July 29, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Conservative Attorneys General should not hire left-wing partisan law firms
By Rick Manning
With the January 6 Committee’s televised hearings fading toward our rearview mirrors, it is worth reflecting on how the Left’s plans go far beyond holding televised hearings for the MSNBC crowd. Nancy Pelosi’s members already voted to impeach President Trump over January 6. But that has never been enough. It has always been far more personal. Don’t forget, Democratic members of the House are working right now with the left-wing trial lawyers at the Cohen Milstein law firm to impose personal liability on President Trump for January 6. The Left is unified, with their lawyers at their side, in trying to personally destroy President Trump.
This unified left-wing legal attack brings to mind something that has been grinding on me: why is it that our lawyers seem to always drift over and help the Left, when the Left is so obviously unified against us and would never come to our aid or help put money in our coffers?
For a basic illustration, consider how Todd Rokita, the Republican Attorney General in Indiana, and Lynn Fitch, the Republican Attorney General of Mississippi, both have big-money contracts with Cohen Milstein, a law firm of left-wing trial lawyers that is working with Democrats in Congress to try and impose personal liability on President Trump over January 6. This law firm has made a passion project out of suing President Trump, first over his hotels and now over January 6. And it doesn’t stop there, as they manage to hit almost all the bells in the liberal pinball machine. They sue companies to force more money into woke corporate diversity initiatives. They donate their political money to left-wing candidates. And they slide settlement money into the pockets of the ACLU.
It is impossible to imagine left-wing Attorneys General signing up a Pro-Trump legal team for a big payout; be serious, they wouldn’t sign up any lawyer who hits even a few notes on the conservative banjo. But here we are with two of our attorneys general feeding this rats nest of left-wing trial lawyers with big-money contracts. Politicians aren’t known for being the most upstanding people, but feeding the enemy like this should be a bridge too far even for them.
And it is not just Cohen Milstein—there are countless examples of our states’ lawyers working with law firms run by hardcore liberal activists and big-time Democratic operatives. I could go on and on with the betrayals. But just consider for a second that Indiana has been paying the Perkins Coie law firm for years. As a refresher, Perkins Coie has long been the Democratic Party’s go-to law firm, employing (until last year) the Left’s most prominent election lawyer: Marc Elias. We are talking about a law firm that is deep into the left-wing swamp. Perkins Coie and Elias were at the center of the Clinton campaign’s work with Fusion GPS on the now infamous Steele Dossier, with its discredited attacks on President Trump. They were also the architect of the push to expand mail-in ballots across the nation for the 2020 election. And Elias has been described “as quarterback of the Biden campaign's state-level litigation team.” While Perkins Coie and their top political hitter were busy with all of this (and more), Indiana was sending them checks, feeding the beast.
To anyone who has fought the Left, and seen how they play their games, it is a slap in the face to watch conservative elected officials team up with Cohen Milstein, Perkins Coie, and others of their ilk, enriching the other side without hesitation. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of conservative or neutral law firms who could do the job.
The Left gets a huge amount from these Benedict Arnold handouts, not just in terms of money, but in prestige and respectability. And ostensibly conservative state AG’s acting like democratic mega-donors doesn’t change the brutal knifing of our side one bit. The left-wing trial lawyers at Cohen Milstein are still suing President Trump and sending money hand-over-fist to liberal politicians, now they are just funding their efforts with money from red states. And it is no different for Perkins Coie.
It is about time that elected state AG’s like Rokita and Finch wake up and realize that this fight is hard enough without our side helping the Left. If they don’t, maybe it is time that we demand better of them. Because the Left is playing for keeps, with a united front, and no amount of pretending changes that fact.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/conservative-attorneys-general-should-not-hire-left-wing-partisan-law-firms/
Video: Biden's Recession. LIVE!
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsAUmsqb3v0
Cartoon: Reimagine Disaster
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/cartoon-reimagine-disaster/
Biden’s recession is here and now
July 28, 2022, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ report showing the second quarterly decline in a row of real, inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product, with GDP contracting by another 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022:
“The United States economy is officially in a recession with the past two quarters contraction being reported by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Most Americans already knew that the economy was in trouble due to the forty-year high inflation that has bloomed due to unnecessary federal government spending splurges since December of 2020, intractable supply chain issues that are exacerbated by a Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who is more interested in his next hoped for job than the one he currently holds, and U.S. based multinationals obstinate insistence in having their supply chains dependent upon the Chinese Communist Party rulers of mainland China.
“Joe Biden and his apologists will try to blame everyone from Putin to businesses for this economic contraction, but the ugly truth is that recession was the only possible outcome of his fundamental transformation policies which are putting a regulatory chokehold on domestic production. Democrats used to depend upon blue collar workers and the unions that represent them for their electoral success, and Joe Biden might be the last Democrat presidential candidate elected who outwardly appealed to workers in hard hats. Unfortunately, his administration’s determination to sentence America to global dependency, most notably but not only in the energy sector, is an economic death sentence to much of middle-class America.
“The Biden administration’s determination to outsource all environmental risk is guaranteed to outsource all of the jobs that come with that risk. Joe Biden argues that there cannot be a recession without job losses. What will he say when the full impact of his policies trickle down to workers later this year when the unemployment lines are the only things that are growing. I hope this does not happen, but it is the inevitable consequence of an administration at war with the engine of the American economy.”
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2022/07/bidens-recession-is-here-and-now/
Byron York: The Biden recession
By Byron York
THE BIDEN RECESSION. This morning the Commerce Department announced the economy shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022. That comes after the announcement last April that the economy contracted by 1.6% in the first quarter of this year. Now, the United States has had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is the popularly accepted definition of a recession. So it's official: The U.S. is in a recession.
But it is not official. Denying long-standing standards, the Biden administration will not admit that the economy is in recession. For days leading up to the Commerce Department announcement, senior administration officials made the case that two quarters of negative growth do not necessarily equal a recession, and in this case, although such a situation is exceedingly rare, the economy has experienced two quarters of contraction yet is not in recession.
The administration's allies are accepting the Biden argument. "Some liberal media outlets are beginning to fall in line with the Biden administration's spin on redefining what a recession is," Fox News reported this week. "There's been a major push by the White House to preemptively declare that even if the U.S. economy has shrunk in two consecutive quarters, that doesn't necessarily mean the economy is in recession." To cite one example, on the night before the numbers were released, Politico described the coming government figures as "the first, possibly inaccurate and certain to be revised reading of U.S. economic performance in the second quarter of this deeply weird economic year."
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But why would President Joe Biden and his senior aides go to such lengths to deny that the U.S. is in a recession? Perhaps the best place to look for an answer is the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
The president's job approval rating now stands at 37.8% in the RealClearPolitics average. Remember when Biden's rating seemed stuck in the low 40s? It stayed there for six months or so, but around May of this year, the president's numbers fell through the 40% barrier and now appear to be approaching the mid-30% range. That is "the worst of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II," according to the analysis site FiveThirtyEight.
Why has Biden gone so low? The economy, mostly. Huge numbers of people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and most cite the economy as the reason things have gone wrong. Again, from FiveThirtyEight: "Many factors are driving this overall feeling of dissatisfaction among Americans, but inflation is arguably the biggest reason. Inflation, which is at its highest point since the early 1980s, has consistently ranked as the top issue Americans are worried about. ... In the most recent FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, 62% of Americans told us that inflation or increasing prices was one of the most important issues facing the country, ranking far ahead of any other topic we asked about."
Things are bad now, but they could always get worse. And that is why the White House exhibited sheer terror at the prospect of a recession on top of inflation.
Can you imagine what will happen to Biden's job approval rating if voters blame him for plunging the nation into recession, in addition to soaring prices? When pollsters ask about Biden, his handling of the economy already rates as the lowest among several measures of job performance. For example, in the most recent Quinnipiac University Poll, just 28% of respondents approved of the way Biden is handling the economy, versus 65% who disapproved. A 28-65 split is pretty bad news if you're in the White House.
Thus the White House pushback against even more bad news. "Even if [the GDP growth] number is negative, we are not in a recession now," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday on Meet the Press. "And I would, you know, warn that we should not be characterizing that as a recession."
So look for the White House to continue making its case that there is something unique about today's economy and therefore the traditional measure of two consecutive quarters of negative growth equaling a recession does not apply.
If that is true, it would be the first time in 75 years. "It's rare for there to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP without a recession," the Washington Post noted recently. "In fact, George Washington University professor Tara Sinclair said the only time on record appears to have been 1947."
It's a pretty weak case, but it's all the White House has. "We're not going to be in a recession," Biden said this week. "The employment rate is still one of the lowest we've had in history — it's in the 3.6% area. We still find ourselves with people investing. My hope is we go from this rapid growth to a steady growth. And so we'll see some coming down. But I don't think we're going to — God willing, I don't think we're going to see a recession."
The people should hope Biden is right. But they fear he is wrong.
To view online: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-biden-recession