DEMOCRATS ITCH ALOT THESE DAYS!

Democrats itch for fight with GOP on expelling lawmakers from committees

BY MIKE LILLIS – at The Hill: 01/24/23 6:00 AM ET

House Democrats are itching for a fight with the new GOP majority over who should qualify for committee assignments, tapping Reps. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (Calif.) to sit on the Intelligence Committee in the face of Republican vows to keep them off of the powerful panel.

A similar collision is likely to play out in a separate arena over Rep. Ilhan Omar, the third-term Minnesota lawmaker who is expected to be named by Democrats this week to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, despite GOP promises to boot her from the panel.

The Democrats’ moves — and the imminent clashes they’re certain to spark — indicate party leaders are confident the public battle over what constitutes disqualifying behavior will play to their political advantage, particularly after Republicans granted a pair of committee seats to Rep. George Santos, the embattled New York freshman who is under fire over lies about his background and questions about his finances.

In nominating Schiff and Swalwell to the Intelligence Committee, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) made sure to name-check Santos, emphasizing his new committee posts and hammering GOP leaders for elevating a “serial fraudster” to the panels.  

“The apparent double standard risks undermining the spirit of bipartisan cooperation that is so desperately needed in Congress,” Jeffries wrote in a Jan. 21 letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

The debate arrives as the controversy surrounding Santos has shifted from one focused on resume fabrications to more serious questions about his campaign finances — allegations that have led some Republicans to call for Santos to resign from Congress altogether. Dismissing those concerns, party leaders last week nominated Santos for two committee assignments, on the House Small Business panel and the Science, Space and Technology Committee.

McCarthy himself has defended Santos, saying he was fairly elected by Long Island voters who now deserve his representation in Washington. He’s deferring questions of potential misconduct to the House Ethics Committee. 

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, unlike most other panels, has special rules empowering the Speaker to assign every member. The selections are to be made in consultation with the minority leader, but the final roster requires the endorsement of the Speaker alone, granting McCarthy the unilateral authority to block Jeffries’s recommendations.

Traditionally, that biennial process has been a routine rubber stamp, and the minority party’s picks have been seated without controversy. 

But those dynamics have shifted since 2021, when Democrats staged successful votes to strip two Republicans — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) — of their committee assignments. 

That feud was exacerbated when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vetoed two of then-Minority Leader McCarthy’s picks for the select panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — a move that prompted McCarthy to boycott the probe altogether.

Since then, McCarthy has vowed to keep Schiff and Swalwell from returning to the Intelligence panel — a pledge he amplified on Capitol Hill this month, when he accused the pair of politicizing the committee. 

“I’m doing exactly what we’re supposed to do,” McCarthy said.

The accusations Republicans are leveling against Schiff and Swalwell are unique to each lawmaker. 

Schiff, as former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, had led the investigations into former President Trump’s ties to Russia, and he was the lead manager in Trump’s first impeachment, which centered around charges that Trump had leveraged U.S. military aid to pressure Ukrainian leaders to investigate his political rivals. Republicans have accused Schiff of lying to the public during the course of those probes. 

In Swalwell’s case, Republicans are pointing to his association with a suspected Chinese spy who had helped fundraise for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign — an episode first revealed publicly in 2020. After the FBI informed Swalwell of their concern, he cut ties with the Chinese national, who fled to Beijing. But that’s done nothing to temper the attacks from Republicans accusing Swalwell of being a national security risk.  

“If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee,” McCarthy told reporters this month.

Fact-checkers have repeatedly found the GOP accusations to be false. And Democrats maintain that McCarthy’s threats are just another of the many concessions he had to make to the conservative detractors who fought to deny him the gavel earlier in the month. 

“This is Kevin McCarthy once again catering to the most right-wing elements of his conference and doing the will of the former president as well,” Schiff said Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “It’s just a further destruction of our norms and, I think, deterioration of our democracy.”

Jeffries, in his letter to McCarthy, sought to distinguish between each party’s standards when it comes to committee evictions, noting that both Greene and Gosar were removed by a vote of the full House after revelations that they had promoted violence against Democrats. Both votes, Jeffries emphasized, had some Republican support.  

“This action was taken by both Democrats and Republicans given the seriousness of the conduct involved, particularly in the aftermath of a violent insurrection and attack on the Capitol,” Jeffries wrote. “It does not serve as precedent or justification for the removal of Representatives Schiff and Swalwell, given that they have never exhibited violent thoughts or behavior.”

In nominating the California Democrats, Jeffries went out of his way to force McCarthy’s hand. 

Under Intelligence Committee rules, rank-and-file members are limited to four cycles — a cap Swalwell has hit — meaning that Jeffries could have simply replaced Swalwell with a less controversial Democrat. Instead, he waived the term limit in order to force McCarthy to take the aggressive step of intervening to block Swalwell from the panel. Schiff, as ranking member, is exempt from the cap. 

It’s unclear when McCarthy will announce the expected decision to block the pair. The Speaker was in Florida on Monday for an annual gathering of GOP leaders. A spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. 

Separately, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee is scheduled to meet this week to finalize the party’s committee rosters, including the expected move to put Omar, one of three Muslim lawmakers in Congress, on the Foreign Affairs panel, according to several sources familiar with the Democrats’ plans. 

The Minnesota Democrat, a Somali refugee, has been highly critical of the Israeli government and its supporters, particularly on issues related to human rights in Palestine, leading to charges of antisemitism. In one 2019 episode, Omar was forced to apologize after suggesting wealthy Jews are buying congressional support for Israel.

Unlike the Intelligence panel, the members of the Foreign Affairs Committee are chosen by each party and ratified by the full House, meaning McCarthy cannot unilaterally block Omar from taking her seat. Instead, GOP leaders are expected to remove her from the panel on the House floor, as was the case with Greene and Gosar.

TAGS ADAM SCHIFF GEORGE SANTOS HAKEEM JEFFRIES ILHAN OMAR KEVIN MCCARTHY

“Alabama ought to be one of the states where the legislature could put a stop to this ideological assault quite easily.”

 JANUARY 24, 2023 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

THE WOKE PURGE IN THE SCIENCES

Matthew M. Wielicki, professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama, has announced in a Twitter thread that he has decided to leave the university, and some of his reasons are becoming depressingly frequent in the sciences:

Why I am leaving the University of Alabama:

Some internet sleuths have discovered that I will be leaving my faculty position in the Department of Geological Sciences after this semester so I thought I should tell you why. As with most large decisions, the reasons are mainly personal. COVID made me realize that we were really far from our families in CA and the travel on our elderly parents was taking a toll. The result was that our children were not seeing their grandparents very often. As a Polish immigrant I know what it’s like to live far from family and I started to resent myself for choosing my career over my family’s time together.

Furthermore, over the last decade or so, but especially the last few years, the obsession with universities and grant-funding institutions on immutable characteristics of faculty and students and the push for equity in science above all else has dramatically changed the profession of an academic professor.

The rise of illiberalism in the name of DEI is the antithesis of the principles that universities were founded on. These are no longer places that embrace the freedom of exchanging ideas and will punish those that go against the narrative. Although I had worked from an early age to earn a Ph.D. and become a professor, like my father, I feel the profession is no longer worthy of my efforts.

Contributing to this is the earth science communities silence on the false “climate emergency” narrative. Members of the community routinely discuss the mental health effects of climate catastrophism but dare not speak out lest they lose their positions and research funds. (Emphasis added.)

Alabama ought to be one of the states where the legislature could put a stop to this ideological assault quite easily.

“Bauer, of course, has a history of blocking the release of certain documents and then strategically releasing them.”

January 23, 2023

Biden Lawyer Has History of Finding and Releasing Elusive Documents

By Jack Cashill at American Thinker:

In his own discreet way, President Joe Biden’s “personal” attorney Bob Bauer is back in the news again. On Saturday, Bauer released a statement about a new discovery of documents chez Biden.

According to Bauer, the Justice Department “took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President.”

This same CBS News report notes that this new find comes after 10 or so classified documents “were discovered by Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2.” Others were found at his home on December 20.

Bauer goes unmentioned in those earlier finds, but he almost surely had to be one of those “personal lawyers.” Six days before the midterms, these attorneys made the strategic decision not to go public with their find. In Bauer’s case, I suspect the decision to go public after the election was strategic as well—but not necessarily on Biden’s behalf.

Bauer, of course, has a history of blocking the release of certain documents and then strategically releasing them. In the way of background, on August 21, 2008, a week prior to the Democratic National Convention, Democrat attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.

A former deputy attorney general for the State of Pennsylvania and a credible pro-choice gubernatorial candidate in a Democrat primary against sitting governor Robert Casey, Berg expected to be taken seriously. He wasn’t. The media expressed zero interest in his suit.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee took a good deal of interest. Defending Obama’s interest was Bauer, then a top gun from the Deep State’s go-to law firm, Perkins Coie. Bauer served as general counsel to the DNC and as personal lawyer to Obama during the 2008 campaign. In that capacity Bauer led the legal fight against Berg.

On November 12, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the suit. The day after the suit was dismissed, the New York Times reported that White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, was stepping down from his job. An anonymous source told the Times that Bauer would be taking over, and the source knew whereof he spoke.

Bob Bauer in the Oval Office 20101 as White House Counsel

Extracted from a photo by White House official photographer Pete Souza (public domain)

With the media averting their collective gaze, a federal judge felt free to dismiss Berg’s narrowly tailored suit without a hearing. “I was deprived of my due process rights to be heard,” Berg would write. “Judge Surrick made some outlandish comments claiming Obama had been properly vetted, and that was completely untrue.” Berg’s claim here is accurate. The media’s failure to investigate Obama’s background is a scandal in its own right.

After blocking the release of his birth certificate for more than two years, Obama decided in April 2011 to produce the certificate or at least something like it. Donald Trump was giving him fits.

“Finally I decided I’d had enough,” Obama writes of Trump’s challenge in his memoir, A Promised Land. “I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office.” Bauer dispatched Obama’s personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, to secure two copies.

Overriding staff objections, Obama went live on national TV in late April 2011 to address the birth certificate issue. The timing was strategic. Planning was well underway for the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout.

Still failing to appreciate how gingerly the media treated him, Obama writes, “I began by remarking on the fact that the national TV networks had all decided to break from their regularly scheduled programming to carry my remarks live—something they very rarely did.”

Yes, very rarely. Arguably, the last comparable breakaway for a personal matter took place on July 25, 1969, when the networks gave Ted Kennedy fifteen minutes to assure America there was “no truth whatsoever” to any rumors of immoral conduct between him and the late Mary Jo Kopechne.

After explaining the problems America faced, Obama scolded the “carnival barkers” for distracting its citizens. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” he said angrily. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them—not on this.”

Less than a week after the announcement, Osama bin Laden was killed, and the birther controversy was buried along with him. A month later, Bauer returned to private practice so he could once again represent the Obama campaign and the DNC. Said Obama of Bauer at the time, “He has exceptional judgment, wisdom, and intellect, and he will continue to be one of my close advisers.”

Bauer would offer that advice from the plush offices of the firm to which he returned, Perkins Coie. In April 2016, when the DNC learned that its computers had been hacked, its staff alerted Perkins Coie, and the firm, in turn, recommended a private cyber security outfit called CrowdStrike to clean up the mess. No need to bring in the FBI. (As shall be seen, it was CrowdStrike that took control of Seth Rich’s laptop. More to come,)

That same memorable year, 2016, it was Perkins Coie that retained Fusion GPS to create the infamous Steele dossier. Would a firm capable of commissioning the Steele dossier have trouble dummying up a birth certificate?

Would an attorney whom Obama called “one of my close advisers” be one Biden would want to trust? As Joel Gilbert has warned in his prescient book and documentary, Michelle Obama 2024, the Obamas may have other plans for the White House than Biden’s continued occupancy.

Are Fems Preaching Communism IN OUR TODAY’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

Are Americans Still Capable of Self-Government?

Not if we allow the news media to abandon its proper role in a republic.

by DAVID CATRON at AMERICAN SPECTATOR

January 22, 2023, 10:43 PM

Joe Biden last Thursday not addressing his classified-documents problem (City News/YouTube)

In a 1789 letter to the British philosopher Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson observed that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” By that standard, it’s no longer clear that the American electorate is equipped for the task. Jefferson was, of course, an ardent advocate of a free press whose primary function would be to provide the voters with enough information about the government’s actions to assess the soundness of its policies. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that he would dignify today’s corporate media with the appellation “free press.”

Jefferson’s definition of the term would not, for example, apply to “news” organizations that collude with government officials to suppress debate on important national issues such as the COVID-19 lockdowns. Nor would it include the major broadcast networks that collectively refuse to report a major government-censorship scandal like the Twitter Files. This kind of story is why First Amendment protections for the press exist. They allow honest journalists to report government skulduggery without fear of retaliation. Yet the Media Research Center reports that the Big Three broadcast networks devoted 128 seconds to the story.

Last month when Tesla founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk began tweeting out former Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi’s explosive reporting on how Twitter (under pressure from government agents) suppressed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.… Not a single journalist on ABC or NBC … touched the story. MRC analysts reviewed ABC, CBS, NBC morning, evening and Sunday roundtable shows from December 2 (when the Twitter files story broke) through the morning of January 18 and found only CBS (barely) covered the Twitter files story.

The dereliction of duty by these networks deprives millions of voters of information they need in order to assess the character of the man who lives in the White House and the powerful security state over which he presides. The broadcast networks are hardly unique in their failure to keep the public informed. Their print counterparts have been equally negligent. Anyone who relies on the New York Times as their primary news source, for example, will know very little of the Twitter Files. Indeed, Elon Musk called out the Times for ignoring the story, referring to the Gray Lady as an “unregistered lobbying firm for far-left politicians.”

Not coincidentally, Musk’s remark is reminiscent of Jefferson’s description of the press once it has been co-opted by a despotic regime. In a 1785 letter to Dutch statesman G. K. van Hogendorp, Jefferson wrote, “You know well that [the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the minister.” It’s difficult to think of a better description of today’s “mainstream” media. Nowhere is this clearer than in the coverage of President Joe Biden’s irresponsible handling of classified documents.

The corporate media has, for all intents and purposes, adopted the White House’s talking points. They insist that it is somehow disingenuous to compare Biden’s handling of classified material to that of former President Donald Trump. The latter, they claim, was resisting attempts by the National Archives to retrieve certain documents, and his intransigence eventually forced the FBI to acquire a search warrant and conduct a dawn raid at his Mar-a-Lago home. Biden, they tell us, is cooperating with the Justice Department and National Archives. Cato Institute’s Patrick G.  Eddington, however, raises a few issues in which the corporate media have no interest:

Why were the materials at a Biden think tank and at his Delaware home long after he left office as Barack Obama’s vice president? Who took the documents there — Biden himself, Biden aides, both? How long were the documents in the two locations? Who else had access? Are we talking only about paper copies, or is digital media involved? Is there reason to believe that any material at either location is missing or was copied and removed from either location? These are just some of the many questions needing answers.

The faithful guardians of “our democracy” in the Fourth Estate are obviously more interested in protecting our president than in fulfilling their primary function of keeping the public informed. Consequently, as with their failure to cover the Twitter Files, they are deliberately depriving millions of voters of information that would help them decide whether Biden deserves the second term he will almost certainly seek in 2024. On the other hand, the corporate media will ensure that the voters get all manner of salacious information about his probable opponent in that election — whether or not it has any basis in reality.

None of this is meant to suggest that there was once a golden era in which the press always lived up to Jefferson’s ideal. Indeed, the Sage of Monticello occasionally made use of some pretty unsavory “journalists.” But the immense power wielded by today’s corporate media is unprecedented. On the other hand, their power isn’t absolute. Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 partly because he used social media to circumvent the media and communicate directly to the voters. And, in February, the Supreme Court will hear a case that may end up weakening the unholy alliance between Big Tech and the corporate media.

Moreover, there are still news and opinion outlets — including the one you are now reading — where voters can get the truth about the machinations of our government and its officials. And demand is growing for alternatives like Fox News, which in August became the first cable news network to attract more viewers than one of the Big Three broadcast networks (ABC) during prime time. But self-government is not a passive undertaking. It’s our duty as citizens to keep ourselves informed enough to know the difference between propaganda and news. That can’t be done by sitting on our couches and kvetching at the television screen.