The Bipartisan Consensus on China Isn’t Enough

By Jimmy Quinn

Monday, July 05, 2021

 

As the Biden administration made clear that it would adopt many aspects of the Trump administration’s approach to China, it seemed as though a new bipartisan consensus had emerged on countering Beijing.

 

And to a large extent, one has. Both parties have begun emphasizing the need to push back on the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to exercise more influence in the world. The Senate has passed a massive bipartisan legislative package that would reform and grant funding to U.S. technological research and development to that end. The Senate bill, despite its many faults and omissions, has the backing of Democrats and Republicans working in concert to meet the geopolitical challenge of the moment.

 

But unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the House’s companion legislation. The House Foreign Affairs Committee last week held markup sessions on the EAGLE Act, a China bill conceived by the panel’s Democrats to mirror the parts of the Senate package that don’t involve technology. (The House already passed legislation mirroring the Senate bill’s provisions on scientific research funding last month.)

 

For all the bipartisan agreement on certain fundamental aspects of China policy — particularly Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang — there remain significant schisms between the two parties about how to address the challenge. “Unfortunately, Democrats passed up the opportunity to work on a meaningful, bipartisan legislation to counter the threats of the Chinese Communist Party and instead made it another green energy bill,” said Representative Michael McCaul, the panel’s top Republican.

 

In addition to their complaints that the EAGLE Act puts money into an unaccountable U.N. climate fund, McCaul and his colleagues charge that Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Gregory Meeks and other Democrats are rushing through the bill despite its failure to address the CCP’s egregious behavior on the international stage. In response, these Republican critics have proposed a dizzying number of amendments — the committee’s website lists 98 — to toughen the House legislation, which is essentially guaranteed to pass out of the Democratic-controlled committee. But their proposals, for the most part, will not make it into the final bill.

 

Starting last Wednesday, a series of committee meetings yielded hours of quick, sometimes acrimonious debate on the dozens of amendments that Republican members put forward. The conversation did not always remain cordial. On Thursday afternoon, debate on a measure to penalize the NBA for kowtowing to the CCP’s position on Hong Kong and other human-rights issues sparked a clash over procedure, offering some telling insight into where the China debate currently stands in Congress.

 

“We’re getting a lot of proposals that are you know — that are hortatory, that are not effective, that are gonna keep us here for hours and hours and days and days at a time, but that are actually not well thought through as legislation,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who has led the way on a number of measures to address Beijing’s behavior. He pointed out that a separate bill under consideration would already have the effects Republicans seek. Given that there were nearly 100 amendments put up by the committee’s members, Malinowski’s criticism was likely fair in some cases.

 

But Republicans Andy Barr and Mark Green offered a riposte: If Democrats are serious about bipartisan action on these issues, why did party leadership decline to appoint anyone to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s China Task Force and a panel investigating the coronavirus’s origins? (Both efforts are now steered exclusively by Republican members and don’t have the same powers that they would have if they’d been blessed by House leadership.)

 

“If you really don’t like a bill, that might mean that there might be a lot of amendments to try to make it a better bill to fit your side. To suggest that there’s some kind of tactic here — you got a 600-page bill, and you don’t like a lot about it, that might mean there’s a lot of amendments, and you might want to record a vote on it,” said Green, about Republican demands for roll-call votes that extended the duration of debate.

 

Later, a Republican aide put it more bluntly to National Review: “The markup wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t dropped such a terrible bill.”

 

And Republicans tried to make it better. They really did.

 

The EAGLE Act currently fails to do much about malign Chinese influence networks operating in Western democracies. One amendment, proposed by Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), would have created new sanctions to target the Party’s shadowy “United Front” network, which seeks to coopt the Chinese diaspora abroad, foreign elites, and minorities and business leaders within China to do Beijing’s bidding. A blockbuster report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute explained the impact of the network on the world’s democracies last year: “This undermines social cohesion, exacerbates racial tension, influences politics, harms media integrity, facilitates espionage, and increases unsupervised technology transfer.” The United Front has been so effective that Xi Jinping has used Mao Zedong’s formulation in referring to it as a “magic weapon.”

 

Like many of the other measures rejected last week, Wilson’s amendment to the bill is a no-brainer, but Democrats opposed it. “The malign descriptor is undefined, and the broad generalities contained in this amendment leaves [sic] such sanctions open to significant politicization and ambiguity,” Meeks said. But the sanctions would have been required to meet a restrictive five-pronged test, making it all but impossible to wield them against anyone but participants in United Front efforts.

 

That Democrats would oppose such an innocuous and important amendment suggests that they’re not interested in strong efforts to counter some of the essential parts of the Party’s strategy. It’s certainly encouraging that, say, calling out China’s Uyghur genocide has broad bipartisan support, but the consensus, at least in the House, is pretty limited beyond that, backing Taiwan, and some other core issues.

 

That was illustrated when Democratic members spoke out against a number of Republican amendments that would prohibit new EAGLE Act funding for the U.N. Green Climate Fund from being sent to China, where forced labor plays a significant role in solar-panel supply chains. They also opposed amendments that, among other things, would pull federal assistance from the production of films that honor Chinese requests for political censorship, crack down on U.S. exports of sensitive technology, and require the executive branch to put together a report identifying Chinese nationals involved in fentanyl trafficking.

 

It’s true that some of the Republican proposals, such as a Wilson-authored amendment concerning China’s ties with Iran, won adoption. But the debate over the EAGLE Act suggests that while Democrats in Congress are happy to talk tough on China, too few of them are up to the task of crafting concrete measures to confront the threats Beijing poses to the global order.

A Day to Celebrate the American Promise

National Review Online

Sunday, July 04, 2021

 

July 4, 1776, is the birthdate of the United States of America. Now, more than ever, it should be celebrated for that, but also as something more: the greatest single day for human liberty in the history of the world.

 

The birthdate of the United States, long settled, is contested today by radicals: Should we celebrate it, or mourn it? Should we instead center the founding of our nation in its worst moments, not its best? Of course, America was conceived, was born, and matured in stages. The history of the American people dated to Jamestown in 1607, and our self-government to the first Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619 and the Mayflower Compact in 1620. Our separation from Britain began at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and was not completed until November 25, 1783, when the British evacuated occupied Manhattan. The full promise of America was longer in the achieving, and is never an entirely completed project.

 

But consider that phrase: “the promise of America.” No other nation, before July 4, 1776, was founded on a promise. No other polity could be called to fulfill its founding ideals, because no other polity had any. States had rationalizations, and in some cases guiding faiths, but they did not have statements of principles.

 

In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and his collaborators John Adams and Benjamin Franklin made a dramatic choice: not only to provide the Continental Congress with an announcement of a new nation’s birth — a statement still enshrined in American law as the nation’s beginning — but also to offer a justification for that founding. Then, they went further: They grounded that justification in the universal and equal rights of man. The second paragraph of the Declaration, in words mostly Jefferson’s but bearing the signature of all 13 states assembled in the Continental Congress, announced to the world:

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

 

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

“All” men. “Any” form of government. These are universal truths, and calling them “self-evident” was a bold challenge to a world in which they were rarely honored. In the world of 1776, few people chose any of their own government, or had enforceable liberties against a limited government. In the words of Seymour Drescher (one of the leading historians of global slavery and abolition), “personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.”

 

The Declaration, by marrying eloquent words to political deeds, created a language in which people of every nation, rank, and color could champion liberty and challenge tyranny and bondage. And so they did, here and abroad, almost from the first moment they heard the words. By the end of the 18th century, the Declaration had inspired reformers and revolutionaries in France, the Netherlands, and Haiti. Vermont in 1777 became the first place on earth to ban slavery in its constitution; Pennsylvania in 1780 became the first to ban it by legislation. From the outset, the new United States was unlike any nation that had ever existed. From the very beginning, the citizens of the new nation set about the business of fulfilling the Declaration’s promise, in myriad ways that are still contested today. Their descendants would expend much blood and treasure securing liberty at home and promoting it abroad.

 

The Founding Fathers were not utopians. The Declaration added, immediately after its most stirring passage, a statement of conservative caution that underlined the gravity of the Continental Congress’s decision: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” The men who signed the Declaration were committing treason, and they knew they could be hanged for it. George Washington had it read aloud to his troops, who knew the same thing. They did so for no light or transient causes, but for the greatest and most enduring purposes. They made the greatest nation the world has ever known, and made possible much of the progress in others as well. They deserve the fireworks of our Independence Day.

The Greatest Revolution the World Has Ever Known

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, July 03, 2021

 

It’s been a hard time for the American Revolution.

 

It’s been smeared by the New York Times’s 1619 project as a fight to preserve slavery. Juneteenth, a worthy event in its own right, is considered by some as a candidate to replace July 4, marking a supposedly more palatable and less flawed Independence Day. Statues of leaders of the Revolution have been vandalized and torn down.

 

This is wrongheaded, ungrateful, and destructive. Ours is the greatest revolution the world has ever known. It succeeded where so many others have failed, delivered a severe blow to monarchy and aristocracy, inspired republican movements around the world, and won the independence of a country whose power and ideals have influenced the course of history for the better.

 

We shouldn’t underestimate the violence and, at times, the brutality of a multidimensional, yearslong struggle that killed more Americans per capita than any conflict besides the Civil War.

 

But there was nothing like the Vendée, the bloodbath when royalist resistance to the French Revolution in a western region of the country was put down in a spasm of all-consuming savagery in 1793, let alone the terrors that characterized 20th-century communist revolutions.

 

The Revolution’s military leader, George Washington, had no ambitions to rule on his own and tamped down a potential military coup by restive soldiers at Newburgh in 1783.

 

The Revolution didn’t devour its own. Its leaders died in their beds. At the end of long lives, sworn political enemies John Adams and Thomas Jefferson struck up a respectful correspondence, and both died on July 4, 1826, still honored 50 years after the Revolution.

 

When the country’s politics factionalized after the war, no one was guillotined or exiled for his beliefs. Instead, the profound disagreements between the two sides played out in battles in the newspapers and at the ballot box.

 

The Revolution didn’t seek to wipe all that had come before. There was no Year Zero. The idealism of the Revolution (Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”) was leavened with a realism about human nature (James Madison: “There is a degree of depravity in mankind”).

 

It established a republican system that endured. Where other revolutions have given way to serial changes of regime, whether in Mexico or France, the Revolution led to the adoption of a constitution of remarkable staying power.

 

This was an achievement of world-historical importance. In his book The Expanding Blaze, Jonathan Israel writes, “The Revolution commenced the demolition of the early modern hierarchical world of kings, aristocracy, serfdom, slavery, and mercantilist colonial empires, initiating its slow, complex refashioning into the basic format of modernity.”

 

Were the Revolution’s ideals of republicanism and equal rights incompletely realized, and the men who espoused them often blinkered and hypocritical? Yes, of course. But the Revolution coincided with a searching debate about the status of slavery that opened up new vistas. As historian Peter Kolchin writes, the aftermath of the Revolution saw “the abolition of slavery in the North, a sharp increase in the number of free blacks in the upper South, and the ending of the African slave trade.”

 

This, too, is an important legacy of the Revolution, although one passed over by critics for whom our failings blot out all else.

 

Frederick Douglass thunderously condemned the United States for celebrating its liberty while tolerating — or affirmatively defending — the barbaric practice of chattel slavery in his famous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Still, he appreciated the greatness of the founding generation and its members’ handiwork.

 

“It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men,” he said. “Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!”

Is It Possible to Reorient the Presidency?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 04, 2021

 

The American presidency is a deeply weird job: The president’s legitimate constitutional powers and his fundamental responsibilities have overwhelmingly to do with foreign affairs and national security, but almost all the political juice is in domestic events shaped mainly by Congress and other forces beyond his control, such as economic cycles. Presidential politics are governed by a perverse Pareto Principle: 80 percent of a president’s career depends on concerns that should take up, at most, about 20 percent of his resources, including his mental resources and his time.

 

As Daniel L. Byman and Jeremy Shapiro put it in Foreign Policy, “Promoting economic growth has been the top priority of every White House since the invention of macroeconomic statistics.” But contra the confidence of presidential advisers such as my friend Larry Kudlow, there is relatively little presidents can do that directly affects economic growth, employment, wages, and such in the near term. The economy certainly responds to changes in both taxing and spending, but the president himself cannot effect such changes: He can only advocate them and hope Congress will act.

 

Congress, thankfully, often declines to do so.

 

Yet we still talk about the “Reagan deficits” and the “Clinton surplus” instead of the Tip O’Neill deficits and the Newt Gingrich surplus, which would be more accurate. Some sober-minded Chamber of Commerce–type conservatives privately confess that their preferred configuration of power in Washington is one that pits a weak Democratic president against a Republican Congress that hates him. In the other four major configurations — Democratic president and Democratic Congress, Republican president and Republican Congress, Republican president and Democratic Congress, divided Congress — the political energies supporting government expansion overpower the modest forces of restraint, which are weak in the best of times. Americans say they dread gridlock, but they vote for it.

 

Even the economic levers that are within the president’s reach typically produce results that are unintended, unpredictable, and comprehensible only in retrospect. When the Reagan administration oversaw reforms to FCC regulations touching low-power radio transmitters, no one foresaw how central Wi-fi and Wi-fi-enabled devices would come to be 20 years down the road. The federal initiatives that contributed to the millennial housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis had their roots in the 1930s. All those $10,000 toilet seats you hear about the Pentagon’s buying are the unintended result of federal procurement procedures, many of them intended to prevent waste and inefficiency.

 

Unintended results rule the day economically. If there were some policy formula by which we could achieve strong, predictable growth with rising wages and stable prices, then you can be sure that implementing such a formula would be at the top of every president’s agenda: No president would choose a recession, a financial crisis, or a stock-market crash. But a thriving economy isn’t something you can put together like a jigsaw puzzle. It is more like a delicate flower you try to cultivate.

 

By way of contrast, the president has a great deal of real, direct constitutional power when it comes to foreign policy. His power is not fully plenipotentiary — treaties have to be ratified, trade accords require legislation to implement them, Congress may authorize or decline to authorize military force or entangle him in purse-strings, etc. — but it is both expansive and invested in him personally. And though this is not always obvious, it has applications other than war-making. You would think that would be attractive. But the realities of democratic politics draw the president’s attention in other directions.

 

Might the presidency be drawn back? It would be difficult, but the payoff would be great. Rather than the national-chieftain model of the presidency we have today, we could have one that is focused on administrative competence and faithful execution of the law at home and securing U.S. interests abroad, which would be a great improvement — sparing us a god-emperor and, with any luck, giving us a better-functioning administration.

 

Unhappily, there remains that mismatch between the politics of the job and the duties of the job. During my lifetime, the only two presidents to have come into office with considerable appetite and vision for foreign affairs were the Californians — Richard Nixon, who sought a rebalancing of power in the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan, who was determined to win it. (And did, which ought to matter more than it seems to.) George H. W. Bush hoped to quietly enjoy a peace dividend and cultivate his “thousand points of light,” but Saddam Hussein had other plans; the second President Bush wanted to be an education reformer but found himself instead at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and then with Saddam Hussein again. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both sniffed at Republican military adventures abroad and insisted on “nation-building at home,” and both would have preferred to have presidencies occupied by repairing potholes in Poughkeepsie and handing out free false teeth. Donald Trump had a vague conviction that the United States was being drained to no purpose by its overseas commitments and ran to the pacifist side of that infamous warmonger Hillary Rodham Clinton but lacked any real positive program. Joe Biden’s agenda, so far, is pretending to undo what Trump did, and so he broadcasts conventional diplomatic noises across the Atlantic while maintaining Trump’s trade protectionism and executing Trump’s military retreat.

 

One of the things that will make it difficult to reorient the presidency toward foreign affairs is that our presidential politics naturally selects figures with primarily domestic portfolios: senators, governors, the occasional big-city mayor. The Republican foreign-policy bench has been pretty deep at times, but its leading figures either were uninterested in pursuing the presidency or politically unable to do so. We would have been better off with a President Condoleezza Rice or a President Colin Powell than we were with President Donald Trump. James Baker might have made a good president if circumstances had permitted it. On the Democratic side, Madeleine Albright, who actually did the job of secretary of state, probably would have been a better president than would have Hillary Rodham Clinton, who pretended to do that job. (The great tragedy of the 2016 contest between Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump was that it was an election for president rather than an election for mayor of New York City, a job that either of them probably would have performed ably.) The Democrats made two failed presidential contenders secretary of state back-to-back: Hillary Rodham Clinton after her failure in the 2008 primary, and then John Kerry a decade after his failure in the 2004 general. That was a good political calculation in the case of Mrs. Clinton, who was certain to run again. But, in general, it would be better to serve as secretary of state or defense, or in a similar role, before running for president, rather than assuming the role as a consolation prize after crashing and burning.

 

But it is unlikely that the Republicans with an eye on the White House will turn to someone with a real foreign-policy résumé in the near future. (It is difficult to imagine President Mike Pompeo, though stranger things have happened.) The prominent or up-and-coming national figures in the Republican Party are a handful of governors and former governors (Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem), a few senators (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz), and a considerable gaggle of disreputable Trump vestiges, Mike Pence prominent among them. Of all of them, Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations, has the most plausible claim to meaningful foreign-policy experience. Democrats are in about the same condition, and if President Biden is succeeded by a Democrat, it is likely to be one grimy patronage-politics lawyer or another: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, etc.

 

If you want a president mainly focused on day-to-day domestic affairs, one who keeps himself busy visiting the hurricane-stricken and cutting ribbons and praying for a stock-market boom, one who thinks he “runs the country” — president-as-mayor, as Jay Nordlinger puts it — then a governor is what you’re after, or, maybe, on the Democratic side, a big-city mayor. (The ruthless Machiavellian Michael Bloomberg, not the feckless and witless Bill de Blasio.) But if you want a president who functions properly according to our actual constitutional architecture, then you don’t want a hand-holder, a lip-biter, or a your-pain-feeler. You want a diplomat and a statesman, someone who might be able to locate on a desktop globe some of those 150-odd foreign countries where U.S. troops are based, someone who has some inkling of the complex global linkages of the U.S. economy, and who sees in China something other than a ruthless competitor in the manufacture of cheap flip-flops.

 

It would take a very large spoonful of sugar to make that medicine go down the democratic gullet. But it would do the body politic a lot of good.

The Veep from Veep

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, July 03, 2021

 

President Joe Biden has a problem, and her name is Kamala Harris. The vice president has become a comic figure in today’s Washington — a politician given to missteps and unforced errors who inspires neither loyalty nor trust within her inner circle. She might have been Biden’s safest pick for running mate. But now she’s a liability for both the president and the Democratic Party.

 

It’s not just that Harris is unpopular. Her unique combination of falsity and incompetence generates negative press and endangers her dreams of succeeding Biden. For Harris, the month of June has been an extended replay of highlights from Veep, the HBO comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a clueless and floundering politician on the make. Only Harris isn’t laughing.

 

Her favorability among registered voters is seven points underwater in the latest Economist/YouGov survey. Biden’s approval, by contrast, is split even: 48 percent approve, and 48 percent disapprove. More worrisome for Harris is her “very unfavorable” rating. It’s at 40 percent. That’s three points higher than Biden’s number — and just three points short of Nancy Pelosi’s.

 

The reason for Harris’s unpopularity is no mystery. It’s her performance. She has a problem following through. She’s fine when working from a script, but she stumbles whenever she must improvise. The classic example came early in the 2020 campaign. Harris attacked Biden during a primary debate for opposing school busing in the 1970s. The moment went viral — and then evaporated. Harris couldn’t rebut Biden’s arguments against Medicare for All. She couldn’t withstand Tulsi Gabbard’s criticism of her record as California’s state attorney general. She didn’t make it past the first week of December 2019.

 

Last August, when Biden asked her to join the Democratic ticket, Harris took the Hippocratic Oath of running mates: First, do no harm. She lived up to the pledge. She followed the Biden strategy of letting President Donald Trump hog the stage and self-destruct. She made no great mistakes during her debate with Vice President Mike Pence. And she barely made a sound during the presidential transition. The biggest flap concerning Harris was over a Vogue cover shoot that annoyed her Very Online fan base.

 

It was Biden who set Harris up for a fall. By May, the surge in illegal crossings at the southern border had become impossible to ignore. Biden said the vice president would lead the administration’s response. This was a gargantuan and impossible task. After all, Biden’s reversal of Trump’s immigration policies is behind the increase in illegal immigration. And there’s no way Harris would contradict her boss, even if she wanted to.

 

Harris immediately distanced herself from her assignment. She recast her mandate as a diplomatic effort to address the “root causes” of migration. (The root cause is simple: America is a better place to live than the Northern Triangle of Central America.) Her evasion was transparent — and Republicans began criticizing her for refusing to visit the border. But the Harris team doubled down, scheduling a trip to Guatemala and Mexico in early June. It was a disaster.

 

Harris meant to strike a tough tone during her visit to Guatemala City. “Do not come,” she told potential migrants. But her message was undercut: first by Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei, who blamed Biden’s “lukewarm” rhetoric for the rise in migration, and then by NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who asked Harris why she was several thousand miles away from the border. A flustered Harris laughed awkwardly and tried to dodge before blurting out, “And I haven’t been to Europe!” Louis-Dreyfus couldn’t have delivered the line any better.

 

Harris’s inane reply amplified Republican charges that she was avoiding the real issue. By the time she returned from her trip, it was obvious that Harris would visit the border sooner rather than later. The question was when. On June 25, less than a week before Trump was scheduled to visit Texas, Harris hurriedly went to El Paso. The Democratic bastion is far from the Rio Grande valley that has been the busiest site of illegal activity. But Harris managed to get through her day trip without incident. The fallout didn’t arrive until later.

 

The voyage to El Paso illustrated another Harris vulnerability: She’s a terrible manager. Leaks and infighting bedeviled her short-lived presidential campaign. Working for her is hazardous to your health. Or at least that’s what an anonymous source told Politico on June 30. The blockbuster story, carrying three bylines and based on interviews with 22 “current and former vice-presidential aides, administration officials, and associates of Harris and Biden,” left no doubt that Harris runs a dysfunctional operation. “It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—,” said a “person with direct knowledge of how Harris’s office is run.” Imagine what they say on the office Slack channel.

 

Biden adviser Anita Dunn told Politico that the situation was “not anywhere near what you are describing.” Perhaps it’s worse. One of Harris’s former Senate aides said, “The boss’s expectations won’t always be predictable.” Not exactly what you want in a leader. Politico says Harris “excels when those around her project calm and order, creating a sense of confidence and certainty.” Unfortunately, confidence and certainty are precisely those qualities that go missing in the ad hoc, improvisational, contingent, and situational world of global politics.

 

More interviews and stories like these, and Harris will soon be living the politician’s worst nightmare: becoming a punchline. A cynic might say that Biden purposely handed Harris the toughest assignments to redirect negative public sentiment away from the Oval Office and to displace the frustrations and embarrassments he experienced during eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. Democratic strategists worry that Harris exhibits none of Biden’s strengths, such as they are, while shouldering all his weaknesses. That doesn’t bode well if Biden opts not to run in 2024.

 

Then again, in the third season of Veep, the fictional president steps down. Louis-Dreyfus’s character becomes president. Think Harris is funny now? The joke might be on us.

Lindsey Graham Is an Idiot

By Philip Klein

Friday, July 02, 2021

 

Sen. Lindsey Graham is an idiot. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Graham himself.

 

Last week, after announcing a bipartisan deal with Republicans, President Biden said he would only sign it if it were passed in “tandem” with a multi-trillion dollar Democrats-only reconciliation bill containing the rest of his liberal wish list.

 

Graham declared that he was not going to be so easily duped. “If he’s gonna tie them together, he can forget it!” Graham told Politico. “I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”

 

He added, “There’s no way. You look like a f—ing idiot now.” 

 

Yet a week later, Graham is back on board with the bipartisan deal citing a statement Biden made to reassure Republicans. “Once Biden clarified that there was no veto threat, Graham returned to the table,” Politico reported Friday morning, saying Biden’s statement, “had the intended effect.”

 

But let’s look back at Biden’s supposedly clarifying statement — and also at the broader context.

 

What Biden said was, “My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.” However, whatever his intent was, his statement should not be viewed as reassuring by Republicans. The comment that drew controversy was him saying that if the bipartisan bill is “the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it.” Nothing in his subsequent statement indicates that he would be signing the bipartisan bill if it came to his desk alone. But the story does not end there. 

 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki followed up his statement by reiterating, “the President intends to sign both pieces of legislation into law. He is eager to do that, looking forward to do that. As you know, they are both moving forward on dual tracks in Congress. The leaders in Congress are ensuring that is happening.” 

 

In fact, just this Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated that the House would not even consider the bipartisan bill until the Senate passes the reconciliation bill. So it’s pretty clear that both Congressional Democrats and White House view the two bills as linked. The only ones who don’t seem to understand that are Graham and the rest of the Republicans participating in this charade. 

 

Defenders of this Republican gambit argue that it is a way of keeping Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema from blowing up the filibuster, and perhaps giving them cover to kill the reconciliation bill. But neither of these arguments hold water. 

 

Manchin and Sinema had already dug themselves deeply into opposing blowing up the filibuster before the bipartisan infrastructure deal. And they did so because of their own political considerations. Were the the filibuster eliminated, Democrats would move full speed ahead with the liberal agenda, and Manchin and Sinema would face tougher votes, pulling them between the demands of their party and their constituents. As long as the filibuster is in place, they are spared from the votes, and can use the procedural roadblock to avoid taking positions on the substance of various issues. 

 

Furthermore, there is no evidence that the bipartisan framework has made Manchin more likely to block the reconciliation package. If anything, it does the opposite. Rather than giving Manchin cover to oppose the reconciliation package, the bipartisan deal seems to have given Manchin cover to support it because it makes the entire process appear to be more bipartisan. Since the bipartisan deal was announced, Manchin has said he supports a Democrats-only package. 

 

The bottom line is that Democrats are treating the two bills as linked, and so should Republicans and everybody else. Conservatives should put Republicans on notice: A vote for the bipartisan deal will be treated as a vote for the reconciliation bill. And any Republican who signs on to this pile of hot garbage should be laughed at for getting duped by Biden. As Graham himself put it, “You look like a f—ing idiot now.” 

Bill Barr Is No Hatchet Man

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, July 03, 2021

 

Turns out it was a worse week to be writing about a “hatchet man” than to be one.

 

Oh, it might not look that way on the surface. For Bill Barr, the alleged “hatchet man” in question, it is no doubt unpleasant to be the renewed target of strafing from Donald Trump. The former president took time out from decrying “the Big Lie” — the “massive election fraud” that never happened — to snipe at his former attorney general. Barr, in Trump’s telling, is a “spineless RINO,” a “disappointment in every sense of the word,” who failed to indict Trump political enemies, buried the promised “Durham report” on the Obama administration’s Russiagate hoax, and “helped facilitate the cover-up of the Crime of the Century, the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.”

 

From the horse’s mouth, then, we learn that Barr was never the Trump political lackey of Democrat lore, never a “hatchet man” in the Roy Cohn mold that Trump craved — never even the “wingman” that former Attorney General Eric Holder professed himself to be, at President Barack Obama’s beck and call.

 

That ought to make it a tough time to roll out a screed such as Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department (Harper). But that is precisely what is being done this coming week by Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor turned legal analyst at CNN — a hotbed of Trump Derangement Syndrome that, as night follows day, became rabidly anti-Barr in the last two years of Trump’s term.

 

It was then, as the media-Democrat complex geared up its 2020 campaign against the former president’s reelection, that Barr was limned as the Main Justice Machiavelli, placing the government’s awesome police powers in the service of Trump’s political fortunes. It was never true, but that’s the Left’s story and Honig is sticking to it.

 

Thus, Honig’s Hatchet Man delivers it, in full: the Democratic dogma that Barr lied about the Mueller report, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller himself said so; the claims of impropriety in the Justice Department’s interventions on behalf of Trump allies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone; more such claims regarding the DOJ’s intervention against Trump sexual-assault accuser E. Jean Carroll; the charge that Barr is philosophically an executive extremist who believes the president is not accountable to other branches of government; and so on.

 

It’s an amalgam of cherry-picked facts and half-truths, one that, hewing to the genre’s standards, consciously avoids acknowledging the situation Barr walked into in his second stint as attorney general — after his service as President George H. W. Bush’s AG won bipartisan accolades.

 

When Barr took the helm, the Justice Department was neck-deep in politics because the Obama administration had recklessly put the intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of the government in the service of the Democratic Party’s agenda, including: the CIA’s spying on a Senate committee (which the administration denied before coming clean); IRS harassment and selective enforcement against conservative organizations; Justice Department cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal (which resulted in Holder’s being held in contempt of Congress); the clearing of Hillary Clinton for her classified-information mishandling (in which the FBI and DOJ barely noticed her misappropriation of government records, by way of a non-secure private email system); the FBI’s improper public pronouncements about the Clinton case, which ironically might have swung the 2016 election to Trump; leaks of sensitive investigative information in politically fraught cases; misuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence authorities to monitor the Trump campaign; the use of improper and misleading public statements to create the impression that Trump might be a compromised, clandestine agent of Russia; and the commencement, without adequate justification, of a special-counsel investigation, the staff of which was dominated by partisan Democrats.

 

Given the way the board was set up, any move Barr made was sure to be portrayed as political. His job, moreover, was complicated by a president who was heedless of, if not outright hostile to, prudential guidelines pursuant to which executive political officials, including the president, avoid public comment on pending investigations and prosecutions. Trump’s tweets, Barr would eventually grouse, made it “impossible for me to do my job.”

 

He did, however, do his job. Admirably so.

 

Barr’s objective was to restore the Justice Department’s ethos as a non-partisan law enforcement institution. The goal was in tension not only with the atmosphere of 2019, in which DOJ was engulfed in politics, but with DOJ’s innate character — a component of one political branch, created by the other political branch, which carries out enforcement policies that are part of the president’s governing agenda and are overseen by congressional committees riven by partisan infighting.

 

Nevertheless, Barr’s aim was, to the extent possible, to get the Justice Department out of politics and politics out of DOJ’s enforcement decisions.

 

It was a particularly tricky hand to play in light of the quite-rational conviction of many Republicans, particularly Trump supporters, that there is a two-tiered justice system, in which Democrats get away with all manner of misconduct while the earth is scorched to nail Republicans on trifling infractions — or to invent infractions when real ones fail to materialize. If you ask Republicans, particularly Trump supporters, if they believe law enforcement should be non-political, they are apt to agree in principle that it should be . . . but that maybe we can hold off on the principle until some score-settling occurs. Others (like the former president) are bracingly unabashed in the view that Republicans will be weak patsies until they are willing to exploit process and power to their political advantage the way Democrats do.

 

There is no perfect way to navigate this turbulence. What Barr tried to do, though, is (a) reestablish Justice Department norms against official public commentary about ongoing investigations and cases (particularly those that are politically charged); (b) require that prosecutors check their aggressive creativity at the door in cases that bear on politics, such that only “meat and potatoes” crimes could be charged (offenses sufficiently clear and significant so that their prosecution is not susceptible to credible claims of political motivation); (c) similarly mandate a material quantum of articulable suspicion before investigations — especially investigations that invoke foreign-intelligence powers — are opened against political campaigns and operatives; and (d) push back against ongoing abuses to counter the perception of two-tiered justice.

 

If you have partisan leanings (I certainly do), you are certain, at least emotionally, to find something to hate in the implementation of such an approach. It is the right mindset, but it leaves a lot of running room for politics — including the politics of the opposite side, which we’re all wired to find more corrupt and condemnable than our own.

 

Those who want to portray Barr as a hatchet man, therefore, rarely get around to noticing that Trump’s principal nemeses emerged unscathed from the AG’s tenure. The Clinton-emails caper was not reopened, nor was there a Clinton Foundation prosecution. Technically speaking, former FBI director Jim Comey — a voluble Trump and Barr critic — could have been prosecuted for mishandling a minor amount of less-than-earth-shattering classified information that the FBI determined was contained in memos he made of meetings with Trump; but Barr would not countenance it because it would have been an abuse of prosecutorial discretion — Comey plainly did not intend to include classified information, and he shared it, at most, with his lawyers who, in their prosecutor days, held high security clearances. There was no prosecution of Obama intelligence officials for misleading Congress. And when the Justice Department’s highly regarded inspector general, Michael Horowitz, handed prosecutors on a silver platter a false-statements case against former deputy FBI director Andy McCabe (after he made misstatements, including under oath, about his role in leaking sensitive investigative information to the press), Barr declined prosecution — the case had been immensely complicated by Trump’s vindictive public commentary and the likelihood that McCabe’s firing had skirted civil-service protections.

 

The claim that Barr misled the country about the Mueller report is specious, no matter how many politically minded judges parrot it. The Mueller probe was a blatantly partisan, brass-knuckles affair, in which prosecutors larded up their charging documents with pages of Trump-Russia collusion innuendo . . . then you flipped to the end to find trifling charges of alleged misstatements to investigators that had no obstructive impact on the probe. Mueller never had any evidence of a corrupt Trump-Russia arrangement; his high-profile press release of an indictment against Russian cyber-crooks collapsed when it was unexpectedly challenged in court; and the special counsel abdicated on the only question he was arguably needed for — whether Trump committed a legally cognizable obstruction offense.

 

It was Mueller who misled Barr regarding that last matter. Initially, he told the AG that he was not relying on DOJ guidance against indicting a sitting president in deciding not to decide the obstruction issue; then, a few days later, he delivered to Barr his report, which explicitly relied on that guidance. Who knows whether this was intentional? When Mueller finally testified before Congress months later, he was stunningly unfamiliar with the contents of the two-volume tome for which he was nominally responsible.

 

Honig, like Barr’s array of Democratic critics, asserts that Barr lied to the public about Mueller’s report. But Barr did not undertake to summarize Mueller’s 400-plus pages. Just days after receiving and digesting the report, he put out a short letter setting forth its bottom-line findings . . . and making the determination Mueller had failed to make.

 

That conclusion — namely, that Trump had not committed a cognizable obstruction offense — deftly sidestepped significant constitutional questions about whether Mueller’s legal analysis of obstruction law was sound, holding that there was no obstruction offense, even under the Mueller construct, because intent could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. No doubt prodded by his staff, Mueller penned a letter complaining that Barr had not faithfully communicated the tone and nuances of the report (i.e., Barr’s short letter was not as unflattering of Trump as Mueller’s handiwork). Mueller, however, conceded that Barr had not given a false account of the findings (nor of Mueller’s dereliction on the obstruction issue). The controversy, in the end, is a tempest in a teapot: Barr publicly released virtually the entire report — including every detail that painted Trump in an awful light, and holding back only a trivial amount of grand-jury information that, under the Justice Department’s then-standing interpretation of federal jurisprudence, could not be transmitted lawfully to a congressional committee.

 

The Mueller report brouhaha is partisan hyperbole. The Democrats’ real problem is that they invested heavily in the expectation that the special counsel would nail Trump, and he came up empty. Plainly, they would much rather tell themselves that the salient issue is how Barr handled the report, rather than that the report itself cleared Trump of the slander that he was an agent of the Kremlin — which Democrats and their allies in the intelligence community tirelessly promoted.

 

The same angst fuels the other major complaints about Barr: his interventions in the Flynn and Stone prosecutions. But here again, to say he intervened is to tell half the story.

 

The FBI and the Obama administration had no factual predicate to investigate Flynn, a decorated combat commander, on suspicion of being a Russian agent. Realizing this, the Bureau violated Justice Department and executive-branch protocols by dispatching agents to the White House to question Flynn in his first full day on the job as Trump’s national-security adviser — in the meantime, misleading Flynn about the nature of the interview and withholding advice about his rights that the FBI routinely gives suspects it interrogates. The session was a patent perjury trap — the FBI did not need Flynn to explain his communications with the Russian ambassador because it had recordings of them; and they did not play the recordings for Flynn, so they were obviously trying to induce him to say something inconsistent with the recordings, which could then be framed as a false statement.

 

Even so, the agents who conducted the interview did not believe Flynn lied to them. The matter was seemingly dropped, only to be revived months later by Mueller’s team, which was trying to squeeze Flynn to give them Trump . . . and, in the course of doing so, floated the possibility of prosecuting Flynn’s son if Flynn did not agree to plead guilty. The case was politicized overkill. Barr undertook to dismiss it because it should never have been brought in the first place (a decision that was lawfully his to make, but that was thwarted by a lawless judge who was determined to force Trump to pardon Flynn — which he did — rather than allow the case to be dismissed).

 

The sentencing of Stone, too, was overkill. He was singled out for prosecution for obstructing Congress. The case was the usual vehicle for Mueller’s staffers to write an indictment that hinted at Trump-Russian collusion they couldn’t prove, and then accuse Stone of comparatively petty process crimes (before arresting the then-66-year-old in a brandishing of force fit for a terrorist chief that CNN’s cameras were somehow on hand to capture).

 

Continuing this exercise in hyperbole, prosecutors wanted to recommend a nine-year sentence (which, to be fair, was justifiable on a literal, though not a practical, construction of the federal-sentencing guidelines). Barr deemed this to be extreme, but he also thought Stone was righteously convicted of serious felonies, even if they were not the crimes of the century. The trial prosecutors — Barr’s subordinates, after all — went ballistic when Barr ordered their recommendation withdrawn, supplanted by a reasonable submission pointing out that (a) the sentence to be imposed was up to the trial judge, who was intimately familiar with the case and the sentencing guidelines, and that (b) construction of the guidelines that suggested a sentence of 37 to 46 months would be fair. The judge, who praised the trial prosecutors and is no Barr fan, imposed a 40-month sentence.

 

Some hatchet man. Trump wanted the case dismissed and was furious when Barr declined to do that. The sentence was completely appropriate, with a judge, who knew she had undeniable authority to impose a harsher term, coming out where Barr had come out.

 

Naturally, Barr’s critics miss the significance of his interventions on Flynn and Stone, just as they take pains not to notice his inaction on Trump’s political foes. Extricating the Justice Department from politics, under circumstances where the deck has been stacked against one side of the partisan divide, cannot mean nothing more than refraining from tit-for-tat politicized prosecutions. It also had to involve pushing back against politicized prosecutorial excess. You needn’t be a Flynn or Stone admirer to perceive that the former’s investigation was wrong, and the latter’s prosecution was excessive. If we are going to have one standard of justice that applies to everyone, such overkill has to be moderated.

 

Justice Department protocols, moreover, have to be applied regardless of the political noise. Trump wanted to leverage federal law enforcement to abet his reelection bid. That shouldn’t happen, and Barr wouldn’t let it happen on his watch.

 

During the 2020 campaign, the Justice Department had been investigating Hunter Biden for months. DOJ never uttered a public word about it, just as it never uttered a word about an investigation that has implicated Congressman Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), a boisterous Trump ally. The president incessantly hectored Barr not only to indict former government officials instrumental in the Russiagate fiasco, but also to force the issuance of a much-anticipated report by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, whom Barr had assigned to investigate the matter. Barr demurred, drawing Trump’s ire with an early public disclosure that former President Trump and Vice President Biden were not subjects of the investigation; insisting that no one would be charged for investigative excesses in the absence of straightforward crimes that could be established by compelling evidence; and maintaining that Durham’s report would be ready when it was ready, and not a moment sooner — a determination Barr underscored, right before resigning last December, by formally appointing Durham as a special counsel.

 

This implies that Durham is working diligently and may have some months to go, implications bolstered by the fact that Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland has not interfered in Durham’s work (though neither has he committed that any report Durham produces will be publicly released). On that subject, for all the criticism of Barr for having the Justice Department intervene on Trump’s behalf in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, it is telling that the Biden Justice Department is continuing to defend Trump in the case. As I related at the time, the Barr-led DOJ was following longstanding Justice Department legal guidance in seeking to substitute the government for Trump as a defendant (and thus laying the groundwork to seek the suit’s dismissal on sovereign-immunity grounds). It was never a matter of doing Trump’s bidding; it is what the law says, no matter who the president happens to be.

 

That goes for election law, too. Barr took a pounding from the Left for (a) making the commonsense observation that resorting to mail-in voting on a widespread, unprecedented scale was an invitation to fraud because it is palpably not as secure as in-person voting, and (b) unleashing U.S. attorneys’ offices to probe credible allegations of voter fraud. Yet, fully aware that he was coming under intense pressure to back Trump’s claims of massive fraud and election-rigging, Barr knew that he would not be positioned to reject these claims authoritatively if the Justice Department had not exhibited awareness of the potential perils and scrutinized fraud claims.

 

When it came time to stand up, Attorney General Barr stood up. His public acknowledgement that there had been no fraud on a scale that could change the election outcome was a decisive moment in restoring our constitutional order. President Trump’s claims and attempted delegitimizing of his successor’s victory could not have been eviscerated with more finality.

 

It was not what a hatchet man does. It was what a statesman does.