OCTOBER 14, 2020

Thank You, Mr. President

ANTHONY ESOLEN

CRISIS MAGAZINE

In my last article, I wrote that I would soon cast a vote against the party that promises to persecute the Church, and to subjugate all her schools, colleges, and beneficent organizations to an ideology that is fundamentally inhuman. I said also that that was no ringing endorsement for the other party.

Several readers accused me of ingratitude. I take the accusation seriously. Let me then say that I am grateful for what assistance, though sporadic and founded on no coherent philosophy of man, we receive from political bodies. Nor should we underestimate the power of such assistance.

To give one important example: when the secretary of a national department that should not exist (Education) moves to return to parents and local communities some measure of authority over their schools, and to give leverage to those parents who are otherwise at the mercy of their putative betters, for the opportunity to decline to take part in the immoral, the foolish, and the destructive is a powerful weapon for reform, then she and her administration deserve the gratitude of Roman Catholics and of all people who still recall, however faintly, that the family is anterior to all political machinery.

To give another example: when an administration takes small but significant steps toward cutting out those rent-seeking middlemen the regulators, who make it prohibitively expensive for most communities to embark upon public works projects, so that the back ends of our decaying cities, where the regulators themselves never live, look like Dresden after World War II, then they are owed a debt of thanks from everyone who is still stubbornly loyal to places like Altoona and Binghamton, and from all who remember that men with strong shoulders and backs still need jobs, just as we need those men. The party of Humphrey and Muskie, a party once dominated by Roman Catholics, did not need to be reminded of such a thing, but that party no longer exists.https://secureaddisplay.com/i/view/js/?Viewable=0&isMobile=0&AULU=31049420180502T2200289306460AB42454C400A8A16937CB3EB93D7&cb=1602686878473&ccvid=1066681879&pvid=2093262624

To give another example: when an administration, suspicious of the “global” elites who evince neither love of country nor any wise forethought for the welfare of man (because man in their view is an atom of hedonic will, managed by the pseudo-organism of the collective), frees its people in large measure from the caprices of oil-rich Muslim nations, and begins to disentangle them from many a spider-web of enmity and greed where their national interests are not at stake, bringing boys home rather than having them kill or be killed to pad the resumes of military and diplomatic bureau chiefs, then, far from being tagged as “authoritarian,” that administration should be praised for common sense, and, again, for cracking open another window of liberty.

To give another example: when an administration, working against the advice of men and women who insist upon their ways because they are theirs and not because they have been successful, maneuvers long-time enemies into truce, and would-be allies, if not friends, into cooperation, so that Serbs and Kosovars will perhaps cease to cut one another’s throats, and those perennial troublemakers the Palestinians are disabused of any hope to thrust Israel into the sea, and the rogues in Iran are finally isolated as had been the fond desire of a previous administration, and Christians in Syria can breathe awhile, then that administration merits at least a nod of thanks from a Church that purports to bring peace on earth.

To give another example: when an administration, shrugging aside the laissez-faire instincts of its own party’s adherents, moves in a determined way to recalibrate “free” trade with China, first because there can be no free play with a nation ruled by autocratic cheats, and second because questions regarding trade cannot be resolved in the abstract but must account for the circumstances of a nation’s people, their work, their natural resources, and the items to be traded, and thus begins to return manufacture to the country, then it deserves the thanks of all people who value community life and who want, for those who will not be doctors and lawyers, work that builds up the character rather than welfare that disheartens and degrades.

To give another example: when an administration, assuming that its duty is to enforce the laws that the people’s branch of the government has passed, works toward ending the lawless breach of the nation’s borders, a breach that harmed both the United States and Mexico at once, not least by severing no one yet knows how many hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of Mexican fathers from their families, while providing cover for drug-runners, child-traffickers, and murderers, far from being scoffed at for “xenophobia,” that administration deserves the thanks of people who remember that it is autocrats, not republican governors, who pick and choose which laws they will enforce and which they will not.

To give another example: when an administration appoints to the federal bench judges who understand that it is a betrayal of their sacred charge when they arrogate to themselves the roles of legislators, but who concede to the people and their representatives the right to determine what is and what is not in the public interest and what does and what does not serve the common weal, judges who would be ashamed to be accused of having fought for any political end, then that administration deserves the thanks of all its citizens, for surely no true citizen would cede all cultural matters to the whims and the political desiderata of nine lawyer-archons.

To give another example: when an administration, though headed by someone who does not himself understand what is at stake, yet, from a common sense willingness to let people and their organizations try to run themselves as they see fit, shows an antipathy to all who would compel the Church to bow down to Baal in all sexual matters— forcing them to honor Sodom and Gomorrah, even as they have already and foolishly capitulated to almost every other lie promoted by the Great Moral Apostasy of the last sixty or seventy years— then that administration deserves the thanks of Roman Catholics who, unlike many of their leaders, do not want the government to write their Church’s moral teachings for them; for when you are not free to embody a truth, you may as well not be free to believe it, either, and soon enough no one in fact will believe it.

To give one final example: when an administration appoints judges who are at least open to overturning the bloodiest and most authoritarian of all our judicial decisions, since it gives to an individual the power of life and death over an innocent human being, even while it vitiates marriage, relegates fathers to the status of irrelevant spectators, and encourages the ever-growing ambitions of social middlemen whose work depends upon and feeds the chaos wrought by family breakdown, then that administration is owed a little more than grudging thanks from the Church that is supposed to stand up for the lives of these victims of hedonism, thoughtlessness, and depravity.

Is the administration perfect? Not by a long shot. Politics is a muddle at best, at worst a snake-pit. The business of health insurance is still a wreck. We have only begun to consider the needs of the working class. Our public schools are ghastly. Our colleges are no better; and they, with government largesse, behave as a credentialing cartel, bleeding the middle class for all they are worth. We have no idea what to do about illegal drugs and those who peddle them. Marriage and family are in free-fall. Race relations, despite interracial marriage, are terrible. Our popular entertainment would have to improve considerably to be merely foul: it is often diabolical. Community life is mostly a thing of the past.

But for the benefits I have noted, I am grateful.

[Photo credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images]

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By Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author, most recently, of Sex and the Unreal City (Ignatius Press, 2020).

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Hawley vs. the Know-Nothings

FR. DANIEL MARIA KLIMEK, TOR

CRISIS MAGAZINE

At last. On the first day of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican senators stood up to the anti-religious bigotry of their Democratic colleagues over the disgraceful treatment of Judge Barrett’s Catholic faith.

One of the greatest highlights was Senator Josh Hawley’s impassioned opening statement against the blatant anti-Catholic bigotry that Judge Barrett had to endure.

“When you tell somebody that they’re too Catholic to be on the bench,” Senator Hawley exclaimed, “when you tell them that they’re going to be a Catholic judge, not an American judge, that’s bigotry. The pattern and practice of bigotry from members of this committee must stop. And I would expect that it be renounced.”

That pattern and practice of unashamed anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bigotry by members of the judiciary committee has been around for a long time, Senator Hawley explained. Over the years, numerous judiciary nominees have been scrutinized by Democratic senators with questions about their faith beliefs, about which religious organizations do they belong to, about what their views are on moral and theological matters like sin and the afterlife.https://secureaddisplay.com/i/view/js/?Viewable=0&isMobile=0&AULU=31049420180502T2200289306460AB42454C400A8A16937CB3EB93D7&cb=1602686348536&ccvid=1066657630&pvid=2093235393

What any of this has to do with jurisprudence, the legal philosophy of a nominee or their intellectual and professional qualifications as potential jurists is questionable, to say the least.

Senator Hawley even emphasized how Senator Kamala Harris and others have repeatedly questioned the suitability of judicial nominees by invoking their membership to Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus.

“65 million Americans are Catholics, and many, many millions more are Christians of other persuasions,” Senator Hawley explained. “Are they to be told that they cannot serve in public office, that they are not welcomed in the public sphere unless the members of this committee sign off on their religious beliefs? I, for one, do not want to live in such an America, and the Constitution of the United States flatly prohibits it.”

Senator Hawley made reference to Feinstein’s infamously inflammatory comment toward Judge Barrett.

Addressing Judge Barrett herself about the incident, Senator Hawley expressed: “When you were last before this committee, judge, for your initial confirmation hearings, the ranking member [Feinstein] referred to your Catholic convictions as ‘dogma,’ that’s a quote, that ‘lives loudly within you,’ picking up the very terminology of anti-Catholic bigotry current in this country a century ago.”

“She wasn’t alone,” Senator Hawley continued. “Other senators on this committee last time asked you if you were an orthodox Catholic. One senator says she worried that you would be a Catholic judge, if you were confirmed, because of your religious beliefs. I guess as opposed to an American judge, as if you can’t be both a devout Catholic and a loyal American citizen.”

❧

The treatment that Judge Barrett has received, especially from the mainstream media, has been deplorable. In the press, there were countless disgraceful stories attacking, caricaturing, and insinuating falsehoods about Judge Barrett’s Catholicism, especially her identity as a charismatic Catholic and her life as a devoted mother of seven children.

Whereas on the first day of the confirmation hearings, senate Democrats acted as if they have learned their lesson, trying to steer attention away from Judge Barrett’s religion and focus instead on healthcare, a closer look shows how they still attempted to ruin Judge Barrett’s reputation by creating a fictional and deliberately negative narrative about her that has no resemblance to reality.

Democrats portrayed Judge Barrett as some evil agent of the extreme-right who hopes to take away health care from every men, women, and child in America. This a remarkable misrepresentation of what she has actually said about Affordable Care Act. True, Judge Barrett has been critical of the elements of ACA that impinged on the religious liberties of employers—and rightly so. Catholic employers were being pressured to provide birth-control coverage in their insurance plans against the moral teachings of their faith, violating their religious liberty. Any American, regardless of their religious beliefs, should resist such attacks on our First Amendment freedoms.

Judge Barrett was also critical of the way that Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling on ACA imposed a tax penalty on those Americans without health insurance, criticizing the way that he sustained ACA through the penalty of taxing power. Again, that’s a valid criticism. Judge Barrett’s defense of the religious liberties of employers and her critique of the misuse of taxing power should be expected of any dutiful Supreme Court Justice.

No, a closer look at Judge Barrett’s critiques reveal a judge who is not a threat to American lives, but rather, someone who stands up for the constitutional rights of all Americans. And Senator Hawley has done a service to his country in standing up for her.

[Photo credit: Getty Images News]

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By Fr. Daniel Maria Klimek, TOR

Fr. Daniel Maria Klimek, TOR, is an assistant professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

This from the ‘Jerusalem Post’:

It is an excellent summary of the narrative of Bergoglio’s appalling & callous selling out & abandonment of the faithful & heroic Catholics of China.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-cross-and-the-dragon-how-pope-francis-is-lining-up-with-xi-jinping-645491

The cross and the dragon – how Pope Francis is lining up with Xi Jinping

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s five-year policy of “Sinification” requires that religious believers be more loyal to the Communist Party than to their religion.

By DARLENE CASELLA   

OCTOBER 12, 2020 22:08

 The Vatican and the Communist Chinese Government signed a provisional agreement. Full terms have never been released, but it deals with the appointment of bishops, and expires on October 22, 2020. Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin reported the Pope’s intention to maintain the accord. Critics assert that the agreement advances the Communist regime’s control over the Catholic Church, represses dissent and procures the Pope’s silence on human rights abuses in China.

Tangled history of the Catholic Church in China dates to the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century. When the Chinese Communist Party took control in 1949, missionaries of every faith were forced to leave the country. Legal religious worship was permitted only through the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which does not recognize the authority of the Pope. In 2018 when Beijing and Rome signed the agreement, Beijing accepted Pope Francis as the head of China’s Catholics.

Pope Francis highlights areas of human rights abuses to the world in his Sunday addresses. Not a word has passed his lips about the horrific abuses in China. Francis remains silent about the government persecution of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, devotees of Falun Gong, the atrocities against the Uighurs, the repressions in Hong Kong and in Tibet.

American Catholic conservatives are hostile to the Pope’s outreach to China, his denunciation of free-market capitalism, his open-borders proposals, and his Al Gore endorsed global warming encyclicals. Detractors include Cardinal Raymond Burke and former White House adviser Steve Bannon. Francis remarked “It is an honor if the Americans attack me.”

Documents show that the George Soros Open Society Foundation worked to create a profusion of American bishops and lay Catholics to support Pope Francis during his 2016 visit to America. Francis advocated socialism during that trip.Author Sam Wise wrote The Catholic Spring: Wikileaks Reveals How George Soros, Obama and Hillary Orchestrated a Coup Against Pope Benedict for Their Puppet Pope Francis. Benedict XVI was the first pope in 600 years to vacate the chair before death.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s five-year policy of “Sinification” requires that religious believers be more loyal to the Communist Party than to their religion. One of the worst persecutions are the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Xinjiang was East Turkestan until 1949 when it became part of China. There are 380 documented “re-education camps,” which look like massive high security factory complexes. More than one million Uighurs have been tortured, beaten and interrogated in these nightmare forced-labor camps. Each camp in Xinjiang is more than 25 acres with 90-100 buildings more than 12 stories high. Government officials drag men and women from their homes for minor offenses, such as not eating pork. Families are told nothing. Some are returned after a year or two, others are never seen again. There are credible rumors about organ harvesting from prisoners at re-education camps. A letter condemning the Chinese leadership was signed by 22 countries and sent to the UN Human Rights Council.

US Ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich hosted an event in Rome for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month. Pompeo declared “nowhere is religious freedom under assault more than in China. The Chinese Communists Party has battered every religious community in China: Protestant house churches, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong Devotees and more. Nor have Catholics been spared this wave of repression: Catholic churches and shrines have been desecrated and destroyed.Catholic bishops like Augustine Cui Tai have been imprisoned, as have priests. And Catholic lay leaders in the human rights movement, not least in Hong Kong, have been arrested. The Church is in a different position. Earthy considerations shouldn’t discourage the principled stances based on eternal truths and, as history has shown, Catholics have often deployed their principles in glorious, glorious service of human dignity.”

Pompeo requested an audience with the Pope to express apprehension about continuation of the agreement between the Vatican and Beijing. Pope Francis denied Pompeo’s request. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong was distressed about renewal of the Rome/Beijing agreement. He flew to Rome but also was denied an audience.

Was Francis afraid that Pompeo or Zen would influence his decision, or was he determined to side with the Communists;perhaps Francis was apprehensive about sending the wrong message to Beijing.

The writer was an English teacher, stockbroker and president/owner of a small corporation. She is active with Republican Women Federated, the California Republican Party, the Lincoln Club of Coachella Valley and the Armed Services YMCA-29 Palms Marine Base. She can be reached at darlenecasella@msn.com.
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Also          See below From Church militant the story relating to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been sending $2 billion annually to the Holy See since 2013,

SPECIAL REPORT: VATICAN CHINA SELLOUT

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/vatican-china-sellout

Signs That Trump Is Going to Win on Nov. 3

By: Kevin McCullough

Townhall

October 11, 2020 

It’s a foregone conclusion and must now be faced. Republicans have worried. Democrats have gloated. Libertarians, Independents, and Reformers have all weighed in. But now it must be acknowledged President Donald J. Trump is just capable of winning this Nov. 3.

Perhaps the Democrats think that they have found the silver bullet. After the Russia Hoax, Impeachment Farce, Lockdown Lies, Evaporative Economic Policies, Debate Blowups, and CoVid Contraction—they’ve even floated the 25th Amendment—which I only thought really bitter and nasty Never Trumpers would ever embrace. 
But none of it has worked. Not even Nancy Pelosi’s prayers for the President’s health could keep him in the hospital for more than three days. And here one week after he contracted it — no one’s even discussing him having it because he’s symptom free and feeling twenty years younger.

So no… Donald J. Trump just doesn’t have what it takes to just win on November 3. 
Because he’s going to absolutely crush the election that day. A #Trumpslide if you will.

Now the “smart people” will tell you that’s not possible and that he lags Joe Biden in the polls by margins too big to overcome. If you only look at the selective polls listed in the Real Clear Politics average one might come to that conclusion (Just like they did in 2016).

One thing they won’t tell you though is that the hesitancy to tell pollsters what they think is a real phenomenon. A little more than a month ago Bloomberg published a survey that demonstrated Republicans and Independents are more than twice as likely as Democrats to not reveal to pollsters their true thoughts. 

So if the polls that seem to point to a Biden win are wrong what was I depending on when I published my prediction map (the first of a few leading up to Election Day).
To be exceedingly clear — I find no evidence of a Biden win outside of the media polls.

But here’s a short list of considerations that give us a better understanding of the race. 

Enthusiasm GapThe candidates already know that the president is winning by a mile. President Trump can’t help but to continue to draw massive crowds (even while in the hospital.) Every weekend, in every state, in hundreds of cities bikers, truckers, boaters, horse and buggy people, and regular pedestrians are having larger and larger participation in various parades of support from Miami to Manhattan and from Beverly Hills to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile Biden has trouble getting more than a dozen to show up at a tour stop in Yuma. And we all know people who say “I didn’t vote for him then,” or “I wasn’t really sure about him in 2016,” who have converted to “I’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for him now.”

Black Votes MatterIs it significant that Candace Owens led a “Back the Blue” march through DC and to the White House yesterday consisting of thousands of African American voters? Is it important that President Trump received them? Does it seem to make an impact that President Trump oversaw the fastest job creation for Black Americans with the fastest growth in wages among the poorest Black Americans in the modern era? Evidently it does because he’s currently enjoying (what I perceive to be understated) support anywhere from 18 to 25 percent of Black Americans. When narrowed down to Black men he’s consistently in the low to mid-30s percentage wise. The modern era high for a GOP president is 11 percent. Democrat’s consistently need 90 to 95 percent support of Black voters to win. If Trump gets anything above 11 percent he wins big. If he takes 20 percent or more it starts to reshape states like Pennsylvania where he runs up the score in the west and enjoys enough Black support around Philadelphia so as to win the state convincingly. Carbon copy that for Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, etc.

Latino Support Sans PanderingBiden also has challenges with Hispanic voters. The president has seen a broad based support with Latinos that similarly to Blacks defies modern era history. One veteran of elections going back multiple decades told me last week that the president may enjoy support as high as 45 to 50 percent of the Hispanic vote. A number that big just seems so unheard of for a Republican. It’s hard for me to grasp. But just realize this: if the president gets anything above 35 percent he will again shatter recent history and entire state compositions begin to shift. Promises KeptI’m also very bullish on an old fashioned idea, that if you keep a promise, you’ve earned a second-term. You do realize don’t you that Trump presents the opposite problems of most politicians? Usually a candidate makes a ton of promises and then either breaks them or does very little to fulfill them once in office. Clinton kept three over eight years, Bush kept two (outside of 9/11 related items), Obama a big fat one in his first-term. The president came to office and went to work on day one. He’s lifted more than 2,000 regulations on small businesses, got tax reform done, and started in on his list. By my count 127 promises later he’s still not finished. 

It’s still the economy, stupid.As insulting as it sounds it’s still the bottom line. People vote their pocketbook. Voters know this instinctively. Biden has nothing to show for 47 years in DC. The president built the fastest growing economy the world had ever seen. In the past four months he’s produced the fastest job growth in history at just shy of 12 million jobs created, with more than half of those lost only months before due to the virus and ensuing lockdowns. It was precisely the tax reform and deregulation of businesses that allowed the rebound to occur so quickly. And just imagine how much more the recovery would be underway if governors and mayors who are keeping their cities and states locked down for political reasons would allow them to actually open up. 

Oh the pundits, Never Trumpers, and Democrats will explain away Biden’s every foible. When he says the voters “don’t deserve to know” his view on a 150-year precedent breaking idea of randomly packing the Supreme Court, they will give him a pass. When the Biden-Harris bus rolls in and six people sit in a gym in big circles drawn on the floor, the media will ignore the contrast of 40,000 supporters on a rainy tarmac in Minnesota.

But this election won’t be decided by the pundits, Never Trumpers, and swamp monsters.

The American people are the only poll that matters.

On November 3rd, President Trump won’t just win, he will break records, shift turn out patterns, and crush his way to the biggest re-election victory since Ronald Reagan.

Email Link  https://conta.cc/34O8LEM

Rip McIntosh

An American Coup Attempt

 Time may be running out to expose the effort to overthrow Trump,which began before his election. 

By: Sen.Ron Johnson

October 8, 2020

The U.S. is in a constitutional crisis. 

It began on the day of President Trump’s election, when unelected bureaucrats mobilized against his presidency. This is a crisis in the executive branch, perpetrated by subordinate officials who don’t see themselves as answerable to the president. They have effectively established a fourth branch of government—a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy.

The first public display of insurrection began with leaked transcripts of Mr. Trump’s phones call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Jan. 27, 2017, and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull the following day.

As the Senate Homeland Security Committee reported, the Trump administration was plagued with 62 leaks possibly endangering national security in its first 125 days, compared with nine such leaks under George W. Bush and eight under Barack Obama. In 2019 a “whistleblower” upped the ante by leaking details of Mr. Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This fueled Mr. Trump’s impeachment in December.

Between those examples of mutiny against the president, corrupt actors within the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and apparently, based on recent disclosures, other parts of the intelligence community—used their power to sabotage the administration.

Their actions can only be described as an attempted coup—as the Ukraine whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Zaid, did in a Jan. 30, 2017, tweet: “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately.” 

Throughout this constitutional crisis, many journalists abetted the plotters by abandoning even the pretense of objectivity and claiming that Mr. Trump poses a grave threat to the country. These members of the press were willing recipients of leaks that created and perpetuated the false narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Not one member of the media has exposed these sources of false information. They know who the leakers and plotters are; they won’t tell you. 

Fortunately, there are people who are working to uncover the truth. Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Attorney General William Barr, former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, his successor, John Ratcliffe and my committee, along with the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees, are working to declassify important information and make it public. 

Unfortunately, uncovering the truth isn’t easy, and time may be running out. Should Joe Biden win the presidency, the truth may be hidden forever. 

Here’s what we know so far: On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey overstepped his authority and publicly exonerated Hillary Clinton while criticizing her conduct. The same day in London, the FBI met with Christopher Steele, author of the now-debunked anti-Trump dossier. 

U.S. intelligence agencies received reporting that Russians believed Hillary Clinton approved a plan on July 26, 2016, to “stir up a scandal” by tying Trump to the Russian hacking of a Democratic National Committee email server. Then-CIA Director John Brennan later briefed President Obama about this reporting. Also on July 26, a “friendly foreign government” gave the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in London information that George Papadopoulos “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion”that Russia might release information damaging to the Clinton campaign, according to a December report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. 

At that time, according to public reports, Gina Haspel, now CIA director, was the agency’s chief of station in London. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane, its intelligence probe into the Trump campaign, based on the Papadopolous information. 

The FBI received Mr. Steele’s initial reports on July 5, 2016. The bureau soon became aware the Steele dossier was opposition research compiled and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign. By October 2016, the FBI was aware that one of Mr. Steele’s sub-sources worked for Russian intelligence services. In December 2016, the FBI learned that Mr. Steele’s primary subsource was someone it had investigated in 2009 as a suspected Russian asset. 

In January 2017, the FBI interviewed the primary subsource, who described his reporting as the kind of conversation you’d have “with friends over beers.” Around that same time, the FBI received intelligence reporting that the Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation. Yet in March 2018, the FBI briefed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that information in the Steele dossier was reliable. 
We have reached the moment of truth. 

For years, our efforts to obtain documents and testimony from federal intelligence agencies, including the FBI and CIA, have been stonewalled. Now Mr. Trump has authorized his subordinates to declassify and provide all information relevant to our investigations. Will they comply with his directive, or will the insurrection continue?

We will hear howling and screaming that the president is politicizing the agencies and threatening national security. But what is the greater threat to our democracy—transparency, or the continued coverup of an attempted coup against the duly elected president? 

Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Wisconsin and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee

Email Link   https://conta.cc/36R2FpL

Rip McIntosh

Short Tempered Joe Biden Says “Voters Don’t Deserve To Know” His Position on Supreme Court…

Posted on October 10, 2020 by sundance

In a remarkable exchange between candidate Joe Biden and KTNV Las Vegas journalist Matt Dimattei, the intemperate democrat candidate says that voters are not allowed to know his position on packing the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dimattei: “Don’t the voters deserve to know?”

Biden: “No, they don’t deserve to know”..

Just below the surface of Joe Biden is the aged persona of a very angry, unstable, often confused and intemperate, life-long politician. Essentially Biden’s #1 talking point is: you have to vote for me to find out what those who control me have in mind for me…https://www.youtube.com/embed/TbQ3vrxwTxU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

ISOLATION BOOKSHELF, SUPREME COURT

Isolation Bookshelf: The “Borking” of Supreme Court Nominees

OCTOBER 9, 2020

BY MATTHEW J. FRANCK

There never was a golden age when low politics didn’t enter into the process of Supreme Court nominations, but the furies unleashed by Roe v. Wade have driven the politics lower and lower. Perhaps one day the end of Roe will mean the end of “Borking” too. So we may fervently pray.

Barring any unforeseen delays, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its hearings next week on the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a justice of the Supreme Court. Judge Barrett, who spoke at Princeton a year ago, will certainly be confirmed and appointed to the Court if the question of her qualifications is the decisive one—and if at least 50 Republicans stick together.

As I explain in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, the obsession of the Democrats and the media with Judge Barrett’s Catholicism is not really a sign of some general anti-Catholic bigotry on their part, but of their anxiety over the future of the abortion precedent, Roe v. Wade. After all, the Democrats’ presidential nominee is a Catholic. But as frequent PD contributor Samuel Gregg observed last week in the Washington Times, it’s only some Catholics the left has a problem with. If you part company with the Church on abortion, you’re the kind of Catholic they like. If you faithfully adhere to Church teaching, on the other hand, they will hyperventilate that you want to impose “the supposedly absurd beliefs of an inherently oppressive religion”—never mind that Catholic opposition to abortion relies on reason, not revelation. And never mind too that Roe v. Wade is vulnerable, regardless of one’s substantive view on abortion, as an excrescence on our constitutional law—which is the only ground necessary for a Supreme Court justice to call it into question.

I call Roe “the poison pill of our constitutional politics” in that WSJ essay, and with good reason. The defense of Roe’s illegitimate status quo drives the left’s flirtation with anti-Catholicism today, as it has before, and it has driven every ugly moment in our Supreme Court confirmation battles at least since Robert Bork was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987.

Most recently, Roe was the motive of the all-out attack on Justice Brett Kavanaugh two years ago, as Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino detail in their book on that episode, Justice on Trial. The abortion issue “loomed over the entire confirmation process—from the nationwide speaking tour ‘Rise up for Roe’ to the laser-like focus on the two Republican senators who support abortion rights, [Susan] Collins and [Lisa] Murkowski. Planned Parenthood and NARAL were there every step of the way, financing protesters, TV ads, and celebrity appearances.” Some people may still believe the last-minute accusations against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford—most do not—but there is no question that the eagerness of Democrats to credit her story owed everything to their desperation to defeat the nominee who would succeed Anthony Kennedy, who had cast a key vote to preserve Roe years before.

The Kavanaugh battle was eerily reminiscent of the Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991, when Anita Hill accused the nominee of sexual harassment and nearly derailed his confirmation. Most Americans—of every race and both sexes—disbelieved her, but as in the Kavanaugh hearings years later, the fond hope of the left was that her charges would bring down a manifestly qualified nominee, who had already weathered the most intense questioning on his views on the Constitution and judicial responsibility.

Thomas’s friend and mentor, then-Senator John Danforth of Missouri, wrote a little-noticed book about the experience, Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas. As a senator, Danforth was able to provide an up-close look at his colleagues and their behavior throughout the confirmation process, and at Justice Thomas, whom he had befriended from the beginning of his legal career. The picture of the process is not a pretty one. The story of what Thomas at the time called a “high-tech lynching” is also well told in his own memoir, My Grandfather’s Son.

One of the more interesting features of the Thomas hearings—before the Anita Hill phase—was the questioning by then-Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who probed Thomas’s views on natural law, a subject the nominee had touched on in some of his speeches. Biden approached the issue as though a mere belief in natural law would make Thomas a rogue justice—rogue enough to strike down Roe v. Wade, the obvious subtext of Biden’s queries. But just four years earlier he had attacked Judge Robert Bork for allegedly being a positivist—that is, someone who disbelieved in natural law, and who therefore might reject . . . unenumerated rights like “a woman’s right to choose.” Any port in a storm, to seek shelter for the abortion license.

Bork, whose 1987 nomination was defeated, wrote devastatingly of his treatment at the hands of Biden and the Democrats in his 1990 book The Tempting of America. The book’s three parts are a brief history of Supreme Court jurisprudence, a defense of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation, and an account of his nomination and its defeat in the Senate. This last is the strongest part of the book, and is must reading for anyone who wants to know how our confirmation struggles turned so ugly.

To understand the sea change of the Bork nomination, though, requires a view of the whole history of Supreme Court appointments. Still the best account, published in 2008, is the late Henry Abraham’s Justices, Presidents, and Senators (the fifth edition of a work originally titled Justices and Presidents). Professor Abraham died in February of this year at the age of 98, after a career as one of the two or three most influential political scientists studying the Supreme Court in the second half of the twentieth century. His history of Supreme Court appointments is the gold standard, and it’s a shame its author is gone, for it is unlikely to be matched by any subsequent history. One may consider it a measure of his book’s quality that it was plagiarized by a famous Harvard law professor.

In the weeks to come, let us hope—for Judge Barrett’s sake and for the country’s—that the confirmation process returns to something like its normal pre-Bork state. There never was a golden age when low politics didn’t enter into the process, but the furies unleashed by Roe v. Wade have driven the politics lower and lower. Perhaps one day the end of Roe will mean the end of “Borking” too. So we may fervently pray.

About the Author

MATTHEW FRANCK

Matthew J. Franck is Contributing Editor of Public Discourse. He is also Associate Director of the James Madison Program and Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford Universi… READ MORE