Free Republic

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along. I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case. At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he...

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts. Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the...

It was in the national interest of the United States that Ukraine, under siege by our Russian nemesis, be given the full quantum of military aid extended by Congress. It was in the political interest of President Trump that Ukraine aggressively investigate credible allegations of corruption and conflict-of-interest against former Vice President Joe Biden, a favorite among the Democratic candidates seeking to run against Trump in 2020. The national interests of the United States and the political interests of the president are not the same thing. If President Trump conflated them in his discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that...

Is there an enduring American character? For those who view our nation as at a tipping point, the question is urgent. Others scoff, “Why?” After all, if the American character is truly enduring, it will endure — the ship eventually will right itself to the extent it is off course. And if not, history will inevitably evolve it into something better, right? My friend Mark Levin would counter that this is the wrong way to look at it. The foundation of Americanism, he posits, is natural law. That does not just spontaneously appear, nor passively persevere. Understanding our natural-law roots,...

Populism? No thanks. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a populist. Evidently, that separates me from a growing number of commentators, including some conservatives, wistfully engaged in Washington's latest fad: over-interpreting Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. The normally sensible Mike Lee, Republican senator from Utah, took to our pages to plead the case of "principled populism" -- which is akin to calling for a sober Bacchanalia. Not surprisingly, Senator Lee's brief doesn't get very far before strangling in its own illogic, as odes to populism inevitably do. The "characteristic weakness" of populism, he tells...

In commenting on why the Obama administration initially had decided to release redacted portions of the 911 telephone calls made by the radical Islamic terrorist who killed 49 people at an Orlando night club, columnist, author, and former terrorism prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy said it was because the government “is becoming Sharia-adherent.” Sharia is the Islamic law that many Muslims (and governments) throughout the world follow, and it is based on the teachings in the Quran. On Monday’s Bretibart News Daily (SiriusXM), host Stephen K. Bannon asked McCarthy, “The attorney general went on NBC yesterday and she said she’s redacting...

I wonder when the Trump backers will realize they’ve been had. The 2016 GOP campaign has been overwhelmed by Donald Trump’s celebrity persona, by the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it appearances where he might say or do anything — and “anything” includes expletives, incitements, and assorted idiocies that would have been disqualifying in the bygone times of, oh, five or ten minutes ago. But Trump is not the real story of the campaign. The real story is the Republican base’s rejection of the Republican establishment — i.e., the party leaders, prominent pols, lobbyists, and donors who make up the GOP component of the Washington...

By:John Seiler | March 28, 2016 National Review’s jihad against Donald Trump turned against Americans themselves with Kevin Williamson’s screed, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” He writes about such working-class cities as Wayne, Mich., where I grew up after I was born in 1955. To this day, one-sixth of the city is the Michigan Assembly Plant. It’s a shot-and-beer town. Up until the 1974 Depression, the only way you could avoid providing for your family—your wife staying home with the kids and a cottage up North on a lake—was if you...

According to Romney in 2012: Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and create jobs for the American people. He’s done it here in Nevada. He’s done it across the country. He understands that our economy is facing threats from abroad. He is one of the few people who stood up and said, “You know what? China has been cheating. They’ve taken jobs from Americans. They haven’t played fair. We have to have a president who will stand up to cheaters. We believe in free trade and free enterprise, but we don’t believe in...

Is Donald Trump the sharia of American politics? I'm having trouble finding much daylight between Islamic law's repressive blasphemy standards and the mogul's thin-skinned sense of privilege. None of us wants to be insulted or smeared. But sharia forbids not only ridicule or slander against Islam; it bans any examination that casts Islam in an unflattering light. Worse, truth is not a defense: Even if one's questions are based on undeniable past actions or verbatim quotes from scripture, tough questioning is considered blasphemous. Retribution, moreover, is often completely out of proportion to the scale of the perceived "offense." How is...

A national-security investigation may "not [be] conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution." That clause, and others similar to it, are found throughout the Patriot Act and other provisions of federal law. They protect Americans from being subjected to surveillance based on nothing except their religious beliefs. There's an obvious reason for that at least, I thought it was obvious until Donald Trump reportedly embraced the idea of forcing Muslims to register in a database. I say "reportedly" because it is not clear to me, after hearing a recording of Trump's hectic...

What was Obama doing while terrorists attacked Americans in Benghazi? You couldn’t help but feel for Robert Lovell. The retired brigadier general is haunted by the failure of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s Africa Command, to respond when Americans were under siege in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. His congressional testimony this week was somber — no faux “What difference, at this point, does it make?” indignation, no “Dude, this was two years ago” juvenilia for him. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the State Department’s Sean Smith were killed in the early stage of the jihadist attack. By then, the actions that...

In “protecting the rights of all people to worship the way they choose,” then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton vowed “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” Mrs. Clinton required translation into the language of truth, as she generally does when her lips are moving. By the “rights” of “all people” to “worship” as “they choose,” she meant the sharia-based desire of Muslim supremacists to foreclose critical examination of Islam. Madame Secretary, you see, was speechifying before her friends at the Organization of...

Insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the ACA. No, the purpose is to highlight how insouciantly lawless and transparently political the president’s latest Obamacare “fix” is. I refer, of course, to Obama’s magnanimous proclamation that he now deigns to permit insurers to issue policies made illegal by the Obamacare statute — at least until the Democrats can get through the 2014 elections. This was frivolous to the point of malfeasance. Let’s start with the basics. The president has no power to rewrite statutes — he is bereft of dictatorial power to legitimize what...

The first thing to remember is that, with the Obama administration, there are no coincidences. The attorney general of the United States is engaged in a shocking extrajudicial publicity campaign. Eric Holder is prosecuting George Zimmerman in the court of public opinion because he knows he wouldn't have a prayer of convicting him in a court of law. Worse, in doing so, Holder is quite deliberately stoking resentment and tension - under the guise of leading a "national conversation" about race. At precisely the same time, the United States secretary of health and human services has loathsomely injected race into...

Former President George W. Bush’s aide Michael Gerson posted a distressingly ignorant column on 12/13/11 which attacked both former speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, and my colleague Andrew C. McCarthy, for their sober, if frank conceptions of the Sharia. The counterfactual basis for Mr. Gerson’s diatribe is his own thoroughly deficient understanding of Islam’s religio-political code for personal, societal, and Muslim state behavior. He glibly—and wrongly—imputes unique Western notions of individual rights, equality before the law, or even rational legal procedures of evidence to the Sharia’s so-called “set of transcendent principles of justice.” Gerson condemns Gingrich’s apt summary...

You Have the Right to Remain Silent…McCain, Miranda, and Common Article 3. By Andrew C. McCarthy A number of friends and colleagues (both conservative and liberal) have either quarreled with or expressed alarm about my contention that the 2005 McCain Amendment conferred Miranda rights on alien enemy combatants. This contention has been the subject of a 2005 article (here) and a Corner Post (on Tuesday). They say I am making the McCain Amendment out to be much more consequential than it was — which is funny because, at the time, they all seemed to think it was pretty consequential. Why else...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version February 16, 2006, 3:44 p.m. Checked and Unbalanced George Will’s diatribe against the NSA program is meritless. As a reverent admirer of George Will, it pains me to say that his diatribe today against the National Security Agency's terrorist-surveillance program is an embarrassing magpie of hyperbole and error. Will's premise is that the administration, in authorizing the program, has promulgated the "monarchical doctrine" that "whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence...

Imagine for a moment that we are at war. (For many of us, that will not require a very active imagination.) Our military-theater commanders in western Afghanistan and central Iraq sketch out operations against the enemy. They account for the various contingencies that might arise when confronting stealthy terrorists who shun the laws of civilized warfare. They pore over the latest intelligence estimates one last time. They position their land and air forces accordingly, and ensure that they are properly armed and ready. And then they go ... straight to court. Where's the Probably [sic]Cause? Why? Well, to make...