Sept. 20, 2019
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Spygate was an act of war and if its perpetrators are not held accountable, it will happen again
Spygate was an
act of war. Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta and had the emails published
on Wikileaks. That surely was viewed by the Obama administration as an act of war and it responded in kind. It was called a digital Pearl Harbor. However, their first response was
not to sanction Russia. No, that would not come until Dec. 2016 — after the
election. Before the election, the first response was to obtain surveillance
against the Trump campaign and the GOP. The surveillance gave intelligence
agencies unprecedented access to the operations of one of the major parties’
presidential campaigns. Intelligence and surveillance powers are war powers.
They are designed to identify targets, usually military, for purposes of
eliminating threats to national security in the event of war. Their use,
therefore, is itself an act of war, including when it is used domestically.The
American people are told that these powers are essential to defending national
security. But used wrongly, as they were in spygate, they become themselves the
greatest threat to national security and the Constitution.
Cartoon: Never Iran
Iran is on a
warpath.
Video: Democratic presidential candidates declare war on oil, Iran fires the first shot on Saudi Arabia
The Democrats
running against President Trump in 2020 want to ban fracking and off-shore
drilling, and bring an end to fossil fuels with the Green New Deal, and have
declared a war on oil. In the meantime, Iran allegedly targets Western oil
assets by hitting Saudi Arabian oil production facilities with cruise missiles.
What is to be done?
San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle should be held to Clean Water Act standards as human waste pollutes their waterways
Americans for
Limited Government President Rick Manning: “In March of 2018, San Diego County,
California cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista sued the International
Boundary & Water Commission-United States Section and Veolia Water North
America West over the ‘devastating pollution discharges’ from the Tijuana River.
Last night, President Trump stated that he anticipated that the United States
Environmental Protection Agency will take action against San Francisco and
potentially, Los Angeles, which have exacerbated a homeless problem to such an
extent that they are polluting the Pacific Ocean with drug needles and raw
human waste. While some might laugh at the notion that the washing of raw human
waste into the San Francisco Bay should be cited by the EPA, the truth is that
the effects can be catastrophic. Just last
year in Seattle, Washington (which should be in line for EPA sanction as well),
opioids were found in mussels pulled from the Puget Sound. Mussels, which filter sediment for nutrition,
became contaminated due to the washing to raw human waste from a drug addicted
homeless population directly into the Sound. It is beyond ironic that the
far-left urban policies of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle
are creating an environmental disaster for the coastal sea life which these
same politicians claim to revere. An EPA
lawsuit holding these eco-socialist elites to the same standards which they
would hold a private company should create an existential values clash on the
left coast. And hopefully, they will
become ‘woke’ to the reality that their urban policies fail to serve any of
their purported values.”
Wall Street Journal: California can’t go its own way
“The 1970 Clean
Air Act prohibits states from regulating tailpipe emissions, but it allows
California to request a waiver to “meet compelling and extraordinary
conditions.” This waiver authority was intended to help California reduce
tailpipe pollutants such as NOx and sulphur that contribute to smog. The LA
haze in those days could be as thick as San Francisco’s fog. Yet the Obama
Administration in 2009 issued California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions despite the lack of legal or environmental justification. The Energy
Policy and Conservation Act pre-empts state regulations of fuel economy, and
CO2 emissions don’t cause smog. CO2 wasn’t even considered a pollutant until
the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) decision.The Trump Administration
now has strong economic, regulatory and constitutional reasons to revoke the
waiver. California has used its waiver to impose electric car quotas that will
raise costs for consumers across the country. Manufacturing an electric car
costs $12,000 more than an equivalent gas-powered vehicle. Despite generous
federal and state consumer subsidies, auto makers will probably have to sell
EVs below cost in California and raise prices on gas-powered cars everywhere
else.”
Spygate was an act of war and if its perpetrators are not held accountable, it will happen again
By Robert Romano
Spygate was an act of war. Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta and had the emails published on Wikileaks. That surely was viewed by the Obama administration as an act of war and it responded in kind. It was called a digital Pearl Harbor.
However, their first response was not to sanction Russia. No, that would not come until Dec. 2016 — after the election.
Before the election, the first response was to obtain surveillance against the Trump campaign and the GOP, first by targeting George Papadopoulos via foreign agency efforts beginning in mid-2016, and then the FISA warrant applications, assuming there weren’t more, on Carter Page beginning in Oct. 2016, fueled by the DNC-Steele dossier falsely accusing President Donald Trump, Page and Paul Manafort of being Russian agents, that was renewed after the election and then finally the fateful strike on Michael Flynn in Jan. 2017, spying on his phone call with the Russian ambassador, leaking it to the Washington Post on Jan. 12, 2017, sending the FBI to ask about it on Jan. 24, 2017 — all encompassing the bedrock of a three-year-long Justice Department investigation, undertaken under the mistaken belief that the nation had just elected the Manchurian Candidate.
Now, Washington, D.C. and the American people patiently await the publication of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2016 and beyond, wherein the Trump campaign, the opposition party at the time, was unjustly surveilled by the Obama administration, the incumbent party, in an election year.
The surveillance gave intelligence agencies unprecedented access to the operations of one of the major parties’ presidential campaigns. They had Page’s contacts, including telephone, email, text, documents and more, his contacts’ contacts, at least, throughout the campaign, Trump’s sphere and the Republican National Committee, certainly.
The surveillance carried over into the Trump administration in 2017, and the investigation persisted until 2019, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally concluded it, finding in his report that, after all, there was no criminal conspiracy between President Donald Trump or his campaign and Russia to steal emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta and have them put on Wikileaks.
The Mueller report stated, “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
So, if it was not true, then what made intelligence agencies and the Justice Department come to believe in what amounted to a hare-brained conspiracy theory that tore the country in half for three years?
The fact that it was used politically and in a partisan context, and wrongly at that to identify fictitious threats to national security, does not ameliorate and only compounds concerns about how these powers were used and how they may be used again in the future.
Intelligence and surveillance powers are war powers. They are designed to identify targets, usually military, for purposes of eliminating threats to national security in the event of war. Their use, therefore, is itself an act of war, including when it is used domestically.
The American people are told that these powers are essential to defending national security. But used wrongly, as they were in spygate, they become themselves the greatest threat to national security and the Constitution.
The fact that it was used politically and in a partisan context, and wrongly at that to identify fictitious threats to national security, does not ameliorate and only compounds concerns about how these powers were used and how they may be used again in the future.
To create accountability when this sort of thing happens, there must be an accounting of how these powers were wrongly deployed in the first place, highlighting the need for oversight by Horowitz, but it must be followed up by action by Attorney General William Barr. Why did the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court repeatedly rubber stamp the warrant applications against the Trump campaign that found no conspiracy? Why did judges keep renewing it if it wasn’t true?
What was the extent of the surveillance? Who did it net? Were they in the White House? It seems hard to believe they weren’t.
Moreover, what laws (if any) were violated and who will be held accountable so the American people can have certainty that these powers are not abused again in the future?
The worst possible outcome of the Horowitz report would be if it found that, yes, the FBI and Justice Department were given bad, concocted intelligence by political actors, including the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign who hired former British spy Christopher Steele to produce the bogus allegations that President Trump was a Russian agent, used in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to violate their constitutional rights, but that doing so violated no laws.
This dilemma, more than anything, will come to define Barr’s tenure in office as well as determine whether the national rift caused by the abuse of surveillance powers can ever be mended.
This was a blow on democracy itself, an effort to overturn a decisive electoral outcome in 2016. A place the Justice Department and intelligence agencies have little role in interfering. What we did to ourselves pales in comparison to anything Russia was accused of.
Tthe whole reason the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was adopted was prevent unconstitutional domestic spying. A select committee headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) convened in 1975 to get to the bottom of revelations by Seymour Hersh’s explosive report to the New York Times on Dec. 22, 1974 that the CIA had been engaged a mass, domestic surveillance program against anti-war protestors, members of Congress and other political figures.
On NBC’s Meet the Press on Aug. 17, 1975, Church who had led the committee warned, “If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…”
Church added, “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
The committee led to the adoption of the law, which sought to reform how intelligence is gathered and the limited circumstances it can be used in the U.S. If 40 years later, the Justice Department concludes an internal review into the gravest abuses of this law ever seen, where surveillance was used to yield partisan political advantage and even to unseat a sitting president on made-up allegations of treason, that it violated no laws, it will discredit the very rule of law FISA sought to engender.
The real dilemma Attorney General Barr faces is the reality that if the perpetrators of spygate are not held accountable now, and the mass surveillance powers reined in, this will happen again. This was one of the most terrible things that ever happened to our country. How do we put the genie back in the bottle?
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Cartoon: Never Iran
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
Video: Democratic presidential candidates declare war on oil, Iran fires the first shot on Saudi Arabia
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXUckKbeNw8
San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle should be held to Clean Water Act standards as human waste pollutes their waterways
Sept. 19, 2019, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in reaction to President Donald Trump calling on the EPA to take Clean Water Act action against west coast cities that put human waste into natural waterways:
“In March of 2018, San Diego County, California cities of Imperial Beach and Chula Vista sued the International Boundary & Water Commission-United States Section and Veolia Water North America West over the ‘devastating pollution discharges’ from the Tijuana River. Last night, President Trump stated that he anticipated that the United States Environmental Protection Agency will take action against San Francisco and potentially, Los Angeles, which have exacerbated a homeless problem to such an extent that they are polluting the Pacific Ocean with drug needles and raw human waste.
“While some might laugh at the notion that the washing of raw human waste into the San Francisco Bay should be cited by the EPA, the truth is that the effects can be catastrophic. Just last year in Seattle, Washington (which should be in line for EPA sanction as well), opioids were found in mussels pulled from the Puget Sound. Mussels, which filter sediment for nutrition, became contaminated due to the washing to raw human waste from a drug addicted homeless population directly into the Sound.
“It is beyond ironic that the far-left urban policies of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle are creating an environmental disaster for the coastal sea life which these same politicians claim to revere. An EPA lawsuit holding these eco-socialist elites to the same standards which they would hold a private company should create an existential values clash on the left coast. And hopefully, they will become ‘woke’ to the reality that their urban policies fail to serve any of their purported values.”
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured editorial from the Wall Street Journal, the board makes the case for President Donald Trump yanking California’s Clean Air Act waiver that lets it set its own fuel economy standards:
California can’t go its own way
If you haven’t heard, President Trump has declared war on California, the auto industry and the world’s climate. Or that’s what liberals are saying about his Administration’s plans to revoke California’s waiver that lets it set national fuel economy rules that raise costs for consumers across the country.
Mr. Trump trolled California progressives during a visit to the Golden State on Wednesday by tweeting that his Administration would yank California’s Clean Air Act waiver. The Environmental Protection Agency last year foreshadowed its plans to do so when it proposed relaxing the Obama -era corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards.
The 1970 Clean Air Act prohibits states from regulating tailpipe emissions, but it allows California to request a waiver to “meet compelling and extraordinary conditions.” This waiver authority was intended to help California reduce tailpipe pollutants such as NOx and sulphur that contribute to smog. The LA haze in those days could be as thick as San Francisco’s fog.
Yet the Obama Administration in 2009 issued California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions despite the lack of legal or environmental justification. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act pre-empts state regulations of fuel economy, and CO2 emissions don’t cause smog. CO2 wasn’t even considered a pollutant until the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) decision.
The Trump Administration now has strong economic, regulatory and constitutional reasons to revoke the waiver. California has used its waiver to impose electric car quotas that will raise costs for consumers across the country. Manufacturing an electric car costs $12,000 more than an equivalent gas-powered vehicle. Despite generous federal and state consumer subsidies, auto makers will probably have to sell EVs below cost in California and raise prices on gas-powered cars everywhere else.
The state’s EV mandate doesn’t even account for all CO2 emissions since it awards more credit for longer-range batteries, even though they require more energy (and fossil fuels) to manufacture. A Tesla Model S, for instance, receives almost twice as much regulatory credit as a Nissan Leaf. It also provides credit for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles that derive energy mostly from natural gas. This scheme encourages regulatory arbitrage.
Fair-weather liberal federalists are complaining that the Trump Administration is running over states’ rights. Yet the Commerce Clause prohibits states from burdening interstate commerce, and the California rules discriminate against consumers in other states. If California’s waiver is allowed to stand, its rules would become the de facto national standard.
Auto makers want regulatory certainty and have urged the Trump Administration to compromise with California to avoid a prolonged legal brawl. But California progressives as usual want it their way or the highway. As Gov. Gavin Newsom declared, “California will prevail because we’re leaders in this space.”
California intends to sue to enforce its own rules, and the Supreme Court may have an opportunity to consider the case before the end of President Trump’s term. If that happens, the Justices might also consider setting guardrails on Massachusetts v. EPA, which liberals have invoked to demand climate regulation not authorized by Congress.
Most auto makers are already increasing investment in electric cars to comply with regulations in China and Europe. The Trump Administration isn’t prohibiting them from manufacturing more fuel-efficient and electric cars. Liberals call the President a totalitarian, but he’s the one giving consumers and businesses a choice.
