Posted on 04/25/2015 7:13:25 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Voting to confirm an attorney general who wont uphold the Constitution isnt a way to inspire confidence among conservatives.
Hillary Clinton didnt have such a bad week after all. Sure, shes reeling from the latest unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation family piggy bank. But theyre only marginally worse than earlier unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation.
They are roughly on par with the revelations about how Mrs. Clinton obstructed Congresss Benghazi investigations by purging her unlawful private e-mail system, which was worse than her obstruction of the State Departments Benghazi investigation. Yet it may not have been as bad as the obstruction of justice that was a staple of her husbands administration. Those obstructions, in turn, were on par with her husbands selling of a pardon to a fugitive fraudster on the FBIs Ten Most Wanted List . . . which itself was not quite as bad as his awarding pardons to FALN terrorists to ingratiate Hillary! with the New York Puerto Rican community (or at least the radicals therein) in preparation for her Senate campaign.
We could go on corruptio ad absurdum. But you get the point: Reeling is not so bad. Reeling is what Clintons do. The way they operate, its what they <>have to do. They should change the Clinton Foundations name to Reel Clear Politics.
But what difference, at this point, does it make? Not much. See, it wasnt that bad a week for Hillary because, even with all the reeling, there is a very good chance she will be the next president of the United States.
If that happens, we may remember this as the week that put her over the top. Or better, the week Republicans put her over the top, right after they got done putting Loretta Lynch over the top.
On Thursday morning, top Republican strategist Karl Rove proclaimed, The dysfunctional Congress finally appears to be working again as the Founders intended. Just hours later, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed as attorney general i.e., as the chief federal law-enforcement officer of the United States a lawyer who quite openly supports the systematic non-enforcement of federal law. In fact, Ms. Lynch also supports President Obamas blatantly unconstitutional usurpations of legislative authority, including most notoriously, of Congresss power to set the terms of lawful presence by aliens in our country.
Now, I happen to like Karl Rove if youre looking for the Rove piñata at the end of the Tea Party, you will not find it in my columns. But can someone as smart as he is really think Congress under Republican control is working as the Founders intended? The Founders intended Congress to rein in a president who behaved like a monarch. Anyone who has read the 1787 constitutional-convention debates knows they would have impeached and removed a president for a bare fraction of the malfeasance carried out by President Obama.
The Founders, moreover, thought oaths of office were serious business having pledged their own lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of liberty against great odds and a great power that would have put them to death had the revolution failed. They therefore required (in Article II, Section 1) that the president take an oath to execute the laws faithfully, and to preserve, protect, and defend a Constitution that Mr. Obama takes less seriously than his NCAA brackets. Beyond that, the Founders mandated (in Article VI) that oaths to support the Constitution also be taken by senators and executive-branch officers, among others.
So, in what were now to believe is a functional Congress, Loretta Lynch, the presidents nominee for attorney general, testified without compunction that she endorses and intends to facilitate the presidents lawlessness and constitutional violations. With that knowledge, senators then had to consider her nomination.
If oaths mean anything, she should never even have gotten a vote. To repeat, the position of attorney general exists to ensure that the laws are enforced and the Constitution preserved; plus, each senator has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. So this was not a hard call.
Yet, Republicans were up to their now familiar shenanigans.
In October, while courting conservative support for the upcoming midterm election, Senator Mitch McConnell declaimed that any nominee to replace Eric Holder as the nations highest law-enforcement official must, as a condition of his or her confirmation, avoid at all costs Holders penchant for putting political and ideological commitments ahead of the rule of law including as it relates to the presidents acting unilaterally on immigration or anything else.
Turns out he was kidding.
Once the November election was safely won (including his own McConnell wont face the voters again for six years), the majority leader swung into action, laboring behind the scenes to drum up support for Lynch. He not only whipped for Lynch from the shadows; by voting for her confirmation, he mocked any conservatives whod been naïve enough to take his campaign rhetoric seriously.
In this he joined nine others on the roster of Republican senators who took an oath to uphold the Constitution then supported an attorney general who had vowed to undermine the Constitution: Orrin Hatch (Utah), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Susan Collins (Maine), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), and Ron Johnson (Wis.).
That doesnt begin to quantify the perfidy, though. In order to get Lynch to the finish line, McConnell first had to break conservative opposition to allowing a final vote for her nomination. The majority leader thus twisted enough arms that 20 Republicans voted to end debate. This guaranteed that Lynch would not only get a final vote but would, in the end, prevail Senators Hatch, Graham, Flake, Collins, and Kirk having already announced their intention to join all 46 Democrats in getting Lynch to the magic confirmation number of 51.
So, in addition to the aforementioned ten Republicans who said aye on the final vote to make Lynch attorney general, there are ten others who conspired in the GOPs now routine parliamentary deception: Vote in favor of ending debate, knowing that this will give Democrats ultimate victory, but cast a meaningless vote against the Democrats in the final tally in order to pose as staunch Obama opponents when schmoozing the saps back home. These ten John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas), Bob Corker (Tenn.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Cory Gardner (Col.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) are just as willfully complicit in Lynchs confirmation and her imminent execution of Obamas lawlessness.
This is not a Senate back to regular order. It is a disgrace, one that leads to the farces final act: On Monday, Loretta Lynch will ceremoniously take the oath to uphold the Constitution she has already told us she will undermine.
This is not about immigration, amnesty, health care, and the full spectrum of tough issues on which reasonable minds can differ. It is about the collapse of fundamental assumptions on which the rule of law rests. When solemn oaths are empty words, when missions such as law enforcement become self-parody, public contempt for Washington intensifies in particular, on the political right, which wants to preserve the good society and constitutional order the rule of law sustains.
In 2012, Barack Obama was reelected despite hemorrhaging support. Obama drew three-and-a-half million fewer votes than he had in 2008. He is president today because, despite deep dissatisfaction with his tenure, millions of former Republican supporters were too vexed by the partys insipidness to believe voting would make a difference. They stayed home.
The GOP, it seems, is going to great lengths to convince them that they were right. It may be that, for an entrenched Beltway political class, the important thing is to stay entrenched: better to play ball with the opposition party than to represent a base that wants Washington the political classs source of power pared way back.
Accomplished as she is in self-dealing sleight-of-hand, Mrs. Clinton clearly has not cornered the Washington market. To win the White House, she does not need to be popular. She just needs to be a tad more popular with the Left than the GOP is with the Right. Eminently doable.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417467/disgraceful-republican-cave-loretta-lynch-andrew-c-mccarthy
The American People are VASTLY more depraved than the German People were in 1933.
Americans—even “conservatives”—think that people who are fans of sucking the brains out of babies should not only be allowed to walk around in the streets (i.e., not be locked up in mental hospitals), but SHOULD HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE.
In 1933 Germany, NOBODY would have campaigned for any public office on a platform of sucking the brains out of babies.
One spot of good news here.
National Review still has at least one Conservative on their payroll.
Andrew McCarthy, the author of this essay.
It's pretty d*mn obvious this is NO coincidence.
Excellent point, and one I have only just recently begun to analyze and accept myself.
I've been screeching GOP “betrayal” on the Amnesty and massive legal immigration issues for the last ten years.
I was mistaken. These guys aren't betraying anyone. They actually endorse the principles of the Left on issue after issue, and, quite possibly, about 50% of rank-and-file Republican voters agree with them.
They lie because they know they can't win without the support of Conservatives.
And shame on me for not noticing and not understanding sooner.
+1
Most prostitutes are honest. They, at the least, provide the service the john pays for. The republicans roll you. They promise you a good time until you pay [vote for them], then they slip you a Mickey Finn.
And then they vow to harm you.
Like Mitch McConnell did recently.
We are well beyond point where we can hope for a top down electoral solution. The elections reflect the electorate. Pundits, pollsters, politicians who tell us that an election is won or lost because the conservative base stayed home, or because the Republican candidate (Dole McCain, Romney) were lackluster, or because the wrong running mate was chosen, or the candidate somehow muffed a debate, are misleading us.
We are losing elections because we have lost the electorate. Our problem is demographic. One can view the problem from the point of view of race as I often do, or one can view the problem as one of domination by the media, as I also often do, or one can view the problem as a function of our educational system, as I often do, but at the end of the analysis we all must admit that we are staking our political fortunes on a top down solution to a bottom-up problem.
Our system produces generation after generation of high school and liberal arts graduates who unsurprisingly vote as they were educated. They vote as they are exposed by the media. They certainly vote their race if they are not white. Republicans try to correct these tendencies with a television blitz over 60 or 90 days before a national election but the task is hopeless because the mountain is simply too high.
When we lose we blame the candidate. There was a lot wrong with Romney but let's consider the electoral landscape at the beginning of the campaign from his point of view. We know what his point of view was because he told us, 47% of the electorate is essentially bribed into the camp of the Democrat party. So Romney sits down with the likes of Karl Rove attempts to sliver off just enough to slide in. That approach is becoming increasingly unlikely. Yet what is a Romney to do?
He can go Ronald Reagan as Ted Cruz is now attempting to do but it is remarkable how much Ted Cruz is being opposed by the very same people in the Republican establishment who opposed Ronald Reagan. It is equally remarkable those people have affiliation to the Bush family. Follow the money, of which more later.
As long as the demographic/electoral landscape presents the obstacles noted above, it will remain a daunting task to reform the party or elect a conservative.
One further consideration, we should follow the money. It is clear to me that the establishment branch of the Republican Party sitting in Congress has sold out to K St. and Wall Street. We should review our stand on Citizens United and the entire rotten pay for play and crony capitalism game now going on in Washington. We cannot shut down the border because we cannot shut down K St. We cannot effect any conservative solutions which seem so obvious to us until we drive the money changers from the Temple.
We must think bottom-up.
Maybe Cruz will win.
The real question is what was General Ulysses S. Grant saying around that time?
Indeed.
Jesus Christ: You cant impeach Him and He aint gonna resign.
“These men (in government), in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers. Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise all the vast powers that are in their hands .”
~ H.L. Mencken
I read in the Clarion Ledger,Mississippi’s paper of the capital of the state, Saturday, that Thad Cochrane’s senior staffer was arrested for possesion, methampetimine, and precurson to the date rate drug, in Washington.
I wonder if these drugs are to control Thud, who seems to be operating on a whole, nutha, level, these days.
Thank you, good senator, for voting for a anarchist,.
The purpose of elections in our once republic has evolved. Where they were once the means by which everyone could participate in a free government, elections increasingly serve to identify our masters, and condone criminality.
Lucy pulled the football once again in 2014. I'll not be played the fool anymore.
Cruz and Cruz alone.
Lynch is worse than the tephlon preisdent in that she is not only black but an arrogant black women. She will cause much damage if this is possible. THANK YOU GOP you bunch of DELIBERATE scumsucking feckless balless dirtbags
Totally predictable cave-in; all the GOP cave-ins now are fully predictable. Everett McKinley Dirksen often caved for LBJ too, as KY Mitch does with Obama.
Which of these words is the most likely: "maybe" or "win"?
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