+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Because Pruitt is effective the lefties want to smear him and have him removed from office. This is why Washington and Democrats have become a threat to a functioning nation.
To make matter worse, agencies and the un-elected now run government and when one, like the FBI, does not wish to reveal anything they stonewall Congress. The establishment needs to be gutted. Will Trump be able to do so before they gut and impeach him?
Government has become the enemy of "we the people" and Trump, who is trying to do something about it, has been labeled the enemy of government.
As government grew and Congress abdicated much of its authority to powerful and autocratic presidents the bureaucracy began to function as a separate part of government and now has reached a level of arrogance that must be curbed.
Government is no longer "the people's " friend. It has become their/our enemy. It is way past time to clip their wings or we will live to regret this omission.
Again, to make matters even more tragic, we no longer have a "free" press to act as "we the people's ombudsman/guardian." They have become part of the problem because they are on the side of covering for those who have corrupted government.
Chasing Stormy Daniels is more important than attacking the gathering storm in government!
Stay tuned.(See 1, 1a and 1b.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Trump’s Pruitt Test
The President needs to show some loyalty to his leading reformer.
By Editorial Board
Donald Trump demands loyalty up the chain of command, but loyalty down has been another matter. The latest test of loyalty down will be whether Mr. Trump stands behind Scott Pruitt as Washington’s green political machine tries to oust the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator for supposedly grave ethics offenses.
Mr. Pruitt’s real sin is that he is one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive reformers, taking on green idols that others would bow before. In a year he has rescinded the waters of the U.S. rule that sought to regulate every pond in America; proposed to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule that sought to put coal out of business; urged the President to withdraw from the Paris climate pact; made a priority of cleaning up genuine pollution problems like Superfund sites; and this week began revising the destructive Obama-era fuel-economy standards.
If there has been a more consequential cabinet official, we haven’t seen him.
All of this has made Mr. Pruitt a target of the ruling iron triangle of bureaucrats, interest groups and the press. They’re creating smoke about his spending and ethics to get him fired because he is a political liability, as if they care about Mr. Trump’s liabilities.
Mr. Pruitt’s mistake has been to underestimate the animus against him. He should have protected himself better against even minor claims of misbehavior. But when you examine the charges, minor is the right word.
Take the flap over Mr. Pruitt’s first-class air flights, as well as $120,000 for him and his security detail to visit Italy last summer for a G-7 meeting and $40,000 for a trip to Morocco. Apparently it’s a scandal now to tour the Vatican in spare hours on a business trip. The costs are due in part to security precautions after threats against Mr. Pruitt. Some $30,000 of that Italy bill went to security.
Yet his predecessors took similar trips and racked up even more expenses. According to the EPA, Lisa Jackson, the Administrator from 2009 to 2013, spent more than $332,000 on four international trips; one trip to China cost $155,000. Her successor, Gina McCarthy, went on 10 international sojourns, spending $630,000. One trip was to Italy, where Ms. McCarthy received—a tour of the Vatican.
Then there’s the non-scandal that from February to July last year Mr. Pruitt rented a small condo for $50 a night from casual friends. The place is co-owned by Vicki Hart, a health-care lobbyist with no business in front of the EPA, but her husband, J. Steven Hart, owns a lobbying firm that represents industries including energy.
Mr. Hart has no share in the condo, and he has stated that he had no lobbying contact with the EPA in 2017 or 2018. The EPA’s principal deputy general counsel Kevin Minoli released a memo explaining that EPA career ethics officials had reviewed the lease and found that Mr. Pruitt paid a “reasonable market value” ($1,500 a month). A second Minoli memo this week offered a more detailed analysis, which some in the press mischaracterized but which Mr. Minoli described as “reaffirming the original decision” that the lease did “not constitute a prohibited gift.”
None of this is close to disqualifying, and unless there’s some new bombshell the uproar amounts to using ethical traps to expel anyone who threatens the power of the administrative state. If you can’t beat someone on the policies, trip him up on a foot fault. The next EPA Administrator, or new Cabinet official, will get the message and stick to the status quo.
For all of his supposed disdain for the media, Mr. Trump sure cares what they think. This includes taking seriously the bad press a cabinet official receives, whether or not it’s deserved. He seems to believe the worst that’s written about his subordinates when he’d dismiss such a story if it were about him.
The large turnover in Mr. Trump’s cabinet and White House has been unusual, and the way many have been treated (Tom Price at Health and Human Services, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser) makes anyone with talent reluctant to serve. If Mr. Trump throws Mr. Pruitt over the side, good luck finding someone as brave to replace him.
1a) Judges Can Check the Administrative State
Courts are too deferential when unelected officials supplant Congress’s role and write the law.
President Trump has been nominating judges with an eye toward restraining the growth of the federal administrative agencies that have grown so numerous and powerful that they are commonly called the administrative state. Critics will call this “judicial activism,” but it’s really the opposite—a return to the judiciary’s proper constitutional role.
The Constitution sought to protect the liberties of the American people by separating the government’s powers: A legislative branch to make the laws; an executive, controlled by the president, to carry them out; and a judiciary to interpret their scope. The Constitution says less about the judicial branch than the others, but that belies its importance. In Federalist 78, Hamilton called the judiciary the “guardian of the Constitution” because its task was to police the boundaries between the elected branches.
The original design worked well for more than 150 years. But during the New Deal era, Congress began empowering many new administrative agencies to regulate or otherwise control major areas of the U.S. economy.
Although these bureaucracies are theoretically part of the executive branch, presidents cannot effectively control them. In the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, federal agencies issued more than 3,000 rules and regulations each year, so many that the White House could not possibly review them all for consistency with administration policy.
Congress also seems powerless to control their growth. Although administrative agencies act only with authority granted by statute, legislative language is often imprecise enough to allow agencies considerable discretion. Too often this is by design: Lawmakers take credit for “solving” a problem by passing a law, then blame the agencies for making the unpopular decisions Congress evaded.
In 1971, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a decision of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could be shown without an actual finding of intent to discriminate. It was enough that a job requirement could have a “disparate impact” on minorities. Although this decision went well beyond anything Congress had said in the language of the Civil Rights Act, Chief Justice Warren Burger justified it by declaring: “The administrative interpretation of the Act by the enforcing agency is entitled to great deference.”Since the New Deal, the judiciary has also shied away from asserting its role as the guardian of the Constitution’s separation of powers. Judges have allowed unelected administrative bodies, rather than Congress, to become de facto lawmakers.
Congress eventually codified the disparate-impact test for employment in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, reaffirming its diminished lawmaking power by rubber-stamping decisions made decades earlier by the executive and judicial branches. But Congress put no boundaries on the disparate-impact concept. Administrative agencies and judges have employed disparate-impact analysis in other areas of law without congressional authorization. In a 2015 case, the high court applied it to the Fair Housing Act even though it is absent from the statute. Justice Clarence Thomas observed in a dissent that the decision “presents the triumph of an agency’s preferences over Congress’ enactment.”
The key decision that marks this trend is Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council(1984), when the Supreme Court instructed lower courts to defer to administrative interpretations of the law if the statute is ambiguous and the agency’s interpretation is “reasonable.” This significantly increased agencies’ discretion to expand their powers.
Nevertheless, the judiciary has the authority to control the administrative state, and the Trump administration is seeking this control in a way the framers would have approved—by choosing judges who agree with Chief Justice John Marshall’s observation, in Marbury v. Madison, that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” That means the courts can review and determine in each case whether a particular administrative rule was based on specific authority from Congress or—like disparate impact in 1971—sprang from an agency’s preferences.
This does not mean that the courts will make judgments about the policies an agency is pursuing—that would be judicial activism—but only about whether Congress had actually authorized the agency to issue a particular rule, a matter of statutory interpretation and upholding the power of Congress.
The stakes are high. Administrative agencies have enormous power over Americans’ lives. Leaving that power in the hands of unelected officials is likely to become increasingly unacceptable to the American people, diminishing the government’s legitimacy. In a democratic society, laws lack moral authority if lawmakers are not accountable to the people.
That principle is the basis on which Americans rebelled against Britain in 1776—and on which Brexit supporters rebelled against the European Union in 2016, when most of the rules they were required to obey were made by a bureaucracy in Brussels rather than their own Parliament.
The Trump administration’s efforts to return the U.S. government to the structure designed by the Framers—with the courts determining “what the law is”—could end up saving the American experiment.
Mr. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His next book, on reining in the administrative state, will be published by Encounter this year.
1b) What Is the FBI Hiding?
The bureau still won’t comply with an eight-month-old subpoena from Congress.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Bit by bit, congressional investigators have wrested important truths from a recalcitrant Federal Bureau of Investigation about its suspect 2016 election dealings. But there’s one secret the G-men jealously guard: how central that Steele dossier was from the start.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Wednesday sent another letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand yet again that they comply with an August 2017 subpoena and hand over, among other things, the electronic communication—“EC” in investigative jargon—that officially kicked off the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
That EC has taken on a central importance thanks to the FBI’s own leaks. The bureau exploded it on the country at the end of last year after the news broke that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National had paid for the infamous dossier. The public still doesn’t know how much the FBI used it. Critics started asking: Was it part of the application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page ? Could it even have launched the investigation?
Thus the FBI’s scramble to minimize the dossier. And sure enough, the New York Times in December ran what became the “origin” story, titled “How the Russia Inquiry Began.” The story asserted definitively that the cause of the investigation “was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign.” It was rather information from an Australian diplomat claiming to have heard a drunk Trump junior aide, George Papadopoulos, talking about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Yet despite that claim being out there, the FBI and Justice Department have refused to verify it. The Nunes letter says the FBI has provided only a “heavily redacted” version of the EC and indicated on March 23 that it would “refuse to further unredact” the document.
The only plausible reason the FBI might have for denying House Intelligence access to an unredacted EC is that it contains intelligence from foreign sources. Intelligence-sharing agreements between allies sometimes include restrictions on dissemination. But it was precisely that intelligence that was already leaked to the press. We know the Papadopoulos story came via Australia, and we know what was said.
The media only recently reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fed up with the FBI’s spurning Congress and ordered it to be more cooperative. Yet here it is again inviting a contempt citation, and that says something about how badly the FBI wants this EC kept out of sight.
So what’s in it that matters so much? One possibility is that the EC also contains a reference to the dossier. A better theory is that the EC gets to the heart of the legitimacy—or illegitimacy—of the Papadopoulos investigation. The FBI would have needed solid intelligence to justify a full-blown counterintelligence probe—especially of a presidential candidate. Yet the Papadopoulos intelligence was thin gruel—a random comment by a drunk guy making a vague claim. So by what precise means, and via whom, did the details make their way to the FBI? Did it come from actual intelligence sources? Were Obama or Clinton friends or political operatives involved? Did the FBI play a role in plumping up the evidence to transform a political product into official intel?
These are all important questions, as they go to a piece of the FBI’s action. They also divert from the bigger story, in which it is important to keep the EC in perspective. The FBI always needs something on which to hang an investigation. As that Times story put it, it was the combination of “many strands coming in” that spurred the FBI to act, though the bureau chose to put Mr. Papadopoulos on the official paper. What matters more is what direction the investigation ultimately went—which thread the FBI chose to pull. Because while Mr. Papadopoulos might have served as a justification, it is clear he didn’t prove a subsequent preoccupation. After all, the agency didn’t bother to get a surveillance warrant on him. It didn’t even bother to interview him until late January 2017.
What it did was tug at that other strand—the dossier—which even the Times story acknowledges was in the mix by the summer of 2016. The FBI nurtured its relationship with Mr. Steele, dispatched agents to meet him, and debriefed him. The allegations in the dossier against Carter Page served as the basis for the significant task of obtaining a FISA court eavesdropping warrant and three subsequent renewals. The FBI’s every action in recent months has appeared designed to fuzz up that reality—from planting the “origin” story to denying Congress any access to the eavesdropping documents for months to continuing to limit severely the number of people who can look at them.
Here’s what has become very clear: The FBI relied significantly on a Clinton opposition-research document in pursuing its Trump investigation. No amount of diversionary talk over other evidence can now change that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment