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Trump Responds to Democrats' Desperate Last-Minute Impeachment Effort
Think what you want about Trump, that is still a freedom you have. That said, what the Democrats are proposing will mark the end of this republic. It is government by petulance, pique and personal whim and that means instability and as our currency drops and China ascends you can kiss the nation we all love goodbye.
The president condemned the impeachment effort as a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt” in history, The Washington Examiner reported.
“I think it’s causing tremendous anger,” he told reporters as he boarded the helicopter. Trump is flying south for a trip to the border in Texas to tout his work on the ball with Mexico.
On Monday, Democrats revealed their article of impeachment, accusing Trump of “incitement of insurrection.” The Democrats do seem intent on impeaching the president, despite the fact that his term in office ends on January 20, eight days from now.
On Sunday, Pelosi suggested that many House Democrats want to impeach Trump specifically to prevent him from holding office in the future.
While some of Trump’s statements during the Capitol riots were beyond the pale, the president has since condemned the rioters and promised to support a peaceful transition of power.
If the House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, the Senate would almost certainly not remove Trump before January 20. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will not reconvene the Senate until January 19, effectively dooming impeachment while Trump is in office.
Impeaching Trump for allegedly inciting the Capitol riots would set a terrible precedent. The president never told his supporters to break into the Capitol or engage in violence. Urging people to “fight like hell” in a political speech is hardly insurrectionary. This impeachment would set a precedent that Congress could impeach a president if the majority party interprets aggressive rhetoric as incitement to violence
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A solid Republican ticket in 2024 would be Pompeo and Haley!
Pompeo Issues WARNING About China
We need to heed his warning.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently announced that the threat from the Chinese government was closer than people think.
Pompeo was speaking with members of the Republican Study Committee and stated that he did not realize the threat China had until he worked as the Central Intelligence Agency director.
He said, “This fight is inside the gates today … Containing where they are today, leave them in our institutions of higher learning. It leaves them in our high schools; it leaves them in our PTA groups. It leaves them inside our city councils and our state legislatures all across America. This is a deep effort that has been going on for 50 years. Republicans and Democrats alike refuse to deal with it, and we started to and did.”
He made sure to state that U.S. lawmakers need to stand up to China.
“They aren’t ten feet tall. They have enormous challenges. And we need to go use the tools that we have, the power that we have, to impose real costs on them in a way that will shape their behavior, in a way that reflects the understanding that we have about how the West must win and how the United States must protect its own.”
Read the whole article here.
And:
Beijing Won’t
Bow to Bluster on Taiwan
Biden will have to coordinate a military
buildup with allies to stop a catastrophe.
By Walter Russell Mead
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement last week that he’s lifting restrictions on meetings between U.S. and Taiwanese officials will enrage Beijing, but the impact on Taiwan’s security is harder to judge.
Taiwan has divided America from China since Chiang Kai-shek’s
defeated Kuomintang fled to the roughly Maryland-sized island about 100 miles
from the Chinese mainland back in 1949. Ever since Henry Kissinger’s
groundbreaking diplomacy in the early 1970s, Washington has embraced a
one-China policy. The U.S. rejects the use of force to resolve the Taiwan
issue, but under the policy of “strategic ambiguity,” America declines to say
what it would do if Beijing attempted forceful reunification.
President-elect Biden, unfortunately, inherits a situation in
which the basis of the old compromise is coming apart. For its part, China has
launched one of the greatest military buildups in the history of the world
across the straits from Taiwan. Coupled with the artificial islands and
military buildup in the South China Sea, it’s clear Beijing has been
systematically seeking to create the conditions for a successful invasion of
Taiwan.
China is closer to this goal than many Americans realize. Twenty
years ago, Beijing had no prospect of conquering the island. The Chinese
Communist Party could bluster about reunification all it wanted, but the
Taiwanese, the Japanese and the mainlanders themselves understood that this was
empty talk.
It gets less empty every day. Increasingly the military balance has shifted from a clear U.S. advantage into a gray zone as China’s buildup accelerates. This is anything but a secret; the gradual decline of America’s ability to forestall an invasion of Taiwan is well understood by governments around the Pacific.
Permitting the erosion of the U.S. position around Taiwan was
one of the great strategic blunders of modern times. The fall of Taiwan would
be bad news not only for Taiwan’s democracy-loving and independence-minded
residents. It would be a strategic catastrophe for Tokyo, leaving Beijing in
control of the sea routes Japan needs for survival. A Chinese takeover would be
such a conclusive demonstration of American weakness that no country, from
India to Vietnam, could or would risk its security on U.S. ties. Given that the
island also hosts the world’s most advanced semiconductor industry, controlling
Taiwan would put China on the road to world technological and economic
supremacy even as it became the arbiter of Asia.
It doesn’t take a war to change the politics of Asia. Already,
signs that the strategic balance is drifting in Beijing’s favor undermine
confidence in America and strengthen the arguments of China appeasers from
Tokyo to New Delhi.
Restoring a stable power equation is possible but cannot be
achieved overnight. It will require significant military spending and perhaps
some difficult trade-offs elsewhere, but it also necessitates a renewal of U.S.
diplomacy in the region. By coordinating military planning and burden sharing
more closely with countries like Japan, India, Vietnam and Australia, the
military balance can be stabilized and secured in less time and with less cost.
And solidifying relationships with neighboring countries like the Philippines
and Pacific island nations to allow the allies to disperse their forces to more
bases will make those forces harder for China to target.
Some fear that this kind of military and diplomatic push would
further destabilize U.S.-China relations. That concern is misplaced. The risks
of an ambiguous and tipping military balance far outweigh those of shoring up
the allied position. As the military balance shifts, Washington will have to
resort to increasingly dramatic gestures and threats that are likely to provoke
China but unlikely to deter it.
Selling high-profile arms to Taiwan, stepping up official
contacts with the island, or even—as increasingly senior figures in the
American foreign-policy establishment suggest—replacing “strategic ambiguity”
with an open U.S. guarantee of Taiwan’s security won’t help Taiwan all that much
as long as the mainland is becoming more capable of invasion. But such moves do
antagonize Beijing and deepen its commitment to the military buildup.
It was American military strength that made the Kissinger
compromise over Taiwan possible in the first place. That compromise remains, as
it has been for the past 50 years, the cornerstone both of Taiwan’s security
and of pragmatic and peaceful U.S.-China relations. While China’s rise makes
that military edge harder to sustain in some ways, the accompanying ascent of
regional allies makes it easier.
Stabilizing
U.S.-China relations and protecting the Pacific status quo require the same
things from Mr. Biden’s administration: A hard-nosed understanding of the
military facts of life, a sophisticated diplomacy that embraces the
game-changing potential of both old and emerging American alliances, and a
clearsighted approach to the economic and technological foundations of national
power.
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Your tax dollars go for this:
https://twitter.com/
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All Donald Trump’s Deplorables
Even Hillary Clinton consigned only half of Trump supporters to her infamous ‘basket.’
By William McGurn
Whatever political future Donald Trump might have envisioned for
himself is now dead. He squandered a good chunk of it in the Georgia runoffs,
when he made them all about himself instead of about keeping Republican control
over the Senate. But it was finished off by the mob of his own supporters who
stormed the Capitol this past Wednesday and inflicted more lasting damage on
their man than anything his enemies ever managed.
At the moment, Washington is consumed with just how humiliating
Mr. Trump’s exit will be—with a second impeachment, with the 25th Amendment
invoked, with his resignation. There’s even talk of holding a Senate trial when
he’s no longer president.SUBSCRIBE
But for anyone who cares about unity and healing, the
president’s fate is no longer the primary concern. More important is the future
for the half of America that supported him. Because there is an effort to lump
the 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump with those who rampaged
through the Capitol—thus rendering them unfit for polite society going forward.
There’s no denying the reality of the thugs. But let me tell you
about the people I know who attended that rally. To a person, they are decent,
ordinary Americans who didn’t enter the Capitol and wouldn’t dream of
disobeying a police officer.
Some (but not all) believe the election was stolen. They’re
mistaken, but that doesn’t make them white supremacists, domestic terrorists,
religious extremists or any of the many noxious names they’ve been called.
Those I know personally are now terrified that they will be doxed—meaning
vengeful leftists will make their personal information public—and perhaps fired
from their jobs if it gets out they were in Washington for the rally.
These are also people who have no problem with arresting and
prosecuting those who did break the law that Wednesday. A Reuters/Ipsos poll
reports that only 9% of Americans consider the rioters “concerned citizens” and
5% call them “patriots.” The remaining 90% includes millions of Trump voters.
True, those millions include some, perhaps many, who believe in
conspiracy theories and don’t trust their government.
But where could that have come from? Might it have something to
do with watching leading media outlets proudly declare they wouldn’t even try
to be fair in reporting about Mr. Trump, and then go on to promote the
conspiracy theory that the president was a Russian agent? Is it any surprise
that people might then look to other sources of information, some of which are
dubious? Or that distrust in government grew as people learned how leaders at
the FBI and Justice Department abused their police powers to interfere in an
election and then undermine an elected president?
Everywhere a Trump voter turns, he sees ostensibly apolitical
organizations enlisting in the “resistance.” Here’s an email just sent to every
kid in America applying to college through the Common App:
“We witnessed a deeply
disturbing attack on democracy on Wednesday, when violent white supremacist
insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undo a fair and
legal election. The stark differences between how peaceful Black and brown
protesters have been treated for years relative to Wednesday’s coup again call
attention to the open wound of systemic racism.”
Mr. Trump’s power to cool
passions, now running at a fever pitch, is almost nil, and in any event his
time is running out. But if Joe Biden means what he says about being
president for all Americans, including those who didn’t vote for him, he has
work to do. A healthy start would be to ask his fellow Democrats to call off
the impeachment that will only rub raw an open wound, or make clear to the
anti-Trump Republicans in the Lincoln Project that their effort to blacklist
anyone who served in the Trump administration is a prescription for more rancor
and division.
Some ask: Why is it on Mr. Biden to soothe disenchanted Trump
followers? The answer is because in a week he will be the nation’s leader—and
he’s already promised as much. In his victory speech he said it was time to
“stop treating our opponents as enemies.” He’s right, but it will take
leadership to make these words real for millions of Trump voters who feel, with
reason, that the hatred and contempt directed at Mr. Trump is also meant for
them.
Hillary Clinton admitted
this when she infamously labeled these voters “deplorables.” But funny thing
about that: In her original remarks, she made clear she was consigning
only half of
Mr. Trump’s supporters to her “basket of deplorables.”
The other half, she said, are “people who feel that the
government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about
them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures.” She
went on to advise that “those are people we have to understand and empathize
with as well.”
She was willing to consider at least half of Mr. Trump’s
supporters worthy of understanding and empathy. Today, this would make Mrs.
Clinton the moderate.
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Many years ago the government allowed unions greater latitude in labor negotiations against corporations. This gave unions power and put corporations at a distinct dis-advantage. in the world of anti-trust activity. GM could not collude with Ford in order to present a united font so unions struck against one and this eventually put pressure on the struck auto company because it's competitors remained free to continue producing and selling. In the end, the struck auto company had to cave and this resulted in higher labor costs for all auto companies.
In the case of social media companies, they were granted special rights not to be sued for what others posted on their sites. They have grown to become exclusive and powerful cartels capable of taking away free speech as they are now doing. They must be stopped and broken up so competition is allowed to return to this segment of the economy, otherwise Bezos, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook will control America along with Sulzberg, Soros, Obama and,maybe one day, Stacey Abrams.
Save the Constitution From
Big Tech
Congressional threats and inducements make
Twitter and Facebook censorship a free-speech violation.
By Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld
Facebook and Twitter banned President Trump and numerous
supporters after last week’s disgraceful Capitol riot, and Google, Apple
and Amazon blocked Twitter
alternative Parler—all based on claims of “incitement to violence” and “hate
speech.” Silicon Valley titans cite their ever-changing “terms of service,” but
their selective enforcement suggests political motives.
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to
regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects
only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and
Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using
a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has
co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot
directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court
held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the
government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish
what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did
by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only
permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but
immunizes them from liability if they do so.
The justices have long held that the
provision of such immunity can turn private action into state action. In Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson (1956), they found
state action in private union-employer closed-shop agreements—which force all
employees to join the union—because Congress had passed a statute immunizing
such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association(1989), the court
again found state action in private-party conduct—drug tests for company
employees—because federal regulations immunized railroads from liability if
they conducted those tests. In both cases, as with Section 230, the federal
government didn’t mandate anything; it merely pre-empted state law, protecting
certain private parties from lawsuits if they engaged in the conduct Congress
was promoting.
Section 230 is the carrot, and there’s also a stick: Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”
Such threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another
congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new
restrictions on “hate speech.” It’s no accident that big tech took its most
aggressive steps against Mr. Trump just as Democrats were poised to take
control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced
approval of big tech’s actions, which Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal
expressly attributed to “a shift in the political winds.”
For more than half a century courts
have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action.
In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the
Supreme Court found a First Amendment violation when a private bookseller
stopped selling works state officials deemed “objectionable” after they sent
him a veiled threat of prosecution. In Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph
Co. (1987), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found
state action when an official induced a telephone company to stop carrying
offensive content, again by threat of prosecution.
As the Second Circuit held in Hammerhead Enterprises v. Brezenoff (1983), the
test is whether “comments of a government official can reasonably be
interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory
action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request.” Mr.
Richmond’s comments, along with many others, easily meet that test. Notably,
the Ninth Circuit held it didn’t matter whether the threats were the “real
motivating force” behind the private party’s conduct; state action exists even
if he “would have acted as he did independently.”
Either Section 230 or congressional pressure alone might be
sufficient to create state action. The combination surely is. Suppose a
Republican Congress enacted a statute giving legal immunity to any private
party that obstructs access to abortion clinics. Suppose further that
Republican congressmen explicitly threatened private companies with punitive
laws if they fail to act against abortion clinics. If those companies did as
Congress demands, then got an attaboy from lawmakers, progressives would see the
constitutional problem.
Republicans including Mr. Trump have called for Section 230’s
repeal. That misses the point: The damage has already been done. Facebook and
Twitter probably wouldn’t have become behemoths without Section 230, but
repealing the statute now may simply further empower those companies, which are
better able than smaller competitors to withstand liability. The right answer
is for courts to recognize what lawmakers did: suck the air out of the
Constitution by dispatching big tech to do what they can’t. Now it’s up to
judges to fill the vacuum, with sound legal precedents in hand.
Liberals should worry too. If big
tech can shut down the president, what stops them from doing the same to Joe Biden if he backs antitrust suits
against social-media companies? Our Framers deeply understood the need for
checks and balances in government. They couldn’t anticipate the rise of a new
Leviathan with unchecked power to make extraconstitutional political judgments
under the mantle of private enterprise.
American democracy is under siege
from Silicon Valley’s political plutocracy. Next week Mr. Trump will be a
private citizen without a Twitter account. Our new class of corporate monarchs
will still control whether and how Americans can hear from the president—or
anyone else. We have devolved from a three-branch federal government to one
with a branch office in Silicon Valley. But there’s no democratic
accountability for Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
Hard cases make bad law, and Mr. Trump presented America with a
hard case last week. The breach of the Capitol is a stain on American history,
and Silicon Valley seized on the attack to do what Congress couldn’t by
suppressing the kind of political speech the First Amendment was designed to
protect.
There’s more at stake than free speech. Suppression of dissent
breeds terror. The answer to last week’s horror should be to open more channels
of dialogue, not to close them off. If disaffected Americans no longer have an
outlet to be heard, the siege of Capitol Hill will look like a friendly parley
compared with what’s to come.
Ordinary Americans understand the First Amendment better than the
elites do. Users who say Facebook, Twitter and Google are violating their
constitutional rights are right. Aggrieved plaintiffs should sue these
companies now to protect the voice of every American—and our constitutional
democracy.
Mr. Ramaswamy is founder and CEO of Roivant Sciences and author
of the forthcoming book “Woke Inc.” Mr. Rubenfeld, a constitutional scholar,
has advised parties who are litigating or may litigate against Google and
Facebook.
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