Politics

Nixon said: ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ President Trump’s version of this is that he can pardon himself and he can’t be accused of obstructing justice in a federal investigation because he’s the head of the federal government and that would be to obstruct himself. His lawyer and spokesman, Rudy Giuliani, argues that a president can’t be indicted in the ordinary criminal courts. Giuliani also says that the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, agrees with this. But could a president be indicted, that is charged, or accused, in the courts? And would Mueller want to? The answer may not be as simple as Giuliani makes it seem.

It was no cakewalk for Vice President Mike Pence. He had showed up in Sea Island, Ga., reckoning that he would schmooze with the wealthy donors to the American Enterprise Institute and answer some prearranged questions from Dick Cheney aka Vice. No dice. Cheney, the wily veteran, took a look at the parvenu occupying his old office and decided to go off script. Where were all the ‘softball’ topics, Pence remarked. Cheney was having none of it. There wasn’t much gratitude for the administration that had finally gotten around to pardoning his former aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. Instead, Cheney breathed fire.

Here is the tragedy of the Democratic party in 2019: its partisans are left to hope that personal hatred of Donald Trump will do for them in 2020 what the Iraq War and the Great Recession did in 2006 and 2008. The first time Nancy Pelosi became speaker of House of Representatives, her party was the party of second thoughts about Iraq. The fact that Democrats won control of the Senate with the 2006 election was even more clearly tied to that misbegotten war: the victory of James Webb over George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat. Webb was a former Republican – a Reagan cabinet official – who switched parties and challenged Allen out of disgust with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy.

When Ilhan Omar says that there’s too much money in American politics, she’s stating the obvious. That’s why I support her brave campaign against the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, General Electric, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Business Roundtable, the AARP, and Boeing. These are America’s top 10 lobby groups, ranked by total spending over the last 20 years. In 2018, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $94.8 million on lobbying. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent $21.7 million and surged to Number Eight on the charts. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ranked Number 157, and spent $3.5 million.

Donald Trump really likes to brag about his brains. To listen to him, he has kind of a supercomputer whirring away there beneath the plume of iridescent hair. He can do anything better than anyone else, whether it’s spending a few hours learning about nuclear strategy or winning trade wars. Besides, his uncle taught at MIT, which means that the Trump gene pool couldn’t be more robust: ‘My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.’ For good measure, Trump noted that his ability to win the presidency on his first attempt ‘would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!’ Well, well, well. Now it turns out that Trump went to great lengths to suppress his high school transcripts.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

The Senate will pass a resolution to disapprove President Donald Trump’s declaration of an emergency on the border, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. Fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul became the fourth Republican to join 47 Senate Democrats in support of a House-passed disapproval resolution, virtually ensuring that the measure will reach Trump’s desk. It is expected that when the measure reaches him, President Trump will exercise his veto for the first time. To override a presidential veto, the measure would need to secure two-thirds support in both bodies of Congress – an extremely high bar to reach. The House fell 40 votes short of two-thirds passage on the measure last week.

The First Lady of Virginia, Pam Northam, wife of Ralph, got herself in hot water this week for handing out cotton to black students while they were on a tour. But the Northams have form when it comes to messy race relations. There’s the whole blackface or KKK costume school photograph business. Then there’s the blacking up as Michael Jackson thing, which Ralph admitted to. Oh, and Ralph Northam’s family owned at least 84 slaves. Northam maintains that he learned about his family’s slave ownership in 2017. That story is harder to believe once you see that three out of the four grandparental lines of his family owned slaves. Two branches owned at least two dozen. Let’s take a tour of the family genealogy.

The most fascinating thing about the Michael Cohen hearing may not be what Michael Cohen said, but what Republicans didn’t. They made no attempt to defend Donald Trump other than to disparage Cohen’s character with metronomic regularity. Cohen was a liar. A bad man. He enriched himself. But how do you derogate someone who has already confessed to swimming happily in Trump’s swampy waters? The other tack they pursued was to declare the hearing a circus or a charade. Protestations were profuse. O tempora o mores! Washington, we were told, is a ‘hellhole.’ (At least Republican lawmakers forbore from deeming it a shithole.

Later this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference will convene for its annual gathering. Spectator USA has obtained a final copy of its official schedule. We are reprinting it here for the first time, in its entirety, and without comment.

On Tuesday, Chicago voters head to the polls to vote for Rahm Emanuel’s successor as Da Mayor. ‘Why vote in late February?’ you might ask. ‘Didn’t Chicago just vote in November for House members and Governor?’ Oh, you naive soul. For decades, Chicago has held its elections in February precisely because it is cold, often snowy, and hard to get to the polls. When you suppress ordinary voters, who is left? For many years, it was reliable voters for the old Chicago Democratic Machine. Some of them drove city busses or garbage trucks; others shuffled papers in city offices. Some filled potholes. Many more watched their co-workers fill potholes while they grabbed a cigarette. What better way to ensure that insiders get reelected?

The New Jersey State Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill Thursday to require presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns in exchange for a place on the state’s ballot. The measure passed along party lines 23-11. Sitting President Donald Trump famously bucked modern tradition when refusing to release his tax returns, so the NJ measure could effectively keep Donald Trump off the ballot. The Democrat-dominated New Jersey legislature passed the same requirement in 2017, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie refused to sign it.

My libertarian friends object to some of my recent writings — in particular, an essay for First Things proposing a moderate economic nationalism as ‘A New Conservative Agenda.’ The various intellectual factions on the American right are all susceptible to utopianism and dangerously wishful thinking when they dwell too much in their own minds: they all need the benefit of a look through someone else’s eyes once in a while, even to see their own concerns more clearly. In the letter below, I respond to some friends’ objections and summarize — tidily, I hope — a few vital questions to which libertarians offer inadequate answers.

Andrew McCabe, second-in-command at James Comey’s FBI, is at it again. First, he and his boss shredded the Bureau’s reputation as the world’s leading law enforcement agency. Now, McCabe is compounding the damage by making wild, self-serving charges to sell his new book. In one TV interview, he said it is ‘possible’ that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Serious charges need serious proof. Simple fairness demands it. But McCabe presents none. That’s par for the course. Simple fairness was not the hallmark of the Comey-McCabe era. No disinterested observers think the Bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server was treated the same way as the amorphous charges against the Trump campaign. That bias wasn’t the fault of FBI field agents.