Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Respect Needed for Trump’s Pardons

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The Constitution expressly grants the authority to the president to issue pardons, and this power has been repeatedly invoked by presidents beginning with George Washington. The lack of respect given to President Trump in connection with his relatively small number of presidential pardons is a disgrace.

This presidential prerogative is particularly important when the President, as Commander-in-Chief, pardons a military officer under his direct chain of command. Presidential pardons of servicemen who put their own lives on the line in defense of our freedoms should receive heightened respect by all.

Reports are that Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher’s platoon mutinied against him and prompted the overzealous prosecution of him for crimes he did not commit. He was nearly fully acquitted by a military jury in a system that rarely sides with an accused soldier or sailor.

A blizzard of allegations were made against Gallagher in an apparent attempt by some of his subordinates to destroy him. When it came to testifying in a court of law, however, the allegations virtually disappeared and the prosecutors should have dropped their case.

Gallagher’s acquittal at trial on all of the serious allegations against him vindicated the sailor, and embarrassed the prosecutors. But instead of backing off from their mistake, the Deep State doubled down against Gallagher.

The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, is a former Wall Street banker lacking in combat experience. His skills are not in hand-to-hand fighting against the enemy, but in navigating the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.

Spencer resisted the order by his Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, to restore Gallagher to his full rank, and to move on to more important issues. But in a textbook example of intransigence by the Swamp, Secretary Richard Spencer persisted in defying Trump’s commands concerning the Gallagher case.

Underlings, particularly in the military, should not be trying to negotiate around their superiors. Trump did not command the Navy to do anything immoral or contrary to the Constitution, and Spencer should have complied with his duty to obey orders.

After he was fired, Spencer appeared on television to criticize our President. When asked the obvious question on CBS to explain “what’s wrong with following a lawful order from the commander in chief?”, Spencer admitted, “Nothing.”
But then Spencer added that “I could not, in my conscience, do this.” His “conscience” somehow prevented him from honoring the equivalent of a presidential pardon?

Spencer and other Trump critics need to take a close look, perhaps for their first time, at Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution: “The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

President Trump’s first pardon as a president was issued to Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who fought for years on the front lines against illegal immigration. Yet the ACLU persuaded a Clinton-appointed federal judge to ignore the pardon, and the Ninth Circuit is now considering Sheriff Joe’s appeal.

It is a bit mystifying that liberals would be so resistant to presidential pardons when they were used so often by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton famously pardoned a long list of his friends during his last evening in the White House, and his supporters did not protest.

The soldiers whom Trump has pardoned are not his buddies or donors, as some of the recipients of Clinton’s pardons were. In addition to restoring Navy SEAL Chief Gallagher to his rank, Trump issued pardons to two Army officers, 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Major Mathew Golsteyn.

Maj. Golsteyn had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism that included enduring enemy fire and assisting a wounded Afghan soldier, but was charged with murder of a suspected bombmaker based primarily on an interview Golsteyn gave on Fox News.

The notion that armchair lawyers should be prosecuting our servicemen for being supposedly too tough on the enemy lacks the support of the American people.

Yet the knee-jerk resistance by the Deep State to Trump began with his very first days in office. Sally Yates, an Obama-appointed holdover in the Justice Department, was fired for defying another policy set by the President because she disagreed with it.

Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher served in combat with valor, fighting hard against some of the fiercest terrorists in the world. The allegations made against Gallagher of violent wrongdoing were evidently false and never proven in court.

Trump tweeted, “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”

The disrespect for Trump’s pardons smokes the Never-Trumpers out. Let’s hope they at least refrain from criticizing another long-standing presidential tradition, the ceremonial pardon of a live turkey for Thanksgiving.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Trump is doing what he was elected to do

The NY Times is pro-impeachment all the times, and the more it pushes impeachment, the more subscribers it gets. But it published Daniel McCarthy op-ed explaining:
President Trump was doing exactly what voters elected him to do when he asked President Zelensky to account for Ukraine’s dealings with the Bidens. It’s a question related to the overall system linking American politicians with Ukrainian interests. No doubt Mr. Trump sees that system as reflecting more poorly on Democrats than on his own party or himself. But exposing that system, whatever its partisan overtones, is both a legitimate interest of the United States and something that Mr. Trump’s voters expect of him in light of his 2016 campaign.
Yes, even if every allegation against Trump is true, it is all proper, and even carrying out the wishes of the voters.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Impeachment Hearings Are a Bust

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Television ratings for the impeachment hearings have been a bust, far less than the viewership during Watergate or Clinton-Lewinsky. Even the testimony of ex-FBI director James Comey and future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh drew higher ratings than the Democrats' latest show trial.

Less than 13 million people watched the first day of impeachment hearings, which is only a tiny fraction of the audience for big football games. Polling shows that Independent voters, who will decide the next presidential election, are unplugging this in large numbers.

It does not help the Democrats that their star witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, has been discredited by his own supervisor, Tim Morrison. According to Morrison, Vindman is not reliable and his boss Morrison even doubts his judgment.

Morrison, the far more credible witness, found nothing improper on the telephone call held between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In contrast Vindman appears politically biased by his own disagreement with President Trump's foreign policy, which further undermines Vindman's objectivity.

The opinionated views of Vindman and other anti-Trump witnesses hopelessly distort the hearings. Democrats have delayed testimony by those who are willing to stick to the facts, which vindicate our president.

Morrison listened in on the July 25th call and has first-hand knowledge which several of the other informants, including the so-called whistleblower, lack. Morrison and other witnesses who support Trump’s statements have not yet been allowed by the Democrats to testify publicly.

The Democrats’ game plan is to try to turn the public against President Trump before the most knowledgeable witnesses testify in his defense. On Friday Democrats relied heavily on their witness Marie Yovanovitch, the Former Ambassador to Ukraine who was replaced by President Trump and who has a history of foreign policy failures.

But Yovanovitch had an underpublicized zinger against the Democratic frontrunner for president, Joe Biden. She testified that it was improper for Hunter Biden to take a large salary from a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father Joe Biden was vice president.

Committee member Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) astutely followed up by asking Yovanovitch if she ever raised this potential conflict-of-interest by the Bidens with officials at the State Department, such as George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs who testified two days earlier. “I don’t believe so,” Yovanovitch replied.

“No one did anything? You see why the president was a little concerned about what happened in Ukraine?” Ratcliffe quickly pointed out rhetorically.

Yovanovitch did not admit the obvious, but it was unnecessary at that point. The failure by her and other anti-Trump diplomats to flag the Bidens’ improper conduct is reason enough for Trump to raise the issue earlier this year.

Impeachment hack Adam Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, strained to portray Yovanovitch as a victim of bullying by Trump. Schiff even interrupted the hearing to read a tweet by President Trump critical of Yovanovitch, and Schiff pretended that it was a crime for Trump to tweet against a witness.

But it was Schiff, not Trump, who interjected the tweet into the hearing and potentially influenced the witness by reading it to her. Schiff was playing to the media, rather than attempting to ferret out the truth in a fair way.

Schiff further distorted the hearing for the purpose of the television cameras by refusing to allow Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) to release his time for questioning the witness to a female colleague, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Schiff apparently thought the optics would be better for his side if a Republican male rather than a female questioned the anti-Trump female witness.

But the staged impeachment hearings are failing to hold the attention of a television audience. Even former Trump attorney Michael Cohen attracted higher television ratings when he testified before a congressional hearing earlier this year.

How long the Democrats pursue impeachment amid pitiful television ratings remains to be seen. Most of the public thinks we should not be sending millions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign country with a history of rampant corruption.

There is no precedent for this bizarre inquisition into foreign policy decisions which are properly for a president to make. Another poll shows that 90% of evangelicals, the voting bloc pivotal to the election of President Trump in 2016, view the impeachment hearings as a witch hunt.

The proverbial national spotlight that Democrats hoped to shine on their impeachment show trial is dim and ineffective. Its greatest achievement may be to force the Democratic senators who are running for president to be in D.C. during the month of January, to sift through the non-evidence rather than campaign against Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In less than a year these impeachment proceedings will be rendered moot by the real jury: American voters.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Impeachment testimony is fourth-hand

Here is the lead NY Times impeachment story from the top of page 1:
Impeachment Hearings Open With Revelation on Trump’s Ukraine Pressure

As public hearings began, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, said he was told President Trump cared more about investigating Joe Biden than he did about Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives opened historic impeachment hearings on Wednesday and took startling new testimony from a senior American diplomat that further implicated President Trump ...

Mr. Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he learned only recently of a July telephone call overheard by one of his aides in which the president was preoccupied with Ukraine’s willingness to say it would look into Mr. Biden and work by his son Hunter Biden for a Ukrainian energy firm. Immediately afterward, Mr. Taylor said, the aide had been informed that Mr. Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine.

A powerful witness for Democrats, Mr. Taylor appeared as Congress embarked on the third set of presidential impeachment hearings in modern times.
Got that? The best evidence is fourth-hand hearsay.

Tayloy said that he had "authority" over the "regular channel" of communications to Ukraine, but was unhappy that Trump had used others for informal communications. Last week, one of Taylor's aides said that he heard Sondland express an opinion in July about Trump cares more about exposing Biden's corruption than advancing the Deep State agenda for reviving the Cold War.

Let's hope so. Some polls have indicated that Joe Biden is the frontrunner to be elected President in 2020. If he is a crook, we need to know that.

Taylor has spent much of his career trying to revive the Cold War by putting troops on the Russian border in order to justify State Dept. budgets. Let's hope that Trump does not care to agree.

But only Trump knows what he cares about. Unless Sondland is a mindreader, he does not know Trump's state of mind. Any such opinion from Sondland is just second-hand hearsay. Taylor's aide is third-hand, and Taylor's testimony is fourth-hand.

If I went to the White House or anywhere else to push for some pet project of him, and didn't get what I wanted, then I might very well grumble that someone cares more about something else. Such grumbling could not possibly be evidence of wrongdoing.

And the pro-impeachment NY Times gushes that this is "startling new testimony"!

This is just a coup by Schiff-Nadler-Schumer, NYTimes-WashPost-CNN, and the Deep State Cold Warriors.

Schiff now claims that he doesn't know who the so-called whistleblower is, even tho Eric Ciaramella's name seems to be known to everyone else, and Schiff is known to have helped him write the complaint.
This will go down as the lamest impeachment attempt in American history.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Misguided Politics Drives Impeachment

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The phony impeachment campaign by Democrats is boosted by an underlying hostility harbored within the Deep State against President Trump’s foreign policy. Long gone are the days when Democrats were the anti-war party, as their own presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) laments.

Democrats and entrenched D.C. bureaucrats are united in wanting to send more aid to foreign countries and to perpetually station our troops in distant lands. The push to impeach President Trump gained steam after he brought our soldiers home from Syria.

“The senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified” in wanting President Trump to send military aid to Ukraine, declared impeachment witness Deputy Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper. When the money stopped flowing for the globalists, they falsely alleged wrongdoing by President Trump.

“It’s in our interest to deter Russian aggression elsewhere around the world,” Deputy Secretary Cooper opined. But that is an opinion for the President, not the Deep State.

The American people elected Donald Trump to repudiate the globalist mindset that has dominated nearly every president since Woodrow Wilson. It is not an impeachable offense to stop sending money to foreign countries.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, is a rising conservative star who echoes the America First positions of President Trump. In a speech on Tuesday, Senator Hawley provided compelling arguments against the globalist agenda of the Deep Staters.

“The American public is rightly skeptical of open-ended commitments and rightly tired of endless wars,” Sen. Hawley declared. “We find ourselves embroiled in the longest war in our nation’s history, with no discernible end in sight.”

Our “commitments have been paid for in the dearly earned dollars of the American working class, and in the dearly precious lives of American soldiers. … We cannot remake every nation in our image.”

But there are many enemies of Trump’s America First policy. A high concentration of those enemies are in the Deep State, the bureaucracy in D.C.

The Democrats’ central witness against Trump could be Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, but his deposition was more opinion than fact. Vindman has become the new front man for the Democrats as they decided not to rely further on the secret whistleblower who did not have any firsthand knowledge of any relevant facts either.

An accused person has a due process right to call witnesses. The President should have rights at least as great as those guaranteed to criminals in our courts of law.

Yet Democrats are refusing to allow Republicans to call as witnesses the whistleblower or Hunter Biden, the son of presidential contender Joe Biden. What are Democrats afraid of?

Democrats want to avoid full display of their political motivation behind the impeachment proceedings. The common denominator among the Deep State witnesses against Trump is their disagreement with his America First policy and their disdain for Trump as our Commander-in-Chief.

Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, earlier rebuffed a scheme by John Kelly and Rex Tillerson to work against Trump from within his administration. She sets an example for others to defend our president.

“There’s no insistence on that call, there are no demands on that call, it is a conversation between two presidents that’s casual in nature,” Haley stated on the Today show in reference to the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president which is at the center of the planned impeachment.

Democrats allege that Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to a request that it investigate corruption concerning Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden. On July 25, Trump merely asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a favor, but there was no quid pro quo.

Haley observes that it was proper for Trump to ask the Ukrainian President to probe corruption. If the Bidens were not involved in any wrongdoing, then they should have nothing to fear from such an inquiry by the distant Ukraine.

When Joe Biden was vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it fired Viktor Shokin, its top prosecutor. Shokin had been investigating wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company which paid Biden’s son Hunter at least $50,000 a month to serve on its Board of Directors despite his lack of experience.

Nikki Haley points out that “an American should want to know the answer of, ‘Did Biden pressure the prosecutor to, you know, to do what he did?’ And I think there’s a real question there.”

Haley added that “you can question the president, but you also have to question what Biden did.” Yet Democrats refuse to allow Republicans to call Hunter Biden or the whistleblower to testify, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says this failure would render any impeachment “dead on arrival.”

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Voices for dignity, intelligence and gravitas

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether the news media is serious with its anti-Trump bias. This NY Times op-ed letter has me stumped:
To the Editor:

A plea from 33 writers: Please use language that will clarify the issues at hand.

Please stop using the Latin phrase “quid pro quo” regarding the impeachment inquiry. Most people don’t understand what it means, and in any case it doesn’t refer only to a crime. Asking for a favor is not a criminal act; we frequently demand things from foreign countries before giving them aid, like asking them to improve their human rights record.

That is not a crime; ... But using this neutral phrase — which means simply “this for that” ... Please use words that refer only to criminal behavior here. ...

Please also stop using the phrase “dig up dirt.” This slang has unsavory connotations. ... Words make a difference.

These are parlous times, and we look to public voices for dignity, intelligence and gravitas. Please use precise and forceful language that reveals the struggle in which we now find ourselves. It’s a matter of survival.
Is this letter a spoof or not?

It is almost as if the letter read: "Please stop calling him President Trump, as that gives him too much respect, and start calling him the criminal-in-chief! Also, Deep State has unsavory connotations."

This is from 33 writers showing off their writing skills. Okay, I am impressed that they fooled the NY Times.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Manly Sports Carry Trump in Battleground States

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump’s high-profile support of manly sports is scoring points for him in the battleground states. While Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic contenders are absent from marquee athletic competitions, Trump is being seen by millions of Americans as an ordinary guy cheering alongside the rest of us.

On Monday, Trump welcomed the world champion Washington Nationals to the White House, after having attended Game 5 of the World Series. Its catcher, Kurt Suzuki, donned a Make America Great Again hat to the consternation of the liberal media.

First baseman Ryan Zimmerman presented a “TRUMP 45” baseball jersey to the 45th President. The Nationals’ principal owner and 18 of its 25 players attended, despite liberal pressure to boycott the event.

The handful of players who skipped this ceremony mostly did not say why, but potential liberal retaliation against Trump supporters is tainting even our national pastime. Newspaper reporters dole out MVP awards and Hall of Fame inductions, and a player who skipped the Trump event is contending for an MVP award for which votes have been cast.

On Saturday, Trump is expected to attend a college football game between the top two teams in the nation, LSU and Alabama. Dubbed the “game of the century,” this is being played deep in conservative Alabama where Trump will be running up the score on Election Day next fall.

As at any large public event, Trump receives a smattering of cheers and some organized boos, but millions of voters in the heartland appreciate his willingness to attend what Democratic candidates avoid. Trump’s appearance ringside at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at Madison Square Garden last Saturday was a knock-out punch with voters.

All three of these sports – baseball, football, and ultimate fighting – are manly traditions which have become politically incorrect at the liberal universities where Professor Warren comes from. Millions of women are huge fans of the same competitions which Trump attends, but liberal feminists are not.

A bikini-clad woman, known as a “ring girl,” adorns the ring for ultimate fighting. But feminists do not like that, and have succeeded in eliminating the swimsuit portion of the Miss America contest.

UFC founder Dana White welcomed Trump at Madison Square Garden, a short cab ride from his Trump Tower in New York City. During the Republican National Convention which nominated Trump, White predicted correctly that Trump’s “sense of loyalty and commitment will translate into how he will run this country.”

“We need somebody who believes in this country, we need somebody who is proud of this country, and who will fight for this country. Donald Trump is a fighter, and I know he will fight for this country.”

Trump has been doing exactly that, fighting for our country, while congressmen Nancy Pelosi and “Shifty” Adam Schiff do the opposite by concocting a scheme of secret impeachment hearings against Trump. Rather than cower in political fear in the White House as Richard Nixon did, Trump has come out swinging, to a standing ovation by the American public.

His trip to the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi, attracted a full house at the 10,000-seat BancorpSouth Arena, with many thousands more gathered outside. “I love him 100 percent,” gushed Mary Ann Gannon there. “He’s the greatest president we’ve ever had.”

On Monday night, amid the backbiting by the swampy Democrats in D.C., Trump held a rally at the 23,500-seat Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, home of the Wildcats college basketball team. “This is better than the Final Four," Trump said, to a raucous ovation inside and by thousands outside.

Even those who were not really Trump supporters are getting in on the fun. A racehorse named “Covfefe,” after a famous tweet by Trump, recently won the $1 million Breeders Cup at Santa Anita, California.

Voters are siding with Trump in the key battleground states which will decide the upcoming presidential election: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan. Despite all the Democratic maneuvering about impeachment, Trump leads in these states.

National polls for the presidential election have been almost meaningless, as they should be. California has the most voters but has made itself politically irrelevant by turning so far leftward.

It hurts the Democratic contenders to continue to pander to voters in California, which moved its primary earlier in order to impact the nomination. Hillary Clinton racked up millions of extra votes there, but those votes were wasted as Trump won all the battleground states.

“New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World,” screams the latest headline from the left-leaning New York magazine. The Democratic candidates are preaching to their own irrelevant choir, rather than reaching out to independent-minded Democrats in the battleground states where Trump is heading toward a second victory.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.