‘The Committee is seeking documents for future public disclosure to harass and embarrass the President and his senior advisors…’
Elijah Cummings/Photo by AFGE (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The honeymoon is over—if ever there were one—on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after two top-ranking GOP members said Democrats secretly obtained leaked White House documents and gave them to the media but not to committee members.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, had written a letter of praise in late January to new Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md., for his overtures at transparency and for vowing to include opposition party members in discussions about calling witnesses before hearings.
On Monday, though, Jordan and fellow committee member Mark Meadows, R-NC—both strong voices within the Freedom Caucus and staunch supporters of President Donald Trump—did the opposite, issuing a letter of complaint that castigated Cummings for failing to follow through on those 6-week-old pledges.
“These actions are not indicative of the objective, fact-based oversight you promised,” they said.
The concern related specifically to an investigation into the security clearances of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom serve in official advisory capacities in the White House.
On March 8, Axios reported that the Oversight Committee had received leaked documents pertaining to the process by which Ivanka Trump and Kushner had been granted security clearances.
Jordan and Meadows said that the Oversight Democrats never made them aware of the leaked documents or provided copies.
“We first learned about these documents from Axios’s reporting,” Jordan and Meadows said. “However, according to the article, the Committee had been in possession of the documents since early February.”
The two said that by keeping them in the dark, Cummings had broken not only his own pledge for transparency and bipartisanship, but also had violated the committee’s norms of courtesy and convention.
“[T]he Axios article—if accurate—suggests a departure from the Committee’s historical practice of sharing documents that will be made publicly available,” Jordan and Meadows said.
Although Cummings had earlier requested the documents through official channels, the White House refused to provide them, making the leak itself as significant a part of the Axios story as the contents of the purloined materials.
Jim Jordan & Mark Meadows/IMAGE: Fox News via YouTube
Because Jordan and Matthews are said to be in regular communication with Trump, it poses a particular challenge for Cummings in his efforts to pursue White House investigations without having them share details with the president.
But while being in possession of the leaked documents—unbeknownst to Trump—may provide a strategic advantage, Cummings’s surreptitious methods for obtaining and disseminating information risk violating the same sort of ethical practices that he is claiming to investigate.
“By not sharing documents with us, you are depriving us of the opportunity to participate in and be aware of the Committee’s work,” Jordan and Meadows said. “Without access to these documents, we cannot determine whether the information in the Axios story is cherry-picked, inaccurate, or out of context.”
They also criticized Cummings for leaking some of the documents to Axios, effectively undercutting the integrity of the investigation.
“By providing documents to the media before the Committee issues any reports or holds any hearings, one may conclude that the Committee is seeking documents for future public disclosure to harass and embarrass the President and his senior advisors,” Jordan and Meadows said.
The two have frequently clashed with Cummings since the new Congress began its session in January. They made their presence well known during the recent public testimony of convicted felon Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, calling the hearings a “rigged deal.”
In their letter, they said that they detected a pattern in Cummings’ partisan approach of excluding its GOP members.
“As the star witness of your first big hearing, you invited Michael Cohen, a convicted liar who then lied to the Committee several times under oath. … Now, if accurate, you are leaking documents to the media without providing access to the minority.”
‘I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it…’
Nancy Pelosi/IMAGE: CBS via YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In an interview published Monday in The Washington Post, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her strongest statement of opposition yet to impeaching President Donald Trump.
“I’m not for impeachment,” she said. “This is news—I haven’t said this to any press person before.”
The statement is sure to rankle many of her Democratic colleagues in the House, who have, in so many words, made constant calls to “Impeach the motherf***er.”
Several powerful committees have hired full-time staffs to investigate the president and have indicated that they plan to do so regardless of the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose report to the attorney general on collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is expected any day.
As for supporters of the president, it may leave many wondering whether Pelosi taking it off the table could help usher in a spirit of relative bipartisanship, if it could offer some hint as to the contents of the Mueller report—or if it’s simply a trap being laid by a master manipulator to encourage Trump to let his guard down.
“Since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this,” Pelosi told The Post, “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. And he’s just not worth it.”
Pelosi has, since becoming the House leader in January, given similar indications that there would need to be a high, “bipartisan” bar for impeaching, particularly as it would fail to remove the president from office if it came to a party-line vote in the Senate.
Such was the case with former President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. Although there was clear material evidence that he had obstructed justice and perjured himself to investigators—and to the American public—about his sexual dalliances in the Oval Office, no Democrats in the Senate supported the charges that would have removed him from office.
The voting public also sent a clear message to the House of Representatives in November 1998, as impeachment was imminent, by reversing Republicans’ wave victory from the previous 1994 midterm and punishing the party with a loss of seats—though not enough to overturn their majority.
Thus far, no evidence has been presented publicly that would implicate Trump in an impeachable offense.
While accusations, bolstered by the testimony of Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, suggest impropriety and possible campaign finance violations in payoffs delivered to two alleged Trump paramours, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who would have conducted their romantic liaisons a decade prior to his campaign, those accusations reached nowhere near the level of Clinton’s offenses.
Rather, Cohen’s own felony convictions—including lying to Congress—have already led Trump allies to attack his credibility as a witness.
Moreover, based on precedent set by disgraced former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., Trump defenders could easily argue that any payoffs were personal in nature rather than campaign expenses.
Whatever Pelosi’s true intentions are, certainly one of them is deflating Trump’s ability to rile his base prior to next year’s election.
She made clear in no uncertain terms what she felt regarding Trump’s fitness for the office.
“No. No. I don’t think he is,” Pelosi said. “I mean, ethically unfit. Intellectually unfit. Curiosity-wise unfit. No, I don’t think he’s fit to be president of the United States.”
Pelosi conducted the interview with The Post on March 6, it said. The remainder will be published in a forthcoming edition of The Washington Post Magazine.
‘I am hoping that the country gives serious thought to the fact that the government has no objective criteria for race and they know it…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A Washington State business-owner is challenging the biased and capricious policies that determine eligibility for disadvantaged and minority status in state and federal incentives programs.
Taylor’s case, if accepted, could prove to be a landmark decision on the standards that the government uses to determine racial identity.
“If they pick up the case I am hoping that the country gives serious thought to the fact that the government has no objective criteria for race and they know it,” Taylor told Liberty Headlines in an email.
After a DNA test showed that Taylor was 90 percent Caucasian, 6 percent American Indian and 4 percent of sub-Saharan African descent, he submitted the test to Washington’s Office of Minority and Women’s Business Enterprises, which—according to court records—certified him as black and allowed him to qualify as a Minority Business Enterprise.
Based on his MBE eligibility, Taylor also applied for the federally-funded Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program through the U.S. Department of Transportation.
PHOTO: Lisa Zins (CC) via Flickr
However, questioning the validity of the DNA test, they demanded that Taylor provide proof of a direct ancestor and found “little to no persuasive evidence that Mr. Taylor has personally suffered social and economic disadvantage by virtue of being a Black American,” reported The Atlantic.
The Washington OMWBE bureau later reversed its MBE certification upon reviewing Taylor’s eligibility.
Email records and a polygraph test that Taylor provided to Liberty Headlines indicate that he received conflicting accounts from the state bureau—some of whom allegedly supported his efforts “because it would be best for the country to show we are all the same,” according to the documents.
Although Taylor had his birth certificate updated to reflect his Native American ancestry, the program had by then changed its eligibility requirements to require a tribal affiliation.
According to e-mails, a staffer in the Bureau of Indian Affairs advised him to contact the Muckleshoot tribe, saying it accepted non-indigenous tribal memberships, but Taylor continued to challenge, saying the DNA test alone should suffice.
“Explain to me how it is that a non-native American who has no native American, who was adopted into a tribe, who has no heritage is considered native American over someone who has native American heritage genetically as well as on their birth certificate and thus should receive benefits due to their tribal membership,” Taylor wrote the BIA staffer.
The legal question at hand took on added significance after the national news surrounding a DNA test submitted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed she was between 0.09 and 1.56 percent Native American.
Elizabeth Warren / IMAGE: The Late Late Show with James Corden via Youtube
Warren initially touted the result as a confirmation of her claims, demanding that President Donald Trump pay her $1 million for being proven wrong in doubting her. However, widespread condemnation of the test led her to apologize to the Cherokee Nation for making the false claims.
It was also revealed that Warren had listed minority status on her registration with the Texas Bar Association and other professional groups early in her career, and that she likely benefited from appropriating the minority identity, either directly or indirectly through affimative-action policies.
Taylor said in his lawsuit that he audited the federal agencies responsible for denying his claim and found “tens of thousands of Caucasians that have been certified as minorities,” according to his polygraph.
Despite the (not entirely unexpected) rejection by the 9th Circuit, Taylor said the outcome—he is in the process of filing a writ to petition the Supreme Court to hear the case—puts him where he wanted to be.
“I was hoping to get here or that they let me go to trial,” he said, “either way I could show the system for being flawed.”
And he added that for the bureaucracies involved, the litigation will prove much costlier than it would have been simply to apply an equal and consistent standard from the start.
“It would have been much easier to have just taken the certification and the monies that would have gone with the certification.”
‘The proposed redactions have nothing to do with national security and are anathema to our goal of government transparency…’
Bruce Ohr / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After growing impatient with stonewalling by the Department of Justice, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., released unreacted transcripts from the testimony last August of former high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we gave DOJ an opportunity to review them for information that would endanger national security, but after many months and little progress, our patience has grown thin,” said Collins. “The proposed redactions have nothing to do with national security and are anathema to our goal of government transparency.”
At the same time, government accountability advocate Judicial Watch—whose Freedom of Information requests into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi scandal resulted in the revelation of a secret, unsecured server that she used to transmit confidential information—said it had received 339 pages of records from the DOJ related to Ohr.
Despite being heavily redacted, those records, Judicial Watch said, reveal the breadth of communication between Ohr and Christopher Steele, a British intelligence operative who had been working for both the FBI and, indirectly, the Clinton campaign.
“The records show that Ohr served as a go-between for Steele by passing along information to ‘his colleagues’ on matters relating to Steele’s activities,” Judicial Watch said in a press release. “Ohr also set up meetings with Steele, regularly talked to him on the telephone and provided him assistance in dealing with situations Steele was confronting with the media.”
The duel disclosures come as many anticipate the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian collusion with the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump to defeat Clinton.
Republican allies of the president have maintained that it was not a question of undue interference from the Russians on Trump’s behalf but rather that of biased and corrupt influences within the FBI, who initiated an intricate smear campaign in their bid to secure the White House for Clinton—and later to undermine the nascent Trump presidency.
Robert Mueller/IMAGE: Georgetown Univ. via YouTube
“Will [Mueller] find any so-called ‘collusion’? Or was the only ‘collusion’ among agency personnel who hated the president and started this investigation?” asked Collins.
Mueller will submit his findings and recommendations to Attorney General William Barr, who will then determine what to pass on to Congress. Whatever they receive will likely be made public by the Democrat-led House of Representatives.
House committee chairs, anticipating the findings, already have declared that they will continue their own impeachment-driven investigations into Trump.
Based on the behavior of “deep state” bureaucrats within the intelligence community, the Republican-led House in the 115th Congress launched its own investigations, bringing in key players like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former counterespionage chief Peter Strzok.
At the center of it all was Ohr, an associate deputy attorney general, whose wife, Nellie, began working for Fusion GPS as a Russia analyst in late 2015, a few months after Trump announced his presidential campaign.
Fusion, a D.C. firm specializing in political research, had been contracted by the law firm Perkins Coie—whose clients included the Clinton campaign and other Democratic organizations—to gather negative campaign information on Trump using Steele as their primary source.
However, rather than issue a public attack on Trump based on the salacious, unverified—and ultimately discredited—information compiled in the Steele dossier, Clinton’s team indirectly conveyed it to the FBI through Ohr.
The FBI, in turn, selectively leaked innuendo to The New York Times and other compliant media sources, then used the public interest generated by the false narratives to justify eavesdropping on Trump officials in warrant applications filed with the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court.
Excerpted highlights of the transcripts of Ohr’s testimony are as follows:
Trey Gowdy/IMAGE: Fox News via YouTube
On foreign nationals conveying potentially biased information (pp. 22-23)
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.): How did you vet those—how did he vet those sources? How did Fusion GPS vet those sources?
Ohr: I think— don’t know the specifics. The fact that my wife was looking at some of the same figures, like Sergei Millian, suggests that that was one way they were trying to vet the information. So when I provided it to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information. I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware—
Gowdy:. Did you tell the Bureau that?
Ohr: Oh, yes.
Gowdy: Why did you tell the Bureau that?
Ohr: I wanted them to be aware of any possible bias or, you know, as they evaluate the information, they need to know the circumstances.
Gowdy: So you specifically told the Bureau that the information you were passing on came from someone who was employed by the DNC, albeit in a somewhat triangulated way?
Ohr: I don’t believe I used—I didn’t know they were employed by the DNC, but I certainly said, yes, that—that they were working for—you know, they were somehow working associated with the Clinton campaign. And I also told the FBI that my wife worked for Fusion GPS or was a contractor…
Peter Strzok & Lisa Page/PHOTOS: Justice Dept. & Ohio State U.
On anti-Trump lovebirds Lisa Page’s and Peter Strzok’s involvement (pp. 81-82)
Valerie Shen (counsel on behalf of Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.): What was your understanding of why Lisa Page was participating in that meeting?
Ohr: I think she was working on the investigation.
Shen: Okay. And what was your understanding of why Peter Strzok specifically was in that meeting?
Ohr: I believe he was working on the investigation as well.
Shen: Again, I mean, this was discussed last round. Obviously, these two names have been in the news for lots of different reasons. I guess I just want to be able to dispel any notion that there’s anything more perhaps than two officials performing their jobs at the time. So trying to form the question. Do you have any reason to believe that Lisa Page and Peter Stzrok’s attendance at this meeting should indicate any nefarious purpose or concern or implication of bias on the Russian investigation or law enforcement community at large?
Ohr: The answer is no. I saw their participation as appropriate since I had originally conveyed my information to Mr. McCabe, and he in turn had put Lisa Page and then Peter Strzok in contact with me. So it seemed like the natural progression…
Glenn Simpson & Christopher Steele (screen shot: PBS NewsHour/Youtube)
On potential conflicts of interest between Fusion GPS and the investigation (pp. 91-92)
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC): How did she [Nellie Ohr] get a contract job with [Fusion GPS founder] Glenn Simpson?
Ohr: I don’t remember who made the contact, whether she spoke with Glenn Simpson directly or whether there was another party or someone else involved. I just know it wasn’t me.
Meadows: So when she came home and said, “Honey, I got a job with Glenn Simpson,” what did you say?
Ohr: Oh, I’m sure we had a conversation at the time. I just can’t remember now.
Meadows: Did you say there may be a conflict of interest if she’s being—if Glenn Simpson is being paid by the DNC or Hillary Clinton and I’m working for the Department of Justice? Could there potentially be a conflict? Did you say anything like that?
Ohr: Well, my wife started working for Glenn Simpson, doing—a contractor for Fusion GPS in late 2015, and I don’t believe it had anything to do with the campaign at that point.
Meadows: So she never talked about the campaign with you?
Ohr: Well, at some point I became aware that the topics she was researching had to do with the possible—
Meadows: When did you become aware?
Ohr: I don’t recall exactly.
Meadows: So when you became aware what was your conversation? Did you tell her that it created a problem for you because you were with the Department of Justice?
Ohr: I think she can work for the firm that has dealings with the DNC. I don’t think that’s—
Meadows: And you can investigate it—while she’s working for the firm that is hired by the DNC and you can be the source that leads information from that same group to the FBI? Do you not see a problem with that, Mr. Ohr?
Ohr: I can’t—
Meadows: I mean, would you do it the same way if you had it to do over again, Mr. Ohr?
Ohr: That’s hard to say. I was not part of the investigation….
‘ If Ohio is in play, we’ll have already won the easier states and have 270 electoral votes…’
George Soros/photo by Niccolò Caranti (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Ohio progressives who hoped George Soros would come to their aid in the 2020 election shouldn’t hold their breath.
In February, the Soros-backed Priorities USA, one of the largest Democratic political-action committees, announced its plan to spend $100 million trying to flip four key battleground states that went for President Donald Trump, but Ohio is not one of them.
To add insult to injury, Priorities USA downgraded Ohio’s long-vaunted “swing state” status to a measly “GOP Watch” state—putting it in the same column as Texas and Iowa but behind other red-leaning states like North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia, reported Cleveland.com.
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for Priorities USA, told Cleveland.com that the group was keeping an eye on Ohio to see if an investment down the road was worth making.
Schwerin said the downgraded status did not mean Democrats had written off Ohio, only that they saw a more promising route to victory elsewhere.
A Soros-backed initiative in Florida last election helped restore voting rights to 1.6 million convicted felons—approximately 10 percent of the population—which could provide an edge for Democrats if they get them to the polls.
The 2018 midterm election also showed that Democrat-led redistricting efforts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had helped clinch major victories, further eroding the electoral margin that secured the presidency for Donald Trump in 2016.
Priorities USA’s path to 2020 electoral victory (click image to see enlarged full document)
“What we think that means is if Ohio is in play, we’ll have already won the easier states and have 270 electoral votes,” Schwerin said. “Our investment strategy is how to get to 270 electoral votes.”
But political analyst Kyle Kondick, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said Ohio appeared to be drifting away from Democrats.
“There are individual county-level trends that are positive for Democrats,” Kondik told Cleveland.com. “There are just more for Republicans.”
Despite the 2018 re-election of Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown—who ousted current GOP Gov. Mike DeWine from the Senate in 2006—Republicans at the state level currently hold the governor’s office and both chambers of the state legislature.
While Barack Obama carried the state in 2012 and made it a central part of his strategy, Ohio went resoundingly for Trump in 2016, giving him an 8-point edge over Hillary Clinton.
On Thursday, Brown, who had been mulling a 2020 challenge to Trump, announced that he would not enter the already crowded Democratic primary field.
The president may still have to fight for Ohio if its previous GOP leader, former Gov. John Kasich enters the race as an independent, but by the end of his term Kasich—now a CNN analyst—received more favorable poll numbers from Democrats than he did from his own party.
“Doesn’t it seem within the realm of possibility with as bad as it was for Democrats in 2016 in the eastern part of the state, surely it can get worse,” said Kondick.
Still, a post-mortem memorandum on the 2018 election from David Pepper, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, revealed that plans for retaking the state remained afoot.
“Any look at the actual hard-nose data of 2018 belies what they’re saying,” Pepper said. “We were closer [to] being blue in 2018 than we were in 2010, and two years after 2010 we were blue.”
Pepper pointed to his party’s successes in flipping six seats in the state legislature (and losing only one to Republicans), as well as picking up two seats on the (technically nonpartisan) Ohio Supreme Court.
While conservatives still hold five of the seven slots on the court, vulnerability there could embolden the gerrymandering efforts of Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is eyeing Ohio as one of its 12 targets for 2020.
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov
Many of its successful “sue til blue” campaigns have focused on using activist judges within the court system to declare state legislative maps racist or otherwise unconstitutional.
The NDRC website touted the recent Ohio seat flips, as well as a May 2018 ballot initiative to reform the state’s redistricting process and make it “less partisan” (i.e. more Democrat-friendly) after the upcoming census.
“Despite these victories, Ohio remains a deeply gerrymandered swing state and is currently under trifecta control by Republicans,” said the NDRC website. “As such, Ohio will remain an NDRC target in 2020—we are targeting the state House.”
‘I believe that one day AOC will be viewed as the person who killed the Democratic Party because of her cockeyed crazy ideas…’
Felix Sabates / IMAGE: Telemundo Deportes via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Self-made millionaire Félix Sabates, a Cuban immigrant, issued the latest warning about America’s leftist radicalization with a full-page ad in the Charlotte Observer that slammed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y.
“We have a socialist revolution beginning in America with Rep. Ocasio–Cortez,” Sabates said in the open letter published Wednesday in the Observer.
Sabates emigrated from Cuba in 1960, at the age of 15, after Fidel Castro forcibly came to power and began nationalizing privately-held assets in the country, including the Sabates family’s string of businesses.
Sabates settled in Charlotte, N.C., where he worked his way into a successful career as a salesman, eventually purchasing the toy company that introduced Atari gaming consoles and Teddy Ruxpin bears to the U.S. market in the 1970s and ’80s.
After selling the toy company, he invested in yacht and luxury automobile dealerships, became a founding co-owner of the Charlotte Hornets basketball franchise, and is the owner of NASCAR’s Chip Ganassi Racing team.
But now, Sabates, 73, sees warning signs that history is repeating itself.
“When I was teenager in Cuba I saw how quickly a self-proclaimed socialist Castro became a communist,” said Sabates. “His policies drove a rich country into poverty. We are heading in same direction if we allow these self-proclaimed socialists to hijack our government.”
Like Castro, Ocasio–Cortez has benefited from her cult of personality—including a strong Twitter following and fawning mainstream-media attention—to exert an outsize influence on the Democratic agenda in Congress with increasingly authoritarian overtones.
Some, in fact, have framed her as the Left’s foil to President Donald Trump due to parallels such as their outsider status and populist appeal.
But where Trump’s business acumen has helped to revitalize the nation’s industry, Ocasio–Cortez, a 29-year-old former bartender, would like to see the government milk it dry while supporting a living wage for those “unwilling to work.”
Among the proposals buried in her much-lambasted Green New Deal is the suggestion that it be funded by “government taking an equity stake in projects.”
Fidel Castro overlooks a crowd of supporters after forcibly ousting Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
The vague statement signaled a clear dogwhistle for a socialist takeover of private industry, mirroring those of Castro and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
The plan, as it stands, would also add trillions in debt to the economy—spending more than the annual gross domestic product of any country except the United States and China, and costing an estimated $65,000 per year for every individual American.
Economists and others have cautioned that it could lead to anything from hyper-inflation to a “Green Great Depression,” with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell calling the idea of adding massive spending deficits “just wrong.”
In a recent New Yorker profile, Ocasio–Cortez falsely claimed that the GND was a “grounded” proposal and that opponents had resorted “to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level.”
But despite insisting on its urgency—saying failure to implement its 10-year net-zero carbon emissions plan could result in global devastation by 2031—Democrats have repeatedly resisted the call to debate the deal’s specifics, maintaining that it is a work in progress.
After making it public in early February, Ocasio–Cortez quickly deleted the initial framework from her website, calling it a draft.
“What we would love for all Democrats to do is come to the table and begin to help flesh out the many policy details that will be needed to actually make the Green New Deal a reality,” said Evan Weber, co-founder and political director of the Sunrise Movement, which has aggressively lobbied Congress to support it by using children as political pawns.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., promised to bring the bill to a floor vote, but Weber called the move a “sham” and encouraged Democrats to vote “present” rather than engage in debate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., meanwhile, refused to commit to scheduling a vote on it and has repeatedly downplayed the proposal.
The radicalism of Ocasio–Cortez and her allies has undoubtedly pushed Congressional Democrats farther to the extreme Left.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez / IMAGE: The View via Youtube
On one hand, it has benefited traditional liberals in the short term, giving formerly far-left figures such as Pelosi, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (although she is one of the 11 cosponsors of the GND Senate bill) a broader window to cast themselves as centrists by calling for moderation over Marxism.
“I believe that one day AOC will be viewed as the person who killed the Democratic Party because of her cockeyed crazy ideas,” he said.
That may be the best-case scenario.
Some, such as conservative economist Thomas Sowell, have said recently that the odds are strong that socialists, led by Ocasio–Cortez, will use their idealist rhetoric to manipulate low-information supporters into overthrowing America’s capitalist-driven democracy.
“We may make it, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Sowell said.
The committee ‘has the broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time”…’
Elijah Cummings/Photo by AFGE (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Two powerful Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform continued to push a narrative of election impropriety in the Georgia governor’s race, demanding that its winner, Gov. Brian Kemp, hand over massive amounts of documentation from the 2018 election.
On Wednesday, Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jamie Raskin, chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, sent letters to Kemp and to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office Kemp held previously.
The Oversight committee “has the broad authority to investigate ‘any matter’ at ‘any time’ under House Rule X,” asserted the two Maryland Democrats in clarifying how a Georgia matter would fall under their federal purview.
However, the two phrases in quotation marks did not come directly from the section that outlined the jurisdictions of the Oversight committee and appeared to be taken out of context from an earlier portion of the chamber’s Standing Rules.
Kemp narrowly defeated one-time rising Democrat star Stacey Abrams by a margin of 50.2 to 48.8 percent in the November election.
Abrams subsequently refused to concede, even after it became clear that challenges would not overturn the result, nor force a run-off by lowering Kemp’s total below the 50 percent mark.
Among the Oversight congressmen’s accusations, they said Kemp stole the election by canceling the registrations of 1.4 million inactive voters.
Moreover, they said, 53,000 Georgians—many of them minorities—who attempted to register in 2018 had their applications put on hold by the Secretary of State’s Office.
“The Committee is particularly concerned by reports that Georgians faced unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during the 2018 election,” said the Oversight letters.
Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp/IMAGE: Associated Press via Youtube
The Democrats also blamed Kemp for the state’s alleged closure of more than 200 polling places, specifically targeting minority precincts.
They claimed voters were forced to wait in line for hours to cast ballots “even though hundreds of available voting machines sat unused in government warehouses.”
The committee gave the Georgia officials two weeks to furnish the massive trove of requested documents covering a time span from Jan. 1, 2017 to present.
Fishing Expeditions
Opponents have criticized the Congressional Democrats for their preoccupation with partisan investigations.
Last week, the Oversight committee held a public hearing for convicted felon Michael Cohen, the former lawyer of President Donald Trump—despite the fact that Cohen’s criminal charges included lying to Congress previously.
On Monday, House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler mailed out 81 letters pursuant to his investigative threads, prompting Trump to condemn the fishing expedition via Twitter.
Now that they realize the only Collusion with Russia was done by Crooked Hillary Clinton & the Democrats, Nadler, Schiff and the Dem heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY. 81 letter sent to innocent people to harass them. They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country!
However, Democrats have retorted that they can “walk and chew gum at the same time”—or in this case that they can continue the partisan impeachment push against Trump while also pursuing investigations of other partisan causes.
Claims of disfranchisement have become a familiar talking point for the Left recently, with a renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act among its top agenda items, along with socialist initiatives like free college, Medicare for all and the Green New Deal.
Democrats hope specifically to derail the efforts of many Southern states to implement voter ID laws, which are intended to prevent fraudulent would-be voters, such as illegal immigrants, from casting ballots.
Abrams has continued to levy accusations of election theft against Kemp, fashioning herself into a figurehead of minority-voter suppression, and has established a political-action committee specifically to advocate for the cause.
Not to be outdone, in a recent speech that ostensibly commemorated the 1960s civil rights march in Selma, Ala., defeated 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton likened her own run to Abrams’ failed Georgia campaign, claiming that both had been the victims of racism.
“I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and I will tell you, it makes a really big difference,” Clinton said.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Eminent economist and conservative columnist Thomas Sowell said Tuesday that the willful ignorance of many Leftist radicals may well lead America down the path of socialism—and inevitable decline.
While Sowell noted that most economists predicted such a movement was unlikely to gain traction in the U.S., “I do have a great fear that in the long run we may not make it,” he told Fox Business Network’s David Asman during a segment of “Cavuto: Coast-to-Coast.”
Sowell said there is still a glimmer of hope. “The one thing that keeps me from being despairing is that we don’t know—there’s so many things we can’t possibly know.”
But he added that in the current climate of tossing out plain-sighted, empirical evidence in favor of populist, emotional appeals and groupthink, the odds were stacked against America. “We may make it, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” he said.
One of the key problems, he noted, was that Americans lacked access to the necessary facts since much information comes filtered through the vested agendas of the educational system and the mass media.
“If people have never heard those things because the media filters out things that go against what they believe, then the charge can stick no matter what the facts may happen to be,” he said.
On matters such as the discussion of a wealth tax to soak the rich and, effectively, redistribute income, Sowell said history has already provided ample evidence of its failure.
“Socialism is a wonderful-sounding idea,” he said. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous.”
Sowell cited socialist Venezuela, which once held the largest oil reserves in the world, and Uganda, where a political revolution drove wealthy citizens to flee in destitution, as two models where the economy never recovered.
But he refuted the Left’s contention that they were exceptions to the rule. “Looking at it in a worldwide perspective, these so-called ‘exceptions’ are almost universal—on every continent, among people of every race, color, creed and whatever,” he said
Sowell, who was raised in poverty before attaining a litany of prestigious degrees through hard work, began his scholarly career as a Marxist but became disaffected with it during the 1960s after noticing a correlation between rising minimum wage and unemployment in the Puerto Rican sugar industry.
Ultimately, the demand for observable evidence to support his beliefs prevailed over his earlier idealism.
“Before I was a Marxist I was an empiricist, and I stayed an empiricist,” he said. “And with the passing years, I simply, as I looked into more and more things, I saw the difference between reality and the rhetoric.”
Increasingly, though, the influence of politics had resulted in the suppression and subversion of fact-driven decision-making.
“Politicians stay in office by saying things that people want to hear and by not accepting evidence that shows they’ve gone wrong,” Sowell said.
Even learning institutions were at fault after having been hijacked by activists, partisan ideologues and political stooges.
“Unfortunately, so many people today—including in the leading universities—-don’t pay much attention to evidence,” said Sowell, who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.
As more and more Democrats embrace shockingly extremist policies like the Green New Deal, very few institutions remain willing and able to keep them in check.
Two months into her tenure as a member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez already has proven to wield an oversize influence on the Left’s policy discussions, and in turn she has demonstrated increasingly alarming tendencies toward authoritarian demagoguery.
At a recent event in New York, she responded to GND critics by saying, “I’m the boss! How about that?”
Ocasio–Cortez also used a recent New Yorker profile to spread misinformation and point fingers at opponents.
After first declaring that Republicans, including President Donald Trump, feared her because she had “become as powerful as a man,” she then falsely claimed that GND opponents were unable to refute the substance of her “grounded” policy and had resorted to “mythologizing it on a ludicrous level.”
In reality, many on the Right have embraced the opportunity to debate the specifics of the outlandish proposal, while Democrats in Congress have refused to move it forward, maintaining that it is still a work in progress.
After first publicly unveiling the GND framework in early February, Ocasio–Cortez quickly removed it, claiming it was a draft version.
Sowell said the 29-year-old socialist’s political future—and her potential influence on the direction of the country—hinged on whether the public could discern truth from fiction.
“It depends upon whether people go by facts or by rhetoric,” he said. “If they go by rhetoric, she’s a rising star.”
Sowell, who finds himself in the conservative minority of academia as well as among African–Americans, also weighed in on recent accusations of racism that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen perniciously raised against the president last week in Congressional testimony.
Once again, Sowell said, evidence was the key—and barring it, he was not in a position to judge.
“I don’t know enough about the man to know what he is,” Sowell said, “but I would like to see any such accusation accompanied by something that we can test against facts.”
‘The party should never lose sight of our primary objective: making sure a Democratic president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021…’
Eric Holder/IMAGE: The Daily Show
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A week after announcing he plans to merge his Democratic gerrymandering operations with President Barack Obama’s campaign arm, former Attorney General Eric Holder said he will not run for president in 2020.
Holder, a self-described Obama “wingman” whose oversight sunk the Justice Department to new depths of partisan bias, will instead focus on his National Democratic Redistricting Committee in its efforts to target red states and “sue til blue.”
“I will do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from [Republican] gerrymandered districts,” Holder wrote in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post.
Holder’s article listed several of the priorities he saw as crucial for the next Democratic president, including the socialist programs endorsed by many of those running.
“We must restructure our economy in a way that promises economic security for the middle class, creates genuine opportunities for upward mobility and attacks the income inequality of this new Gilded Age,” Holder wrote.
He described initiatives such as universal health care, the Green New Deal, open borders, extending the First Step Act into farther-reaching criminal-justice reform and strengthening the Voting Rights Act.
Although none of the provisions outlined in the original 1965 Voting Rights Act, such as literacy tests or poll taxes, have been challenged lately, Democrats euphemistically use the name to refer to their effort to block voter ID laws and allow ineligible voters, such as illegal immigrants, to cast ballots.
Ironically, one of Holder’s first controversies as attorney general was his refusal to prosecute militant members of the Black Panther Party who had been accused of voter intimidation after they were filmed standing outside a Pennsylvania precinct with billy clubs.
Holder, who made history as the first attorney general held in contempt of Congress, also refused to intervene on behalf of police forces during race riots in places like Ferguson, Missouri.
And he extended the Justice Department’s reach into unprecedented areas, such as bullying banks, public schools and universities to cooperate with his political agenda or face increasingly Draconian regulations.
Through it all, the former campaign bundler doggedly chased one core pursuit with surprising candor and transparency: Entrenching power for himself and his fellow Democrats by any means necessary that he could get away with.
Holder reminded his fellow party members to remain focused on this goal despite the likelihood of a contentious and rancorous primary battle in a crowed field of Democratic candidates.
“The party should never lose sight of our primary objective: making sure a Democratic president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021. I will do my part to help make that possible,” he said.
‘This session demonstrates exactly what is at stake this fall…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Although it seems increasingly clear that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax may dodge direct accountability by riding out their respective racism and rape scandals, other Democrats in the state fear the political fallout will weigh on their upcoming campaigns.
According to the Free Beacon, few—if any—of the Democrats in the Virginia legislature expressed plans to campaign with Northam and Fairfax prior to this year’s state elections.
Republicans, on the other hand, vowed not to let the galling hypocrisies be wiped from public memory as Virginians head to the polls in November to send representatives to the General Assembly.
This session demonstrates exactly what is at stake this fall.
The controversies of the Democratic statewide office holders have led to chaos and embarrassment for our state.
Meanwhile, the Republican-led General Assembly has delivered leadership and results. pic.twitter.com/dHyLEOC6BW
Northam, after defying bipartisan calls to resign over a yearbook photo that likely depicted him in blackface alongside a companion dressed in KKK robes, announced in February that he would use the remaining three years of his term to support a radical agenda aimed at healing the deep wounds of racism in the state that the Democratic Party is historically responsible for.
Fairfax also refused calls to resign after two women came forward with separate allegations of rape against him, drawing strong parallels with last September’s hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox said he plans to hold public hearings on the Fairfax accusations.
But GOP members of the state Senate and House of Delegates, which hold the narrowest of majorities—including one that was decided by drawing a name from a bowl—hope voters will be mobilized at the polls to elect a legislature that will keep its corrupt executives in check.
The GOP long held a solid majority in the General Assembly, but demographic changes and left-wing activists’ court-enforced gerrymandering efforts recently have begun to erode it.
Despite what Democrats in the state have viewed as a growing trend in their direction, the scandals of the party’s top leaders now promise to throw the Old Dominion’s politics into a tailspin.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Democrat Sen. Mark Warner—himself a former Virginia governor and now a political mainstay—acknowledged that the scandals of his fellow party members were “very challenging” to the brand he had spent 20 years working to build.
Warner, however, seemed to backpedal from the firm line he drew early on demanding the two step down. He said Fairfax was entitled to “due process” and that Northam should work to win back constituents’ trust.
“When I called for his resignation, along with my friend Tim Kaine, we said the governor had lost the faith of the people of Virginia,” Warner said. “[Northam] has a right to try to regain that faith, but I believe that will involve him getting out and making that case directly to Virginians.”
Other elected officials with less political clout than Warner seemed more tentative about the idea of Northam increasing his public presence during campaign season.
In a pair of videos produced by the conservative America Rising PAC that accompanied the Free Beacon article, many Democratic delegates quickened their pace and gave no answer when asked whether they would campaign with Northam and Fairfax.
Del. Lamont Bagby, one of the few to respond, said, “I don’t think they’re gonna be campaigning.”
Bagby later clarified in a phone interview that he meant they weren’t up for election this year. “Neither one of them has campaigned for me in the past,” he added. “I don’t know whether they will campaign for me in the future, but it’s way too early to make decisions about who you’re campaigning with.”
Political watchers will certainly gaze with interest to see what the outcome of the 2019 state elections may reveal about the following year’s national race. President Donald Trump issued a tweet early in the Northam scandal expressing confidence that it would enable him to move the state back into the red category.
Democrats at the top are killing the Great State of Virginia. If the three failing pols were Republicans, far stronger action would be taken. Virginia will come back HOME Republican) in 2020!
Warner also faces re-election to his third-term in the U.S. Senate in 2020. Although no challenger has yet announced, the Northam scandal and a strong Trump economy could help reinvigorate the GOP on the heels of a disappointing effort to unseat Sen. Tim Kaine in 2018.
As Virginia governors are limited to a single four-year term, the gubernatorial race in 2021 will be another interesting one to watch. Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring (also marred by several negatives recently, including his own blackface scandal) were the two top prospects to succeed Northam. It remains to be seen whether they can rehabilitate their images in time.
But if Democrats wish to retain the governor’s mansion for a third consecutive term, their best bellwether and hope of doing so might be to see Trump re-elected. For more than four decades, with only one exception (as Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell faced bribery charges for which he was later cleared), Virginians in the year after a presidential election have chosen a governor belonging to the opposite party of the sitting president.
