September 16, 2024

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

Trump’s second would-be assassin was a radical activist who wanted the West to ‘instigate’ World War III over Ukraine

By Robert Romano

Former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated — again — in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Sept. 15 by Ryan Wesley Routh, a radical political activist who in his 2023 book, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War,” said he wanted the West to “instigate” a nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine.

Routh, who claimed in a June 2022 Newsweek Romania interview he spent time recruiting foreign mercenaries to fight on behalf of Ukraine for the International Legion — Ukrainian officials are disputing his account, saying he was “delusional” — came within 500 yards of Trump before being spotted by the Secret Service, who opened fire and scared him off. As Routh fled in his black sports utility vehicle, he was apprehended shortly thereafter.

According to Secret Service Special Agent Rafael Barros, speaking at a Sept. 15 press conference, it was not clear if Routh got any shots off: “He noticed that the rifle was pointing out, our agents engaged. We are not sure right now if the individual was able to take a shot at our agents. But for sure our agents were able to engage with the suspect.”

Key questions include how Routh knew Trump would be at the golf course that day at that time as it wasn’t publicly available information.

As for why the golf course’s perimeter was not secured, according to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, former presidents do not get that level of protection: “And at this level that he is at right now, he’s not the sitting president. If he was, we would have had the entire golf course surrounded. Well, because he’s not, the security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible.”

Bradshaw added, “you got to understand, the golf course is surrounded by shrubbery. So when somebody gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight. All right… So I would imagine that the next time he comes at a golf course, there’ll probably be a little more people around the perimeter.”

But after the July 13 attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pa., when Trump was nearly killed, why wasn’t Secret Service protection sufficiently upgraded to prevent this from happening? How can shooters be able to hide in the bushes waiting for Trump to come along?

And what about other presidential candidates, including Robert Kennedy, Jr., who after he endorsed Trump had Secret Service protection Jill Stein, Chase Oliver and Cornell West?

What we learned on Sept. 15, when former President Trump — or any other candidate for president who is not the sitting president — visits a golf course or anywhere else off-schedule, there is not a full perimeter. In other words, it’s open season on challenger candidates in presidential elections. After July 13, how is that possible?

Every candidate should be secured, not just former presidents, including substantial third-party candidates for president like Kennedy, who is still on the ballot, and Stein, Oliver and West. You get to 1 percent, you get protection. Third party candidates can have just as much impact on the outcome of an election as the two major party candidates, with Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign and Jill Stein’s 2016 campaign being credited in part for the outcomes. Now we know they are much softer targets.

As for Routh, he was apparently radicalized by Russiagate propaganda and later by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a war which Trump has campaigned on wanting to end and restore peace to the region via a negotiated settlement.

In his book, Routh wrote he wanted the West to “instigate” nuclear war with Russia, in a chapter titled, “Why not nuclear war?”: “We must institigate this war and push the issue to the end.”

Routh added, “The entire world runs and hides in fear because Putin has [n]uclear weapons… Enough is [e]nough, the world cannot allow a country [to] be involved in conflict after conflict and do nothing. It must be quick and decisive and [a] powerful blow to end it once and for all. Again, we must give Ukraine back all of the nuclear warhead[s] that we took with the only stipulation is that they all be used.”

Unbelievably, Routh thinks such a war is survivable, “All NATO nations have missile defense systems in place to eliminate… what Putin sends and the fallout will blow in his direction… Why do we even have nuclear weapons if we are not prepared to use them?”

That’s nuts. And yet this nut got pretty close to killing the former president, whose peace plan Routh might have viewed as an obstacle to destroying Russia. Imagine if he had connected with his target?

Given similar facts as Butler, Pa., where security was more lax than that of a sitting president (again) as a matter of policy, coupled with the additional facts of being in contact with a foreign military with an interest in a more pro-active U.S. involvement in the war and also with U.S. government agencies, a good number of people would be convinced this meant it was an inside job, even if it turns out the assassin was no more than a delusional radical. Once again, we’d be tearing ourselves apart in the fallout.

As it is, protection for former presidents and presidential candidates is inadequate. And it still remains to be answered: How did Routh know where Trump would be?

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/09/trumps-second-would-be-assassin-was-a-radical-activist-who-wanted-the-west-to-instigate-world-war-iii-over-ukraine/

Congress Is at Their Regularly Scheduled Government Funding Impasse, and As Usual It’s Going to Get Ugly

By Rick Manning

Congress is at their regularly scheduled government funding impasse, and as usual it is going to get ugly.

The four-vote Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed six out of twelve bills to fund the spending that Congress must pass every year. The other six came out of the Appropriations Committee but do not yet have enough votes to pass the House and so have not been brought up.

The Senate has not considered any of the funding bills and as usual is focused upon either passing one giant Continuing Resolution (CR) which keeps spending levels at current levels.

The current fight in the House is over a proposed CR that meets spending caps and has a policy rider which would close a giant loophole in the federal law that prohibits non-citizens from voting. The federal government fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, so agreement must be reached to fund the 27 percent of the spending actively controlled by Congress or else a ‘government shutdown’ occurs.

One of the areas of disagreement amongst House Republicans is whether the CR should extend government spending until December, or if it should expire in March or even continue for the entire 2025 Fiscal Year (forcing a legally mandated one percent cut in spending with the defense side getting disproportionately whacked.)

The Speaker’s bill, which Americans for Limited Government has endorsed, calls for a six-month CR with the SAVE Act attached dealing with illegal voting by non-citizens.

The reason is crystal clear. If President Trump is re-elected and a GOP Congress follows, they will have an immediate chance to rewrite the spending priorities using the power of the purse. The alternatives are having the historically disastrous Christmas omnibus which ends up looking like a Christmas tree adorned with spending projects for all the good little Congressional Critters. The other alternative effectively locks in the Biden-Harris spending priorities for the first nine months of Trump’s term should he win, negating the former President’s ability to hit the ground running during a term where he becomes a political lame duck by the middle of 2026.

The other possibility is that the House Republicans cannot gather the necessary votes to pass anything, and either the government “shuts down” or GOP members who desperately do not want a shut down as it hurts them politically five weeks before the election coalesce with Democrats to enshrine the minority party’s priorities which can also pass the Senate and get signed by President Biden.

The Democrats are licking their chops at the opportunity to take over the most important function of the House of Representatives, the power of the purse. In doing so, they will strip away many protections and policy directives contained in the funding bills. They will also be able to reconfigure the spending to fully reflect their priorities.

Right now, there are not the votes in the House GOP to pass a six-month CR. Some Republicans have never voted for a CR before and want to keep that record intact. Others want to trigger sequester and have an automatic 1 percent cut take place mid-2025. And defense hawks do not want Pentagon spending hogtied to a CR of any length as it makes letting contracts very difficult.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is trying to solve this political Rubik’s Cube knowing that if he loses four Republicans for any proposal, chaos could erupt on the floor with a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans ceasing the initiative, and ending all discussion about illegal alien voting and most probably fiscal restraint from the legislation.

As much as I like a good ol’ government shutdown fight, let’s be clear, while four House GOP members can stop a Republican-only CR from passing, what they cannot do is stop their Republican colleagues from making a deal with the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. They also cannot prevent the Senate from taking one of the spending bills that were sent to them months ago and replacing that language with a CR, all the while berating the Speaker for not keeping the shutdown intact.

Job one for House Republicans right now should be to maintain and expand their majority, and close behind, job two is to not do anything which harms Donald Trump’s chances at re-election.

Both shutting down the government and turning the funding process over to the Democrats does self-inflicted harm to both the House GOP and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

No one wants to cut government spending and re-shift priorities more than Americans for Limited Government. Doing anything other than passing a six-month CR, and hoping that a GOP controlled House and Senate, alongside President Trump can finally unite around spending priorities which will accelerate the process of cutting spending to bring the budget closer to balance.

Everyone in D.C. knows how this ends up ultimately playing out, the only question is whether chances of a bigger House majority and a Trump win in November will be damaged getting to it.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://townhall.com/columnists/rickmanning/2024/09/14/congress-is-at-their-regularly-scheduled-government-funding-impasse-and-as-usual-its-going-to-get-ugly-n2644748