The House has voted to approve 5 billion dollars for the border wall, but there’s basically no chance it will pass in the Senate.
When that happens, and another funding bill is passed that doesn’t include the wall money, will Trump “shut down” the government?:
But in fact it’s Senate Democrats shutting down the government in media spin. Shutting the government is not actually shutting the government, but there can be bad optics for the party that gets blamed, which inevitably is Republicans.
$5 billion in the world of federal spending is small. It’s not about $5 billion. It’s about Democrats wanting to break Trump.
But isn’t everything about breaking Trump?
However, former Congressman Jason Chaffetz has a thought on how to resolve the impasse—redirection:
Each year the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on things that are not specifically authorized by Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit in this practice.
The Democrats may feign exasperation with the president potentially spending “unauthorized” money on the wall, but they have enthusiastically participated in the budgetary games that will make it possible.
…[T]he budget categories under which programs are authorized and funds are appropriated are very broad, and since Congress doesn’t pass specific language about every last dollar’s use, discretionary funds are inevitably used for things that Congress never specifically funds.
This is how the executive branch often gets the money it needs to do things that Congress won’t formally authorize. It finds money that has been either broadly appropriated or appropriated to a program that is expired and redirects it to a related program or purpose of its choosing.
I see no reason why that cannot happen. If it doesn’t happen, it would mean that the powers that be didn’t want it to happen.
Not really. At least, I hope not. But I’ve been focusing on him lately because he is an excellent example of the kind of person especially common in government these days. Call it the Swamp, call it the Deep State, call it macaroni—whatever you call it, it’s not a good thing.
Lat Monday’s statement of note from this wise public servant was as follows:
Mr. Meadows: All right. So, when you saw [that the Steele dossier was funded by a private client], who did you think the private client was?
Mr. Comey: I don’t know that I knew. [see NOTE below]
Mr. Meadows: I didn’t say you knew. Who did you think it was? Obviously — are you saying you’re so intellectually not curious that you would not say, “Who’s the private client?”
Mr. Comey: Show me where the word “client” is. I’m struggling a little. I see. So the sentence reads, “The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI.”
I don’t remember asking — other than knowing it was political people opposed to Trump, I don’t remember asking which firm, which law firm, those kinds of things. And I don’t remember being told.
Mr. Meadows: So you’re trying to share with this committee –and I want to take you — and that’s why I was asking you to verify this. You expect us to believe that you got notation that a private client is there and that you didn’t — you weren’t inquisitive enough to figure out who the private client was?
Mr. Comey: Who cares? It was Republicans —
Mr. Meadows: Well —
Mr. Comey: — opposed to Trump —
Mr. Meadows: — it makes a big difference. I mean, if you —
Mr. Comey: Let me finish my answer. It was Republicans opposed to Trump, and then it was Democrats opposed to Trump. There was potential bias in this information. That’s really important. Whether it was Sally Smith or Joe Jones, Republican, or Sally Smith, Democrat –
Mr. Meadows: Director Comey —
Mr. Comey: — to me, it didn’t matter.
Rep. Meadows objected, saying it is of great importance, given that the information was used to gain court permission to spy on an American citizen:
“It does make a difference. If someone is paying for this and you’re actually using that information to surveil American citizens with a FISA application, it does matter to me and most Americans.”
Here Comey is repeating MSM and Democratic talking points about Fusion which have been shown to be untrue. Republicans had zero to do with the funding of the dossier, as Comey either knows or should know if he’s at all competent. What he probably does know, however, is that Republican involvement is the fiction the MSM was pushing and that many many Americans probably believe that to be the case, so Comey’s answer will appear to make some sense to those people even though it is based on a falsity.
Comey’s lack of specific interest in who funded the dossier (if he really didn’t know and didn’t ask, which may or may not be the case) would have come from his need to get that investigation going and to use the dossier to jumpstart it no matter what. Why question its provenance if you’re already dedicated to using it despite the fact that Trump’s enemies paid for it, which should have made it highly suspect as a source?
Of course, it turns out that Trump’s oppponent’s campaign funded it, which if anything would make it even more suspect than if other Trump enemies had funded it. But to Comey, all of that was irrelevant (or at least he’d like us to think it was irrelevant). In his previous career, had he really lacked curiosity to that degree? I doubt it very much. But he’s a clever enough lawyer to use it as an excuse now. He’d prefer that we think him a fool rather than a knave, if he has the choice of shaping our opinion.
I say “knave.” The man is no fool, not by a longshot.
[NOTE: Let’s look at this exchange a bit more closely:
Question: So, when you saw [that the Steele dossier was funded by a private client], who did you think the private client was?
Mr. Comey: I don’t know that I knew.
Isn’t that quintessential Comey? “I don’t know that I knew.” The question was not, however, whether Comey knew who the client was. The question was who Comey thought funded it. His answer was that he doesn’t know whether he knew or not, and yet later in the exchange he seems to be saying he didn’t know and what’s more was not the least bit curious about it.
That seems to contradict his earlier response about not knowing (or not remembering?) whether he knew or didn’t know, although it’s all so slippery it’s hard to even say. Statements that are so equivocal are deliberately difficult to contradict, because they essentially say nothing. But Comey is quite practiced at that sort of thing.]
As presidents go, Trump is harder to predict than most.
Will he veto the continuing resolution budget bill? The Freedom Caucus will support him if he does:
…[W]e’re going to back you up if you veto this — back you up,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said. “If you veto this bill, we’ll be there. More importantly, the American people will be there. They’ll be there to support you. Let’s build the wall and make sure we do our job in Congress.”
Here’s a report timestamped 42 minutes ago (as I write this, anyway) saying Trump is “abruptly” threatening to veto it. I don’t see what’s so abupt about it, since he’s been threatening that sort of thing off and on for quite some time. Trump likes to keep his options open, you might say.
It would not surprise me if he doesn’t veto it and it would not surprise me if he does. How’s that for a definitive statement? Trump is indeed unpredictable and I believe that’s one of his strengths in fighting the Democrats and those Republicans who oppose him. As I wrote yesterday, however, Trump’s supporters will not like it if the wall doesn’t get built, and if he has any desire to be re-elected (and I think he does have that desire) he needs to find a solution.
Here’s a description of another possible approach from Trump to tackling the problem:
“It’s not a retreat, it’s actually a bigger attack,” said a Trump adviser,
The shutdown date OK’d in the Senate-passed legislation was pushed back to Feb. 8, after Trump is scheduled to give his State of the Union to a joint sitting of Congress. It is always the biggest speech of the year.
“The date after the State of the Union gives the president the biggest visible platform,” said another source familiar with the plan today. “This positions us to have the fight when we have the most visibility,” added the source.
Visibility is one thing, but results are what people want, and with the Democrats and Pelosi in control of the House there is little chance (IMHO) of getting any wall funding passed. I think this particular anonymous source is blowing smoke—but hey, as I said, Trump is unpredictable.
Then again, if the American people wanted the wall, why did they elect a Democratic House? My sense of it is that people don’t think that way when they vote. Most people are thinking locally—as in, “this person is nicer than that person, this person will get my district more perks than that person.” The entire picture—“if I vote for the Democrat then the Democrats might control the House and we can kiss the wall goodbye”—just isn’t that common a perspective.
Reading this commentary by John Hinderaker on Comey’s most recent testimony reminds me what an arrogant guy Comey is, among his other flaws—not that we really needed reminding.
And Andrew C. McCarthy had this to say about the FBI’s questioning of Flynn and Comey’s commentary on it:
…[T]there are innumerable fact patterns in which law-enforcement agents acquire incriminating evidence through sharp tactics…But those tactics, even though lawful, are often overkill when police use them against people who are not dangerous, hardened criminals.
The Flynn interview is troubling. He should not have been under investigation. If the FBI wanted to interview him on January 24, 2017, a request should have been communicated to the White House counsel by the Justice Department. The FBI decided to bypass both DOJ and the White House. The Bureau exploited the chaos of the second full work day of a new administration, contacted Flynn directly, and actively discouraged him from notifying the White House counsel. They intentionally avoided going through proper channels.
If properly advised that the FBI wanted to interview Flynn, the White House counsel would have asked why…On what basis did the FBI seek to interview the national-security adviser about conversations he appropriately had with a foreign government while Flynn was a transition official designated to become the president’s top adviser on foreign threats to U.S. interests?…
The FBI did not treat Flynn fairly. It is breathtaking to hear former director Comey brag about how he “got away with” dodging protocol in order to interrogate him. Nevertheless, while the Bureau’s situational ethics leave much to be desired, their aggressive tactics did not violate the law.
Comey isn’t alone. He’s merely one in a long line of supposed public servants, originally highly-praised as smart and full of integrity, who have either been revealed as quite the opposite or who have turned into quite the opposite. Their motives include one or both of these reasons: (1) partisan politics (and for those who would argue that Comey was a Republican and therefore can’t have had a partisan political motive, please read this); and/or (2) becoming drunk with power as a result of being given more of it.
And when McCarthy writes, “It is breathtaking to hear former director Comey brag about how he ‘got away with’ dodging protocol in order to interrogate [Flynn].” I’m pretty sure McCarthy’s shock isn’t just because such a thing happened. It’s also because it was McCarthy’s old buddy Comey who did it. As McCarthy wrote back in April:
I am fond of Jim Comey and have been for 30 years. I vigorously disagree with both his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and the manner in which the FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.
McCarthy also writes this in his more recent article, “The FBI did not play it straight with Flynn, and it worked.” And therein lies a clue as to the mechanism for this whole process: a person and/or an agency has power, and when the boundaries of that power are pushed and yield a payoff, then it is done again and again because it is found to have worked. If there is no punishment, and the goal is reached, nothing but some sense of fair play will hold people back, and apparently that is often a very weak type of restraint indeed.
I’ve been having a hard time understanding what the rule of law means in America since Obama was elected in 2008.
Victor Davis Hanson files everything away and can pull out a long catalog of pertinent examples at a moment’s notice. I’m too lazy to do that now, but most readers here are aware of all the wacky legal stuff which has gone down since 2008 — the soft Trump coup being the latest and greatest.
For ten years I’ve been wandering around in a fog, mumbling to myself, “Can they really do that?”
The answer appears so far to be “yes, they really can.”
Another smart piece from Dershowitz, who says it’s certainly possible that Flynn lied to the FBI and that the FBI acted improperly. Here’s how he describes the latter:
The FBI knew the truth [about what Flynn had actually said, and to whom]. They had recordings of the conversations. Then why did they ask him whether he had those conversations? Obviously, not to learn whether he had them but, rather, to give him the opportunity to lie to federal agents so that they could squeeze him to provide damaging information against President Trump. If you do not believe me, read what Judge T.S. Ellis III, who presided over the Paul Manafort trial, said to the prosecutors: “You do not really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”…
Defenders of the tactics used by special counsel Robert Mueller argue that his potential witnesses are generally guilty of some crime, such as lying to FBI agents, and that may well be true. But they are targeted not because of what they may have done. They are targeted for what they may know about what the real target may have done. Then they, and their relatives who may also be complicit, are threatened with imprisonment and bankruptcy unless they plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors.
So the real question, which transcends the Flynn, the Manafort, and even the Trump investigations, is whether these tactics should be deemed acceptable to use in our justice system. Is it the proper role of law enforcement to conduct criminal morality tests to determine whether citizens will tell the truth or lie when given the opportunity to do either by FBI agents? Is it proper to target individuals for such tests for the purpose of pressuring them into becoming witnesses against the real target?
Dershowitz goes on to add that anyone concerned with liberty should have the same attitude about such tactics no matter which party they’re used against. But few people have that sort of consistency—although Dershowitz does, and that’s why I admire him.
And these points of Dershowitz’s are exactly correct:
The function of law enforcement is to uncover past crimes, not to provide citizens the opportunity to commit new crimes by testing their veracity…
When questioning any suspect, officials should not ask questions whose answers they already know, for the sole purpose of seeing whether the suspect will lie. If they do ask such questions, untruthful answers should not be deemed “material” to the investigation, because the FBI already knew the truth. The FBI should not discourage the suspect from having his lawyer present during the questioning, if a false answer will subject him to criminal liability.
It is even worse when this is done in order to “get” an elected president. But the practice is wrong in the more general sense.
I’ve written a great deal about the Flynn case, and that’s because I think it is a highly important demonstration of a deep flaw in our system of justice, one that needs correcting but is unlikely to get it.
[NOTE: This is a redux of a post I wrote a year ago. Apparently they’re still making a big fuss about this song, so I thought I’d revisit it.]
The song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by the brilliant Frank Loesser, composer and lyricist for the musical masterpieces “Guys and Dolls,” “The Most Happy Fellow” (performed less frequently because of its operatic requirements, but absolutely gorgeous and tremendously touching), and the lesser (pun, ha ha) but still great “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.” He also wrote the songs to the movie “Hans Christian Anderson,” a favorite in my youth.
Note that Loesser wrote the music and lyrics to all those musicals and to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as well. That’s quite unusual, although not completely unique: Irving Berlin and Cole Porter come to mind as composer/lyricists, too.
And speaking of lyrics—no doubt you’ve heard about the current drive to ban “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for being insufficiently PC in the sexual assault/harassment realm. After all, the song tells the tale of a man who is trying to persuade a woman to stay for the night, and he uses the cold weather outside as an excuse. But if you actually look at the lyrics, it’s clear that the woman wants to stay, and that her protests are merely for the sake of propriety, and that the whole thing is a flirtatious little game of seduction. In her objections she keeps mentioning what other people will think, not her own feelings. So you might say she’s striking a blow for autonomy and throwing off fusty old custom when she acquiesces at the end.
The entire exchange described in the lyrics is reflective of a previous era when reputation was a big big thing, causing quite a few women to say “no” when they were thinking “yes” and could be persuaded by men who were reading their wishes correctly—as is the man in the song. For young women today, that’s not a description of their mothers’ era, and maybe not even their grandmothers’ era—it’s their great- or great-great grandmother’s era. But that’s the way it often was.
When I was a child—pre-internet, of course—my friends and I used to amuse ourselves in various archaic ways. We not only listened to musicals on a primitive record player that played scratchy 33s, we also played the piano. That is, my friend (who went to Julliard at a very young age and was an excellent player and sight-reader) played the piano, and we both sang. Her family had copies of the Fireside series of songbooks, and so I learned a lot of songs that were considerably older than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In one of the Fireside Books (I think this one) you could find this song, written in 1897 (performed here by Johnny Cash):
That’s history, too.
Frank Loesser used to perform “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with his wife at parties. Here’s the story:
Loesser wrote the duet in 1944 and premiered the song with his wife, [the singer] Lynn Garland, at their Navarro Hotel in New York housewarming party, and performed it toward the end of the evening, signifying to guests that it was nearly time to end the party. Loesser would introduce himself as the “Evil of Two Loessers”, a play on the theme of the song, trying to keep the girl from leaving, and on the phrase “lesser of two evils”. This was a period when the Hollywood elite’s chief entertainment was throwing parties and inviting guests who were expected to perform. Garland wrote that after the first performance, “We become instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’ It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.” Garland considered it their song and was furious when Loesser told her he was selling the song. Garland wrote, “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”
Well, that was a foretaste of things to come, because while working on “The Most Happy Fella” (1956), Loesser took up with the show’s leading lady Jo Sullivan and left Garland (as told by his daughter Susan):
My mother did a lot of the casting for “The Most Happy Fella.” She was co-producer with Kermit Bloomgarden, and when she heard Jo sing, she said, Boy, this is a voice – this is a voice and a personality Frank would just love.
So she sent Jo to audition for my father, sealing her fate. It was a very hard time for everybody. I – my brother and I were uprooted from our California suburban lifestyle and brought to New York City. We at first stayed with friends and then moved to a small apartment.
My mother was not happy and was drinking more and more, and I had never lived in such close quarters with her before, and that was when I began to see that she was – she had big problems.
Everything changed for all of us. My father was living across Central Park in an apartment of his own and having his affair with Jo, and everybody was – he wasn’t real happy either. It was a very – a time full of turmoil, although for him, I think, it was mitigated a great deal by the great success of “The Most Happy Fella.”
If you ever get a chance to see a decent production of “The Most Happy Fella,” run, don’t walk—before the entire Loesser oeuvre gets erased by the Thought Police.
There won’t be a government shutdown over the issue of funding the wall.
Did I think it would actually come to a shutdown? Probably not; the GOP has no stomach for it and Trump is savvy enough to know that voters generally don’t like shutdowns.
But he’d better have something more up his sleeve than this. Most of his supporters didn’t really expect Mexico to fund the wall; that seemed like some sort of braggadocio from Trump. But I think most Trump supporters did and still do expect him to build the wall, and if it doesn’t happen it will hurt his chances for re-election.
Liberal law professor Lara Bazelon has defended the new guidelines for dealing with charges of sexual offenses under Title IX at universities. The headline of her NY Times opinion piece reads “I’m a Democrat and a Feminist. And I Support Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Reforms,” which sounds as though it puts Bazelon in the same camp as Alan Dershowitz—a liberal Democrat who is bravely willing to go on record as not toeing the party line.
That such a stance is now worthy of special note is a sad thing, but that’s the way it is.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s proposed regulations overhauling how colleges handle sexual assault, which may become law in January, are far from perfect. But there is a big reason to support them: I’m a feminist and a Democrat, and as a lawyer I have seen the troubling racial dynamics at play under the current Title IX system and the lack of due process for the accused. Ms. DeVos’s proposals take important steps to fix these problems.
So which is it, Ms. Bazelon: are DeVos’s directives correct because they protect the innocent in general, or are they correct because they protect innocent black men, who are accused in greater numbers than innocent white men?
Bazelon goes on to describe a case defended by a pro bono clinic she runs that represents “low-income students of color in California who face expulsion based on allegations of sexual assault.”. The case involved a presumably false accusation against a black student.
Her clinic is a laudable project. But what about low-income white students who are similarly accused? Are they not worthy of legal representation as well?
Bazelon goes on to describe why the DeVos standards would protect the falsely accused from the problems inherent in the Obama administration’s previous directives on the subject. All well and good; I’m very much in favor of the DeVos reforms, and have been writing about the unfairness of Obama’s system for years. But Bazelon seems to be saying that Obama’s system is a problem because of the racial disparities rather than because it is inherently unfair to the accused of any race:
The Office of Civil Rights does not collect data on race in Title IX cases, but the little we know is disturbing: An analysis of assault accusations at Colgate, for example, found that while only 4.2 percent of the college’s students were black in the 2012-13 school year, 50 percent of the sexual-violation accusations reported to the school were against black students, and blacks made up 40 percent of the students who went through the formal disciplinary process.
Bazelon adds:
I know my allies on the left will criticize my position, but we cannot allow our political divisions to blind us to the fact that we are taking away students’ ability to get an education without a semblance of due process. What kind of lesson is that?
It’s the kind of lesson the feminist left has been teaching for quite some time. It seems that the only reason that Bazelon is noticing this now is because black students have been disproportionately hurt by it.
Or perhaps she wrote her opinion piece with that emphasis because she thinks the racial angle is the only thing that might buy her some dispensation from the criticism of her peers. If she supports DeVos and Trump’s proposals, but only in the service of helping falsely accused young black men, would that give her a pass among her fellow liberals?
The yellow vest protestors of France are not a unitary movement. The majority are peaceful, but there’s a fringe group (right? left? anarchists?) who have been a great deal more violent, and it’s that latter group who have declared war on highway tolls:
French “yellow vest” protesters caused transport chaos on Tuesday after occupying highway toll booths and setting some of them on fire.
France’s biggest toll road operator, Vinci Autoroutes , said demonstrations were under way at some 40 sites in its network and that several highway intersections had been heavily damaged, notably in the south of France.
The Bandol toll station, east of Marseille in the south of France, suffered fire damage overnight into Tuesday and the A50 highway was closed, said Vinci, whose network is mainly in the south and west of the country.
“Motorists should take utmost care as they approach toll gates and motorway access ramps due to the presence of numerous pedestrians,” Vinci said in a statement.
Several people have died in roadside accidents at yellow vest roadblocks in recent weeks, mostly at the many roundabouts blocked by groups of demonstrators.
The demonstrators have also torched or otherwise damaged about half of the traffic radars in France. The ostensible reason for the focus of these attacks, at least originally, is that Macron has raised fuel taxes and changed the speed limits in a way that further burdens a great many people in France who had felt plenty burdened already.
The more intense of the demonstrators clearly fancy themselves revolutionaries. And although the size of the demonstrations have decreased, that doesn’t mean that determined people can’t still do a lot of damage. What the political fallout will ultimately be is anybody’s guess.
Judge Sullivan had a lot to say today in the Flynn sentencing hearing, but it’s not easy to sort out what it meant.
As an example of what I’m talking about, please read this post by Ace and compare it to this by Kemberlee Kaye at Legal Insurrection. The same facts but a different story is told by each.
In trying to sort out just how bad this was for Flynn, I’m going to fall back on a rule I apply to questions of SCOTUS justices during hearings: it’s very difficult to tell what a judge or justice is going to do from the things that judge says to lawyers and/or defendants. Reading the judicial tea leaves sounds easy but it often leads you down a false trail.
In the case of Judge Sullivan and Flynn, though, I think indications are that what’s happening is that Sullivan is puzzled as to why Flynn would plead guilty if he’s not guilty. That’s quite a contradiction. Here’s what I mean:
Judge Sullivan said he had some "concerns" based on Flynn's pre-sentencing filing. ”I cannot recall any incident in which the court has accepted a plea of guilty from someone who maintained he was not guilty and I don’t intend to start today.”
However, since Flynn is determined to plead guilty (why that is the case, we’re not sure, except he may want to get this over with rather than risk a trial), then Judge Sullivan may feel that he must penalize Flynn fairly harshly because he considers the crime of a public official lying to the FBI a serious one. That’s my takeaway from the proceedings so far.
See also this post at Powerline, which points out that Judge Sullivan has delayed the sentencing, in all probability to allow Flynn to offer more information on his dealings with Turkey (which I am pretty sure have nothing to do with Trump) and thus get himself more leniency. There is also the possibility that Trump will end up pardoning Flynn.
