Monthly Archives: March 2022

Mark Sherman| The Associated Press

Gorsuch new book calls for civility and better legal access

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's new book calls for civility, and better access and understanding of the legal system for Americans.

Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON Justice Neil Gorsuch is speaking this weekend to the conservative legal group that boosted his Supreme Court candidacy, in a session at a Florida resort that is closed to news coverage.

Gorsuch is billed as the banquet speaker Friday at the Florida chapter of the Federalist Societys annual meeting, which is being held at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista.

The schedule on the organizations website notes, The banquet is closed to press. Neither the Federalist Society nor the Supreme Court immediately offered any explanation.

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The two-day meeting also will feature former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as well as a session billed The End of Roe v. Wade? that will be moderated by a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump.

The high court is weighing a major rollback of abortion rights, and could overrule the 1973 Roe decision.

Abortion debate: Speakers debate abortion in 30-second chunks as Florida's controversial bill gets early OK

The Federalist Society typically allows reporters to cover its meetings. That was the case in 2017, whenGorsuch addressed more than 2,000 peopleat a black-tie dinner at Washingtons Union Station, seven months after he joined the Supreme Court.

Gorsuchs ascension to the nations highest court owes at least in part to his inclusion on a list of possible nominees that the Federalist Society helped compile and that Trump issued during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

Shortly after taking office, Trump nominated Gorsuch for the seat left vacant bythe death of Justice Antonin Scaliain February 2016. Republicans who controlled the Senate refused to confirm former President Barack Obamas nominee, Merrick Garland.

With DeSantis and Gorsuch on the schedule, the meeting features two prominent public figures who have made a point of not wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic.

At high court arguments in January,Gorsuch was the only justice who did not wear a mask on the bench. His seatmate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has had diabetes since childhood and did not attend arguments in person, although she did not ascribe her absence to Gorsuchs decision.

Disneys website says, Face coverings are required for all Guests (ages 2 and up) in all indoor locations, regardless of vaccination status.

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Justice Gorsuch in Florida for Federalist Society talk ...

Updated Mar. 8, 2022. One hundred forty lies and counting.

More than one year into President Joe Bidens time in the White House and the end to his lies is nowhere in sight. Here is part three of The Federalists rigorous coverage keeping the Biden administration accountable with substantive fact-checking throughout the presidents tenure.

You can find part two of The Full List Of Every Lie Joe Biden Has Told As President here.

Shortly after he announced Russian oil would no longer be imported into the U.S., Biden claimed that he never stifled the U.S. oil and gas industry.

Its simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. That is simply not true, Biden insisted.

The truth is, Biden has done nothing but sabotage the U.S. oil and gas industry and replaced it with his green energy policy agenda. The president used his first year in office to wreck domestic production by suspending oil and gas leases, axing projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, canceling Arctic drilling leases, and pushing a cascade of taxes and regulation on the industry.

As a result, domestic gas prices were rising dramatically well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Painful prices at the pump have quickly become asore spot for Americans, many of whom have indicated theyre looking for a change in the November midterms.

Originally posted here:

The Full List Of Every Lie Biden Has Told As President: 140 And Counting - The Federalist

U.S. Capitol Police lacked guidance and training to handle the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a new report says.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that most of the 315 officers interviewed felt severely unprepared to handle any unauthorized breach of Capitol property. The report reaffirms what multiple other watchdog organizations labeled as a massive security failure by the Capitol Police and House of Representatives leaders, who failed to give the officers clear direction and autonomy to make security decisions.

At least 211 of the officers testified to GAO that they had little to no guidance from leaders in the force before the events despite intelligence indicating there would be a major demonstration and possibly rowdy crowd. Even during the height of the Capitol riot, at least 209 officers admitted that instructions were slightly clear, not at all clear, or not provided.

At least 80 respondents also claimed they were hesitant to use force against violators due to fear of disciplinary actions from the department and a lack of understanding about what kind of force would be appropriate to use against rioters. As a result, more than half of the officers questioned by the GAO, 180, said they desired more training that is realistic and gives practical steps to control a crowd.

After the 2020 summer of destructive riots, when polls showed a lack of confidence in law enforcement, its no surprise that understaffed police departments would urge their officers to cut back on potentially controversial actions to avoid becoming a target for racial justice rioters. At the time of the Capitol riot, the departments force policy stated that officers are only authorized to use the level of force that appears reasonably necessary to bring a subject under control while protecting the lives of officers and others.

One officer even testified in the GAO report that the Capitol Police department is always worried about optics and never really want[s] us to go hands on with the public.

Several respondents stated that the concern with optics was related to leaderships perception of the desires of Members of Congress, the report clarified.

The last time we heard about bad optics related to Capitol law enforcement was when former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned from his leadership post shortly after Jan. 6, toldThe Washington Post that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is ultimately responsible for the security of the Capitol, denied his request for the National Guard to assist his officers. Sund specifically noted that PelosisHouse Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving claimed that deploying the Guard would be bad optics, especially for House leaders who previously shunned using the military against civilian rioters.

As a result, at least 151 respondents claimed there was a lack of leadership and communication surrounding the events on Jan. 6. Approximately 55 officers agreed that the leadership in the Capitol Police department needs to be changed or improved.

Capitol Police officials and evenD.C. Mayor Muriel Bowserhaveadmittedthat Jan. 6 exposed key failures of the law enforcement department, but so far, the department has largely failed to implement the recommendations made by the Capitol Police Inspector General and others.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.

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Report: Capitol Police Were Severely Unprepared To Handle Events Of J6 - The Federalist

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven thus far to be a difficult puzzle for the American right. The reaction of conservatives to the foreign policy of the Barack Obama years was to slam his decisions as unserious, naive, or weak, inviting Americas enemies to exploit us.

This is their natural posture, and one that has largely held despite Donald Trumps very different approach to foreign policy. President Joe Bidens administration has allowed conservatives to return to this posture in its first year, particularly in the misbegotten Afghanistan exit, which went so terribly and embarrassed Americans, even those who supported an end to the war.

The trouble with Ukraine for the right is that it cuts in several different directions, and leaves their leaders uncertain as to the proper and politically justifiable response. As I predicted last week, Trump himself is facing this difficulty today. But there is a path forward for conservatives that rejects both the reflexive anti-interventionism of the New Right and the reflexive interventionism of neoconservatism.

In illuminating that path, it must be acknowledged that the latter approach set the conservative national security agenda for a disastrous 20 years. Incepted in the debates over whether America should go to Baghdad in the 1991 war, the neoconservative domination of the rights national security vision was rooted in two premises.

One was that America was positively obligated to advance the world toward the broad sunlit uplands of liberal democracy. (You might call it a progressive ethic.) The other premise was that America could do pretty much anything. This was an easy sell in the 1990s, in the golden moment when America actually could do nearly anything outside the Mogadishu city limits, anyway. The reality of American power, the fact of what America could do, obscured the need for a debate on what America should do.

Sometime around the April 2004 battle for Sadr City, the limits of what America could do came into focus. That focus became increasingly sharp through the next decade, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on to no discernible purpose, as the ISIS threat flared up, as America involved itself in the Yemeni war, and as Americans found themselves fighting and dying in the remote Sahel.

Whatever sense of purpose attached itself to the post-9/11 wars ebbed away as Americans grasped that they were effectively locked into small and bloody conflicts, endless scraps with ferocious tribesmen and motivated fanatics, in faraway places of which they knew little and cared less. One of the neoconservative pillars was eroded, and eventually fell.

The other pillar asserting an American mission to remake the world experienced its apogee in January 2005, with George W. Bushs second inaugural. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world, said the president, and he committed America to [t]he great objective of ending tyranny. That commitment lasted just under 24 months. By the close of that presidents second term, American objectives had diminished from ending tyranny worldwide to pacifying Anbar.

As John Agresto wrote in a piece in Commentary magazine a decade ago:

Dont all people yearn for freedom? we have asked. And we assume the answer is yes. But the answer is no. Some people, perhaps most people, prefer other goods. Indeed, some people would rather be holy than free, or safe than free, or be instructed in how they should lead their lives rather than be free. Many prefer the comfort of strong answers already given rather than the openness and hazards of freedom. There are those who would never dream of substituting their will for the imams or pushing their desires over the customs and traditions of their families. Some men kiss their chains.

As good Americans, we may wish to say that all people deserve freedom. But to say that all people desire it is flat-out wrong.

Set against this record of squandered lives and opportunity, the New Rights reaction to it a full-on descent into anti-interventionism that would be familiar to a prairie populist of 1937 is completely understandable. Whatever the objective merits, their reaction is a rational one. The New Right anti-interventionists note, correctly, that they bear little responsibility for the parlous state of Americas national security now. But they err in their belief that their policy and ideological preferences represent a road not traveled.

The destructive arrogance of neoconservatism is matched by the abysmal historical record of American isolationism and anti-interventionism, which took America out of the European tumult of the 1920s and 1930s, to no ones benefit; and which also sank America into a brief period of quasi-isolationism in the post-Vietnam 1970s, culminating in real existential danger to America by that decades end.

If the twin premises of neoconservatism have been shown wrong by events, then the twin premises of the anti-interventionist New Right that America will be fine without any engagement abroad, and the world will allow us a peaceful withdrawal from the same are being proven wrong this very moment.

There is no purpose in recapitulating the scope and meaning of the Ukrainian war here. Suffice it to say that if a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine to borrow a phrase deployed by the New Right in its arguments against American involvement proceeds in less than a week to the Russian dictator obliquely threatening nuclear war upon the United States, then we may have no real choice but to be involved.

I dont mean going to war: That would be insane, futile, and disastrous, and the chances for an actual nuclear exchange, whatever it is, would be unacceptably high. I do mean doing things the New Right doesnt wish to do: taking sides, rendering moral judgments, and sending guns and ammunition to the people of Ukraine.

The American people agree with me. They didnt one week ago. They do now. They do because the policy space in this sphere is shifting rapidly right out from under the feet of everyone who believed that the inevitable conservative stance on national security was henceforth anti-war, anti-intervention, and isolationist. The New Right, focusing upon ideological and policy battles, failed to address the real arena where policy is made. It accurately took the measure of neoconservatives and failed to take the measure of Americans.

It turns out that Americans grasp that its foolish to try to make people like themselves but they sure are happy to lend a hand when they see people who are like themselves. It also turns out that Americans have a pretty good grasp of the national interest, and factor both sentiment and calculation into their preference on what ought to be done.

What we see illuminated in the rapid shift of Americans on Ukraine is actually the pathway toward a moderate, realist, interest-based American national security approach that falls into neither the cul de sac of the New Right, nor the dead end utopianism of neoconservatism. An America that has no messianic mission, does not automatically assume that it can do anything, and also possesses the self-confidence and competence to act as a force for good in the wider world, is an America that reflects what Americans actually want. It is an America where a real discussion of the national interest can be had, without the obscuring and distorting priors inflicted by neocons and New Right alike.

The signal quality of this approach not non-ideological, but perhaps prudentially ideological is its ability to allow circumstance to shape American engagements. Pull away the millennial ambitions of a perfected world, and it becomes possible to grasp that America need not squander blood and treasure in Niger, or Yemen, or Helmand. Discard the rigid strictures of a belief that America can do no good, and it becomes possible to understand that America can see to its own interest and be a force for freedom in places like Ukraine, Korea, and Taiwan.

What does this prudentially ideological, interest-based national-security conservatism look like now? It is probably a singular focus upon the threat from the Peoples Republic of China our only true peer competitor and existential threat coupled with an understanding that the peace of Europe, frayed as it is, must be maintained so we can keep that focus.

It is probably a renewed attention to our southern border, where state collapse has rendered Mexico more antagonist than friend. It is probably the defense of a global order where America is the security hegemon, and the American dollar the currency of choice not because we seek to rule, but because the benefits to Americans are so manifest, and so bountiful.

As in so many areas of American life, in the realm of foreign policy we have placed our trust in the experts, and see them squander and abuse it, leaving Americans feeling ignored and disrespected. It is time to listen to them, and in so doing, chart a path toward a clear-eyed foreign policy that maintains order, security, and peace, while seeking our national interest above all.

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Ukraine, The New Right, And Defending The West - The Federalist