue that they might have some justification for putting the nation at such risk. They do not. The New York Times tersely noted that it is “far easier for the committee to claim that Mr. Trump had committed a crime … than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction over the same facts.”

It underscored this point by noting, “In publicly sharing its work, the committee has only escalated expectations that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted, regardless of whether its evidence meets the standard that a federal prosecutor must clear to secure a unanimous guilty verdict.”

To prove the conspiracy charge, for example, prosecutors would have to show that Trump knew he had lost the election but recklessly argued otherwise. The existing evidence so far suggests that Trump truly believes the delusion that he won more votes. The committee, which is a finely tuned machine designed to leak cherry-picked damaging information about the former president, has provided no evidence to support that claim. Nor has it shown that he directed the mob to attack the Capitol to obstruct the vote count.

So far, their argument – which echoes the larger left-wing push to punish and erase all narratives that do not support their preferred version of reality – appears to be that there is a single truth, their truth, and that Trump’s unwillingness to embrace it is a crime.

It is impossible to overstate the danger of this mindset, which is a profound assault on free speech and a dramatic escalation of the effort to criminalize political differences. It is, as Democrats like to say, a page torn straight from Putin’s playbook.

Politics in free nations is necessarily rough and tumble. It is a contest of ideas that often lack scientific precision. It makes room for debatable claims that may contain falsity as well as kernels of truth. The best evidence shows that Trump did not win as many votes as Biden in 2020, but also that it was a highly unusual contest filled with troubling irregularities. Prohibiting people from making that case is un-American.

If Trump can be charged with a crime, what about Joe Biden, who repeatedly claimed that Trump was not legitimately elected in 2016? What about Rep. Jamie Raskin, a leading member of the Jan. 6 committee who objected to the certification of Florida’s electors by making the bogus argument that they were not qualified to serve under state law?

Once a precedent is set, it becomes the norm. Do we really want to go down this road of indicting – rather than just challenging and debunking – those whose only crime is holding problematic opinions?

Why would Democrats place our republic in such peril? The answer is that they want this conflict. As polls show their effort to transform America meeting ever wider resistance, they seem eager for a final battle that will allow them to vanquish the right once and for all. Unable to achieve their ends through democratic channels, they are intent on blowing up the system.

I know that sounds crazy. It’s impossible to imagine how this battle would unfold and how victory could even be achieved. But Democrats are convinced that only they possess the truth and that those who disagree with them are beneath contempt. They see their venomous tactics as virtuous.

If you have ever confronted hard-core Democrats about these issues, you know there is no talking to them. All they have is their certainty.

Truth be told, Democrats have paid little price so far for their war on American norms. Unwilling to accept Trump’s victory in 2016, they advanced the sulfurous claim that the president was an agent of Russia. We now know that false narrative was concocted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and embraced without evidence by the Obama White House, much of the media, the FBI, and other aspects of the Deep State.

In its size and scope Russiagate is the worst scandal in American history. And yet Hillary Clinton and President Obama remain party heroes who are never pressed on the issue. Former Clinton staffers who spread the scurrilous Trump/Russia rumors, including Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have only been rewarded for their perfidy. The New York Times, Washington Post and other news outlets who won prizes for pushing the conspiracy theory refuse to correct many clear errors in their coverage.

The incendiary path Democrats are heading down is unimaginably destructive, not just to the United States but to the world. As Putin continues his war in Ukraine and intensifies, united American leadership is indispensable. Instead of bringing us together, criminal charges against Trump would burn down our house.

Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

The post Are Democrats Really Going To Cross The Rubicon? appeared first on The Political Insider.

‘America First’ Has Answers for U.S. Crisis Of Confidence

Posted on January 4, 2022 by RealClearWire

By Steve Cortes for RealClearPolitics

A majority Americans begin 2022 full of worry and dread. During President Biden’s first year in the White House, societal anxiety surged, including among voters who identify as independents and Democrats. In the newest Axios/Momentive year-end survey, 2021 saw a 50% increase in fear about what 2022 will bring among independents. Democrats weren’t much more sanguine. They began last year with refreshing optimism as their party took control of the White House and Congress, with only 19% of Democratic voters declaring themselves fearful about 2021. By year’s end, that number had surged to 45%.

Reflecting this dour assessment, the RealClearPolitics polling average of Joe Biden’s approve/disapprove ratio also receded sharply for the last year, from a stellar 20-percentage-point surplus in his favor on Inauguration Day, to a minus- 10-point rating.

Given this environment, Republicans naturally grow more confident about the midterm elections. But taking nominal control of Capitol Hill won’t be enough. Will Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and their lieutenants be content with stopping the woke and socialist-inspired agenda of progressives? Or will they boldly implement a full-throttle populist nationalist “America First” agenda?

Doing so requires focus, not a scattershot approach. The next Republican-majority Congress must concentrate intensely on a short list of the most pressing issues, where only the populists can rescue everyday Americans from the abuses of oligarchs and their handmaidens in both major political parties.

The first issue is inflation. This is the factor that explains the 30-point approval swing that has buried Biden’s White House in a matter of months. Inflation is, essentially, a tax — and a highly regressive one at that. After decades of restrained inflation, Americans understandably fear the continued loss of prosperity as their standard of living erodes by the day. For eight straight months, real wages have declined under Biden.

The ravages of inflation, predictably, hit the working classes the hardest. For example, a recent Gallup poll found that among modest earners making $40,000 or less per year, 71% report that inflation is a severe or moderate hardship. In contrast, among workers earning $100,000 per year or more, only 2% cited inflation as a severe hardship. A November Quinnipiac survey found that Biden still enjoyed a slight positive approval rating on the economy among those with college degrees, 50%-49%. But among non-degree holders, Biden languishes 54 percentage points underwater, with only 20% approval and 74% disapproval. Inflation helps explain this huge chasm.

What solutions should be offered? For starters, stop unfair labor competition so that workers have a chance to keep pace with the soaring prices of Biden’s inflation surge. Stop allowing millions of largely unvetted, illegal migrants to simply waltz into America under the bogus pretense of seeking asylum.

For our citizens, end obstacles to work, including the administration’s capricious and unscientific workplace vaccine mandates.

Return to the pro-energy policies of the previous administration: oil pipeline construction, rejuvenated drilling, and aggressive exploration on government lands so that Americans can benefit from cheap, abundant, domestic fuel.

Longer term, continue the process that President Trump began of demanding fairness and reciprocity in trade deals, especially with China. Once an America First president is elected in 2024, change tax and tariff policies permanently to compel the on-shoring of production back to the United States, especially in critical industries like semiconductors and medicines.

But healing the economy alone is not enough.

Our society suffers a sickness of the soul as well, and legions of everyday Americans feel silenced and intimidated by ruling class elites who insist that we pretend to believe fundamental myths, like the existence of dozens of genders. It’s high time for politicians to speak publicly the way the vast majority of Americans speak privately regarding hot-button cultural issues.

As a recent Rasmussen poll revealed, 75% of Americans agree that only two human sexes exist. Only 18% believe in multiple genders, and yet that small minority drives education policy and makes nearly every important cultural decision for our society, declaring the massive supermajority of Americans to be hopeless bigots for accepting the reality of humanity as male and female.

From a policy standpoint, the America First agenda must embrace this issue for elections, from school boards all the way to the U.S. Senate. Stop radical teachers and their unions from sexualizing young children and indoctrinating them with unscientific gender-fluid psychobabble. Forbid any public buildings or funds for such atrocities as drag-queen story times for children. Make illegal the infiltration of girls’ and women’s sports by biological males.

The common theme with these two issues is protection. Right now, powerful forces collude to oppress the masses, via financial and cultural repression. Only the emerging populist nationalist movement can protect citizens in both realms. Restoring wages and restoring gender sanity represent an agenda worthy of a great movement in this new year.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

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Biden And The All-Star Game: A Presidential Wild Pitch?

Posted on April 7, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Philip Wegmann for RealClearPolitics

The president loves baseball, and has said the earliest memories he has are of the sport: a glove under his pillow the night before his first game and a too-big Little League jersey that hung past his knees. Given a chance to pick between an inning on the mound in the majors or the vice presidency, a much younger Joe Biden wouldn’t hesitate.

“I would have pitched!” the then-vice president told a crowd gathered for the final game of the 2009 Little League World Series, before following through with his trademark addendum, “By the way, I’m not kidding.”

Biden’s whimsical yearning was a variation on an old anecdote told by Dwight Eisenhower, and the crowd laughed appreciatively. He told them how he started at shortstop in elementary school but was playing centerfield by high school.

The lesson he learned along the way, Biden said that day in Williamsport, Pa., is that “we owe our best to whoever is watching.” Here, Biden was paraphrasing Joe DiMaggio, as he acknowledged, adding that he hoped “I have done that in my career.”

Almost a dozen years later, Biden is in the Oval Office. Mixing sports with politics, however, may have led to a few errors in his still-new presidency.

It included an ESPN interview; he said he would “strongly support” pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest new voter laws in Georgia. It ended with an extended rundown, caught between angry fans and legislators.

The White House now insists, contrary to fact, that Biden never weighed in on where the “Midsummer Classic” should or should not be played.

Like most Democrats, Biden opposes the new voting law, which requires a photo ID to cast a ballot, sets limits on absentee voting, and reduces the number of ballot drop boxes.

But the president erred when he said during his first press conference that the law “ends voting early” at 5 p.m. (it actually extends early voting hours and keeps Georgia’s 7 p.m. Election Day voting hours intact). He called it “un-American.”

The Washington Post fact-checker gave his claim “four Pinocchios.” The error has not been acknowledged, let alone corrected, and corporations have started making business decisions in response to public pressure on the issue.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Home Depot oppose the law. Outside of Georgia, Apple, JPMorgan, and United Airlines issued similar statements. This kind of posturing isn’t unusual and usually only spooks the local chamber of commerce when a company actually decides to act instead of issue press releases.

Late last week, Biden was asked about “the possibility that baseball decides to move their All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of this political issue” by ESPN’s Sage Steele.

“I think today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that. People look to them, they’re leaders,” Biden replied.

The exchange was almost Trumpian. No, Biden didn’t shout. But he went beyond politics. He talked about sports and politics, almost like a talking head — and exactly like his press secretary promised he never would act.

When reporters pressed Jen Psaki earlier this year on the impeachment trial of former President Trump, she demurred, saying Biden wouldn’t comment because “he is not a pundit.”

The answer about the All-Star Game, however, has opened the president up to a host of related topics. Now that he’s weighed in on baseball in light of the Georgia voting law, for instance, will he do the same regarding the U.S. participating in the Beijing Olympics given the anti-democratic tendencies of the Xi regime?

RealClearPolitics put that question to Psaki on Friday, and while the press secretary punted, saying that the U.S. Olympic Committee would play a “big role,” she insisted that the president “did not” weigh in on baseball.

“I don’t know if you heard the answer, the question and the answer that happened a few minutes ago where we addressed this, and I answered the question. And I give a little more context, but maybe you weren’t paying attention to that part,” Psaki replied.

Another reporter had asked earlier in the briefing if Biden believed businesses should consider pulling out of Texas as that state considers a bill similar to Georgia’s new law.

“Well, first, he didn’t call for businesses to boycott. Businesses have made that decision themselves, of course. He also was not dictating that Major League Baseball move their game out of Georgia. He was conveying that if that was a decision that was made, that he would certainly support that,” Psaki said.

But the president had weighed in on the question, and less than an hour after the briefing wrapped, MLB announced that there would be no All-Star Game in Atlanta.

Georgia Gov. Kemp laid the decision at the feet of Biden, saying that it was “the direct result of repeated lies from Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams about a bill that expands access to the ballot box and ensures the integrity of our elections.”

Abrams, a Democratic activist and former gubernatorial candidate who led the opposition to the law, released her own statement praising the league and its players “for speaking out.” At the same time though, she added that she was “disappointed” that the MLB is relocating the game due to its economic impact. She wasn’t the only Democrat to do so.

Newly elected Sen. Jon Ossoff broke with Biden, telling National Review, “I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia. Georgia welcomes business, investment, jobs, opportunity, and events.”

The solution, he said, was to “stop any financial support to Georgia’s Republican Party, which is abusing its power to make it harder for Americans to vote.”

Republicans reacted at the national level by condemning the move, and South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan even announced he was drafting legislation to strip MLB of its federal antitrust exemption. And while that is a doomed effort so long as Democrats control the House, it was indicative of a shift on the normally corporate-friendly right.

The Georgia House of Representatives threatened to pull Delta’s tax cuts on jet fuel, the Texas GOP is reportedly mulling a similar response to corporate criticism, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threw a brush-back pitch at the business community. He argued in a statement that corporations were acting like a “woke alternative government” with their boycotts.

If that continued, McConnell warned, their actions would “invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from the constitutional order.”

At a moment when Republicans are fighting to keep the White House and Democrats in Congress from increasing the corporate tax rate, McConnell likened the threatened boycotts to “economic blackmail.”

Psaki responded to that statement Monday by saying, “We’ve not asked corporations to take specific actions. That’s not our focus here.” And without going into details Tuesday, she declined to comment on MLB moving the All-Star Game to Colorado even though that state has laws similar to Georgia’s, other than to say “the Georgia legislation is built on a lie. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

The White House has not backed down from Biden’s false claim that the Georgia law limits voting hours. But the president appeared to moderate his tone and acknowledge the economic harm that boycotts cause to local communities.

When asked about a different sport in the same state, the president demurred. And if he was a cheerleader who was “very supportive” of MLB’s decision to can the Georgia All-Star Game, he was more libertarian this week when it came to golf.

Should the Masters tournament relocate? “I think that is up to the Masters,” Biden said after remarks about the pandemic in the State Dining room at the White House. Talking sports this time, he was more cerebral, weighing the pros and cons of boycotts.

“Look, you know, it is reassuring to see that for-profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how these new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are,” he said.

“The other side to it too is: When they, in fact, move out of Georgia, the people who need the help the most — people who are making hourly wages — sometimes get hurt the most.

“I think it’s a very tough decision for a corporation to make or a group to make, but I respect it when they make that judgment, and I support whatever judgment they make,” he started to conclude, before adding that “the best way to deal with this is for Georgia and other states to smarten up. Stop it. Stop it. It’s about getting people to vote.”

Before Biden spoke to reporters, State Department spokesman Ned Price announced that the U.S. is considering a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in 2022.

The president had previously said that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, didn’t have “a Democratic bone in his body,” and Price told reporters that a boycott “is something that we certainly wish to discuss.”

State then appeared to quickly flip-flop. A senior department official, speaking anonymously, told CNBC in that “our position on the 2022 Olympics has not changed. We have not discussed and are not discussing any joint boycott with allies and partners.”

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post Biden And The All-Star Game: A Presidential Wild Pitch? appeared first on The Political Insider.

We Cannot Allow China To Engage In A COVID Coverup

Posted on February 23, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Dave Seminara for RealClearPolitics

China is testing President Biden, but his party is still preoccupied with Donald Trump. Chinese authorities refused to provide World Health Organization investigators with raw data on early COVID-19 cases that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus spread in China.

The stakes in learning as much as we can from this pandemic couldn’t be higher. But it’s unclear if our new leaders are ready to confront China’s increasingly intransigent leaders, who are keen to promote unlikely theories on the origins of the virus that absolve them of culpability.

The virus has killed nearly 2.5 million people worldwide and the International Monetary Fund has estimated that the global cost of the pandemic is $28 trillion. A paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, put the total cost in the U.S. at more than $16 trillion, or nearly $200,000 for a family of four.

With case counts declining and vaccines here, we now see a light at the end of the tunnel, but this is no time for complacency.

This should be a “never again” moment where we steadfastly resolve to do everything in our power to ensure that we never experience another catastrophic plague like this one again.

President Biden has yet to speak publicly about China’s refusal to hand over raw data on early cases, but Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, issued a statement. “At this critical moment, protecting the WHO’s credibility is a paramount priority,” he said. “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”

The statement was better than nothing, but there was no call to action or mention of potential consequences if China fails to comply, which is exceedingly likely given Beijing’s track record on transparency and COVID-19.

Sullivan merely said that “[a]ll countries, including China, should participate in a transparent and robust process for preventing and responding to health emergencies — so that the world learns as much as possible as soon as possible.”

Since the news broke on Feb. 12, other top Democrats have been silent regarding China’s failure to fully cooperate with WHO investigators.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has sent multiple tweets about impeachment but none about China. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has also been silent, but has sent a half dozen tweets about the impeachment.

There’s also been nary a peep on China’s attempted coverup from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has more Twitter followers than Schumer and Pelosi put together, or Sen. Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee who has sent a dozen tweets about impeachment in recent days while remaining silent on China.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made no mention of the WHO team’s China mission, but the day after the news broke, she sent a tweet warning of xenophobia. “Hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have skyrocketed during the pandemic. That’s why our Administration has taken actions to address these xenophobic attacks.”

Combating xenophobic attacks is a laudable goal, but my fear is that the too-woke, too-cozy-to-China Democratic Party may not act forcefully for fear of stoking xenophobia. Remember, for example, how then candidate Joe Biden called Trump’s China travel ban “xenophobic,” and how Democrats like Pelosi and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged Americans to visit Chinatowns at the start of the pandemic.

For years, the Putin-obsessed Democratic Party has acted as though Russia is still our primary geopolitical adversary when China is clearly our biggest threat.

We can demand accountability from China without inflaming anti-Asian sentiment. President Biden must use forceful diplomacy to bring other world leaders around to force China’s hand. Finding consensus will be difficult, but issuing statements of concern is clearly not enough.

The Chinese government should be given a deadline to turn early COVID-19 case data over to the WHO and there must be clear consequences for failure to comply.

Any number of sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans for China’s leaders, should be on the table. We should also strongly encourage the WHO to immediately send its team of investigators back to China. They should remain there until China’s leaders fully cooperate, and if they don’t, team members should hold daily press conferences to shame them.

Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced a bill, the COVID-19 Accountability Act, last May calling for sanctions on China if it failed to fully cooperate with the U.S. and international organizations conducting investigations. The bill never received a vote but now is the time to reignite talks of how to respond to China’s dangerous lack of transparency.

China doves and free-trade-at-all-costs types will insist that we can’t afford to confront China, which is our third largest trading partner.

But when you stack up the economic cost that may arise from rising tensions with China against the potential cost of enduring another pandemic, the choice is clear.

It’s time for Joe Biden and other world leaders to send a clear, united message to China that the world will not allow them to persist in what looks like a COVID-19 coverup.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Dave Seminara is a former diplomat and author of “Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across 7 Swiss Cantons in 10 Acts,” forthcoming on March 2.

The post We Cannot Allow China To Engage In A COVID Coverup appeared first on The Political Insider.

The Trump Impeachment Trial Is A Monsoon Of Manure – Why I Refuse To Watch It

Posted on February 13, 2021 by RealClearWire

By J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics

I refuse to watch the impeachment trial as a matter of principle. To devote any attention to this charade would legitimize the corruption of our Constitution.

Tuning in would be a tacit acceptance of the blizzard of BS that has buried the national discourse.

At least since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Democrats and their media allies have demanded that we view their smears and lies as high-minded pursuits of the truth. Consider:

When they insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, we were told to believe they were safeguarding national security.
When they accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault and even gang rape, we were told to believe they were protecting the Supreme Court.
When in 2019 they made Trump only the third president in history to be impeached – and the only one not accused of committing a high crime or misdemeanor – we were told to believe they were defending the rule of law.
When scores of BLM protests turned violent last summer, they told us to believe that the gatherings were mostly peaceful.
When antifa thugs destroyed property, beat citizens and occupied public lands, they told us to believe that the group didn’t even exist.
When some undefined, unaffiliated people online appeared to subscribe to crazy conspiracy theories involving Satan and pedophiles, they told us to believe it was a vast and highly organized group called QAnon that was intent on overthrowing the government.
When they argued that “whiteness” and “white privilege” are the underlying source of America’s problems, they told us to believe they were trying to heal the nation.
When they censored allegations of the Biden family’s corruption, they told us to believe they were fighting disinformation.
When they allowed Twitter mobs to destroy people who had once said something they didn’t agree with or like, they told us to believe that they were seeking justice.
And, when they demonize and silence the tens of millions of people who oppose their quest for domination, they tell us to believe they are seeking unity.

Those are just 10 examples; there are scores of others.

From their position of power in Washington, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and academia, progressives continually manufacture false narratives that insult reason and decency and demand that we accept them as virtuous.

They are a most dangerous type – unserious people who are deadly serious. I refuse to submit.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

The post The Trump Impeachment Trial Is A Monsoon Of Manure – Why I Refuse To Watch It appeared first on The Political Insider.

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.

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