What Constitution?

In the not so distant past, even when Democrats and Republicans disagreed, both parties attempted to follow the guidelines of the U.S. Constitution. It seem as though that has changed in recent years. Alan Dershowitz is a well-known Democrat who has been called out by his party more than once for his apolitical support of the U.S. Constitution. On Tuesday, he posted an article at The Epoch Times about the arrest of Peter Navarro.

The article notes:

The indictment of Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress violates several provisions of the Constitution and should be dismissed. Navarro has a strong claim of executive privilege that should be decided by the courts before any indictment can lawfully issue.

Either the Justice Department or Congress should seek a judicial ruling that Navarro’s claim of executive privilege is invalid. If the court rules that it is invalid and orders him to respond to the congressional subpoena, Navarro should have an opportunity to comply. If he fails to comply with a judicial order, he can either be indicted or held in contempt by the court. But absent a judicial order, he cannot lawfully be indicted for invoking executive privilege and refusing to reveal arguably privileged material just because a committee of Congress, controlled by Democrats, has voted that he should. It is not enough to allow him to appeal after the fact, because information, once revealed, cannot be erased. He is obliged to claim privilege now and refuse to respond. That is not a crime. It is the constitutionally correct action.

Navarro’s indictment violates several key constitutional rights, including due process, fair warning and executive privilege. It also violates the separation of powers, under which the courts have the authority to resolve conflicts between the legislative and executive branches over claims of executive privilege in response to legislative subpoenas. Due process and fair warning require that these issues first be resolved by the courts before an indictment can be issued.

Please follow the link to the article for further details.

The bottom line here is simple. The Democrats need something to run on in the mid-term elections. They have chosen January 6th, stating that the events of that day were a threat to our Democracy. First of all, we are a representative republic–not a Democracy. Second of all, the protesters were not armed. If you are going to have an insurrection, you should probably carry a weapon. Two women died that day at the hands of the Capitol police–one shot and one gassed and beaten to death (article here). I don’t think the protesters were the problem.

The Company Town

On Saturday, American Greatness posted an article about how Washington, D.C., currently functions (or does not function). The article is titled, “Dismantle the D.C. Company Town.” What a great idea.

The article reports:

Gertrude Stein famously warned that it was important to know how far to go when going too far. 

It pains me to admit that Democrats seem to have a far better sense of all that than do Republicans. Perhaps it’s because Democrats have a visceral appreciation of William Hazlitt’s observation that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” The Democrats, that is to say, long ago became expert at the game of holding their opponents to standards that they themselves violate not just with impunity but with ostentatious glee. 

The news last week that Michael Sussmann was found not guilty by a D.C. jury of his ideological peers was another thumb in the eye of the American so-called system of justice. Scary-looking super-cop John Durham had indicted Sussmann for the same thing that brought down Trump’s flash-in-the-pan National Security Advisor Mike Flynn—lying to the FBI—but no one who has been paying attention thought the two men would be treated the same way. Flynn was close to Donald Trump, therefore he must be considered a sacrificial beast, someone to be made an example of, a pariah. And so he was. 

Sussmann, by contrast, was a covert employee of the Hillary Clinton campaign. He helped get the Russian Collusion Delusion going and lied to the FBI in the process. But he was on the side of the regime party, so, as Jonathan Turley observed as the Sussmann case unfolded, he was afforded every consideration while Flynn found himself ruined. In this tale of two trials, we got a textbook illustration of how you can deploy a two-tier system of justice in which, as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. 

The article also notes the recent arrest of Peter Navarro:

Sussmann joins a long list of Hillary cronies and Department of Justice lackeys (but I repeat myself). In any just world Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, James Comey, Kevin Clinesmith, Loretta Lynch, and indeed Hillary herself would be behind bars. But this is our world, not any just world. 

And here’s some salt to rub in the wound. Peter Navarro, a former Trump economic advisor, was held in contempt of Congress because he refused to hand over documents to the Kangaroo Court, er . . . the Democrat-controlled January 6 inquisition. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s self-declared “wingman” and Attorney General was also held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over documents. But not to worry. As CNN reported soon after the affront, “The White House and the Justice Department made clear Friday what had been expected all along: Attorney General Eric Holder will not face criminal prosecution under the contempt of Congress citation passed by the U.S. House.”

The article concludes:

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein says “all philosophical problems have the form ‘I have lost my way.’” The first response to being lost should be to retrace one’s steps in order to escape the maze. It’s time that Americans faced up to the reality that their governing apparat is a corrupt, self-engorging Leviathan. This is not, or not only, a partisan issue. Sure, Washington, D.C. is a fully paid-up concession of the Democratic Party, regularly voting some 93 to 95 percent Democratic. Sussmann was never going to be convicted there.

So a preliminary antiseptic, as I have argued elsewhere, would be to downgrade Washington in the political metabolism of the country. Indeed, I think the capital, if not the Capitol, ought to be dispersed. Washington, D.C., could continue to function as what it has already in part become: a sort of stage set where functionaries preen and simper before the cameras of a preposterous media and press corps. 

Donald Trump made a few half-hearted stabs at dismantling the lumbering machine that is the Washington establishment, but that seems like a long time ago and, besides, the swamp closed almost instantly to reassert its prerogatives. In his next term, however, he should make the destruction of the Washington machine one of his highest priorities. It won’t be easy. To be frank, I am not sure, absent some world-shaking calamity, it is even possible. But it is nevertheless necessary if anything resembling the republic as envisioned by the founders is to be salvaged.

We have wandered far from the republic the Founding Fathers created. I pray it is not too late to get it back.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

Unfortunately Honesty Has Become A Partisan Item

An article posted at Sara Carter’s website today reports the following:

In a new poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, 73% of Republican likely voters support the Senators challenging Joe Biden’s election.

Meanwhile, 75% of Democrat likely voters oppose the effort, according to the poll.

According to Quoteinvestigator.com:

In 1983 U.S Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a member of the National Commission on Social Security Reform. He employed the saying within an op-ed piece in the “Washington Post”: 9

There is a center in American politics. It can govern. The commission is just an example of what can be done. First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.

So what are the facts? Peter Navarro summed them up in a Newsmax article in mid-December:

The six voting irregularities reviewed in the report (“The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities”) linked up with six battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The findings aim to bolster the contention by President Donald Trump and his legal team that the Nov. 3 election was marred by widespread fraud. Trump has refused to concede the race, even as the Electoral College affirmed a victory by Joe Biden that’s due to be certified by Congress on Jan. 6.

These are the six voting irregularities:

  1. Outright voter fraud.
  2. Ballot mishandling.
  3. Contestable process fouls.
  4. Equal protection clause violations.
  5. Voting machine irregularities.
  6. Significant statistical anomalies.

We are at a crossroads. Do we let cheating stand, knowing that it will only get worse in the future, or do brave men speak out against corruption, regardless of political party? In a way, it is up to the voters–we elected these people. I don’t know if our votes will count in the future, but it they do, we need to unelect anyone who is not willing to speak out against election fraud.

Documentation Of Election Fraud

Dan Bongino posted an article today about a thirty-six page report on the 2020 election released by Peter Navarro, Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.

The article includes the following chart:

This is the link to the full report.

Here are a few highlights:

    • Significant irregularities appear to be ubiquitous across the six battleground states. Only Arizona is free of any apparent widespread ballot mishandling while only Pennsylvania lacks significant statistical anomalies. The rest of the matrix is a sea of checkmarks and occasional stars.

Of dead and “ghost” voters, the report states:

    • In Pennsylvania, for example, a statistical analysis conducted by the Trump Campaign matching voter rolls to public obituaries found what appears to be over 8,000 confirmed dead voters successfully casting mail-in ballots. In Georgia – underscoring the critical role any given category of election irregularities might play in determining the outcome – the estimated number of alleged deceased individuals casting votes almost exactly equals the Biden victory margin.
    • On the Ghost Voter front, a “Ghost Voter” is a voter who requests and submits a ballot under the name of a voter who no longer resides at the address where that voter was registered. In Georgia for example, it is alleged that over 20,000 absentee or early voters – almost twice the Biden victory margin – cast their ballots after having moved out of state.

In the section of the report on election voting machine irregularities, the report makes note of a number of improbable vote surges all in favor of Biden:

    • At least one instance of a large and inexplicable vote switching and vote surge in favor of Joe Biden took place in Antrim County, Michigan – and it is associated with the controversial aforementioned Dominion-Smartmatic voting machine hardware-software combo. In this Republican stronghold, 6,000 votes were initially, and incorrectly, counted for Joe Biden. The resulting vote totals were contrary to voter registration and historical patterns and therefore raised eyebrows. When a check was done, it was discovered that the 6,000 votes were actually for Donald J. Trump. A subsequent forensic audit of the Antrim County vote tabulation found that the Dominion system had an astonishing error rate of 68 percent. By way of comparison, the Federal Election Committee requires that election systems must have an error rate no larger than 0.0008 percent.
    • In Georgia, there were numerous “glitches” with the Dominion machines where the results would change. The most notable of these changes was a 20,000 vote surge for Biden and 1,000 vote decrease for Trump

Houston, we have a problem. If this stands, will we ever have an honest election in America?

Where Did The Jobs Go?

Today Fox Business posted an article that included some comments White House trade adviser Peter Navarro made on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

The article reports:

“We lost over 70,000 factories, over 5 million manufacturing jobs, and it was because Joe Biden likes made in China,” Navarro said. “Donald Trump came along. … He said, ‘Hey, that’s not good. That’s not right. I’m going to fix that.’ And so what President Trump has been carefully doing is putting in place a wide range of policies, whether it’s lowering the corporate income tax to bring investment on-shore, steel and aluminum tariffs, or buy American.”

The U.S. lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between January 2000 and December 2014 because of “growing trade deficits in manufacturing products prior to the Great Recession and then the massive output collapse during the Great Recession,” according to a 2015 report from the Economic Policy Institute.

The article notes:

China’s state-run tabloid Global Times deemed Biden “smoother to deal with” than President Trump in August.

I don’t doubt that!

The article concludes:

“Economic security is national security. That’s one of the principles of the Trump Administration and what we learned from this China virus pandemic,” Navarro said. “If we bring those jobs back onshore as we have been doing, we will create great jobs at great wages but also protect the American people from the Chinese communist party.”

Navarro touted Trump’s stance on U.S. manufacturing, but the president has repeatedly taken criticism for manufacturing his branded products in other countries, including China.

The goal should be to make it cheaper and more practical to manufacture things in America. That goal can be achieved through lower corporate taxes, tariffs on foreign goods, and reliable and inexpensive energy. President Trump has worked in all three of these areas to bring manufacturing back to America. Because of Hunter Biden’s continuing investments in China, it is unlikely that Joe Biden would continue policies that would move jobs away from China.