Facts Get Short Schiff in House
Just how ridiculous is this impeachment farce? Even the Democrats’ friends are mocking yesterday’s Judiciary session as a “climb into the clown car.” “Up next,” Slate scoffed, “a pointless hearing from the House’s most impotent committee.” Even before Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) gaveled members in, reporters like Jeremy Stahl were already declaring yesterday a disaster. And based on the last five months of this absurdity, it was a pretty safe bet.
Just how ridiculous is this impeachment farce? Even the Democrats’ friends are mocking yesterday’s Judiciary session as a “climb into the clown car.” “Up next,” Slate scoffed, “a pointless hearing from the House’s most impotent committee.” Even before Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) gaveled members in, reporters like Jeremy Stahl were already declaring yesterday a disaster. And based on the last five months of this absurdity, it was a pretty safe bet.
While Nadler debated constitutional law, the rest of the city was combing through two dueling impeachment reports — one from Republicans and another from Democrats. Maybe Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is a frustrated screenplay writer, the New York Post joked, because he managed to turn a non-case into 300 pages of “the second coming of Richard Nixon.” “Say this for Rep. Adam Schiff," Michael Goodwin wrote, "his imagination is vivid, and he has a flair for the dramatic. If only he had more respect for facts and a tighter tether to reality.”
When I asked Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) what the key findings were, he said that was the funny part. There were none. “There is no evidence,” Louie explained on “Washington Watch.” In fact, he said, “If we were in a court of law — and I would submit that this is even more important than most criminal cases, because it would end up removing a president through impeachment for the first time in American history — this evidence wouldn’t [survive a] jury trial. You can’t bring in what somebody tells somebody that somebody else said. You’d get laughed out of court. And if I were the judge, as I was once, there’d be some prosecutors [who] would either not be practicing in my court again or there would be some consequences. You just can’t come in and base an important case on four-, five-, or six-way hearsay.”
In the GOP report, which summed up the party’s conclusions, they found absolutely zero proof that American aid for Ukraine was ever linked to investigations that President Trump called for. What’s more, the Republican members point out, no senior Ukrainian official knew about this freeze in funding. If it was a bribe, then it wasn’t a very good one — since no one in Ukraine ever knew it was happening! And yet, Schiff’s party insists, there is “overwhelming and uncontested evidence that President Trump abused the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference in our election for his own personal, political gain.”
We’ve heard that before, Louie said, during the Robert Mueller investigation. “They said, ‘Oh, there’s plenty of evidence to convict him, to impeach him, to remove him… And there wasn’t [any] at all. So imagine their surprise. They thought Muller was going to come through for them — and he was sure trying. He was doing everything he could. But there just was no evidence of anybody with the Trump campaign conspiring [or] colluding with anybody in Russia.” Now, he went on, we’re talking about the most serious action Congress can take — removing a sitting president from office — and “there’s just nothing… It’s an outrage.”
Louie’s colleagues, like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), are still waiting to hear what “high crime” President Trump has supposedly committed. “In desperation," Biggs points out, "Democrats started testing various catchphrases to focus groups in an attempt to find something that would resonate with the country. That hasn’t worked either. They are shedding public support like a St. Bernard in an Arizona summer sheds hair.”
Why? Because this isn’t about what Donald Trump has done. It’s about what Democrats failed to do three years ago: Win. But instead of building a better case for their party bid next year, they’re focused on taking the choice out of voters’ hands altogether! And, worse, they’ve ditched their entire legislative agenda to do it. I’d hate to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) next year when Americans go to the polls and compare the Democrats’ accomplishments (none) with the president’s (trade, economy, taxes, judges, jobs, national security, international diplomacy, immigration reform, religious freedom, pro-life protections, military readiness, Israeli relations, and more). Or the Democrats’ vision (infanticide, open borders, socialism, gender confusion, Medicare for All, taxpayer-funded abortion, judicial activists the Green New Deal) with this administration’s.
At the end of the day, the Democrats’ obsession with Trump is on the verge of reelecting him. And if they do, the impeachment critics warn, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
Originally published here.
Trump: Loading the Bases on Life
Democrats ought to know better than underestimating Donald Trump. But when it comes to the black vote, that’s exactly what some liberals are doing. While the 2020 candidates are pushing the envelope on social extremism, no one seems to be counting the cost. And that cost, more African-Americans are hinting, is the demographic they’ve taken for granted most.
Small changes, Vox warns, “make a big difference in close elections.” So when Democrats don’t take the president’s outreach to the African-American community seriously, Matthew Yglesias warns, they’re making a huge mistake. “There’s some evidence,” he reports, that the DNC has “lost ground with black voters.” Believe it or not, Yglesias writes, Donald Trump did “slightly better with black voters than did John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012.” Even in last year’s midterm elections, “Democrats won the black vote by ‘only’ a 90 percentage point margin in 2018 House races down from 93 percent in the 2016 presidential.” Obviously, he says, “that’s still a huge landslide. But the direction of the shift is striking.”
There are a lot of factors to point to — record low unemployment for black workers for one, and, of course, Trump’s passionate push for criminal justice reform. But there might also be another explanation: the Democrats’ race to embrace radical abortion policy. Dean Nelson, Executive Director of Human Coalition Action, joined me on “Washington Watch” to talk about the faith community’s reaction to the Left’s agenda. And in some predominately black denominations — like the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) — the warning signs are everywhere.
After years of trying, the COGIC passed a resolution last month officially denouncing elective abortion — unanimously. Why is that significant? Well, for starters, they took this stance in the middle of the Democratic primary season, at time when candidates are racing to embrace everything from legal infanticide to taxpayer-funded abortion. Secondly, they couched their objections in the strongest civil rights terms.
“The Church Of God In Christ opposes elective abortions. This issue of personhood has haunted America since the Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Roe vs. Wade decisions. Just as slavery was overturned in America, Jim Crow was defeated, and Nazi Germany was overthrown, it is our prayer that the heinous industry of abortion will become morally reprehensible worldwide.”
As Dean pointed out, “We live in a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to Christians — whether they’re white, black, Asian, or Hispanic. And for them to [have] the political courage to do this at this time, I think shows that they are much more committed to biblical values than they are to partisan politics.” Is this something, I asked Dean, that might get the attention of the Democratic candidates? “I think they’ll notice,” he agreed, but at this point, they’re so sold-out to the abortion industry “that they’ll continue to go in the direction that they’ve gone until large numbers of black Americans show up at the polls and vote differently.”
The New York Times wonders if that’s slowly starting to happen. “The African-American electorate has been undergoing a quiet, long-term transformation, moving from the Left toward the center on several social and cultural issues,” Thomas Edsall warns. Take abortion attitudes, as one example. “WSJ/NBC surveys show that 97 percent of white primary voters agree that the procedure should be ‘totally legal’ compared with two-thirds of black primary voters. A vanishingly small number of white Democratic primary voters — three percent — said abortion should be illegal, compared with a third of black Democrats. A CBS News poll of Democrats in states holding early primaries that was conducted between Aug. 28 and Sept. 4 reinforced these findings.”
“Too many liberals,” strategists warn, “have failed to recognize the liabilities of some of the policies they have been pushing… The result has been an unchallenged belief among white liberals that as they continue their sharply leftward movement of recent years, they will be able to rely on black Democrats for continuing political support.” That’s a big gamble — one every liberal should be worried they’ll lose.
Originally published here.
Abortion Is in Obamacare: Here’s How to Find Pro-Life Options
Remember “we have to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it?” Well, in some cases, “you have to buy it to find out what’s in it.” And all too often, what’s in it is abortion.
Under the last administration, the government did everything it could to keep consumers in the dark about their plans. Back then, most Americans who were shopping for a plan on the exchange had to wait until they got their statement of benefits until they knew if the policy violated their beliefs. And even then, they might not even know how much went to abortion.
The good news is that pro-lifers have options. The bad news is that they didn’t know what those options are — until the last few years. That’s when FRC and the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) teamed up to turn the flood lights onto the Obamacare exchange with a special website that’s dedicated to telling you what the Obama administration wouldn’t: which state plans include abortion. Since 2014, ObamacareAbortion.com has helped users search through insurance carriers to find out which ones cover elective abortions and which don’t. For Americans on the exchange, it’s been a great solution for anyone who wants to see all of their policy benefits before they commit to them.
Unfortunately, if you’re one of the unlucky people living in Alaska, California, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New York and Vermont, there is no pro-life option. Every single exchange plan in these areas covers abortion on demand. As FRC’s Patrina Mosley pointed out on “Washington Watch,” there are a whopping 777 plans covering abortion out the 1,120 plans on the exchange. Most of them are from the states that haven’t opted out of abortion coverage. Twenty-six have — but even in those places, it’s impossible to stay out of the culture of death completely. Until we get rid of Obamacare completely, we’ll all still be subsidizing abortion in some shape or form, Patrina explains, “because when you pay federal taxes in your state, those taxes go to someone else’s state to pay for their enrolment — and for those abortion plans.”
The Trump administration has done its part. Across the departments, the president’s team has made a strong statement through Title X, the Mexico City policy expansion, and other regulations that abortion isn’t health care. While they hold the line on life, Congress still has a lot of work to do to make sure that taxpayers aren’t forced partners of the abortion industry. Until then, consumers at least have a right to shop for plans they can purchase in good conscience. Check out the site today and make sure you’re informed before you’re insured!
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
