As the House gets started with public hearings on impeachment, we should start thinking of how this partisan impeachment will play out if it reaches the Senate.

I’ve been leaning on the insight of Kelly Johnston—a former secretary of the Senate.

He says a critical moment will arise as soon as any “Articles” arrive in the Senate, but before any substantive proceedings occur.  Under rules, the Senate must approve a “Motion to Proceed” to consider the articles.

At the first sign of objection from a Senator, McConnell should move to shut the whole thing down, saying, effectively:

“This far and no farther. We will not put our nation at risk of a future littered with these sort of vendettas dressed in the garb of impeachment. We won’t ever approve a purely partisan Article of Impeachment for trial.”

And the thus the Senate would flush these articles of impeachment from the record as it stands today.

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Recently failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke crudely told Americans he wanted to seize their guns. “Yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” he said.

Many decried this brazen call for a violation of the 2nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The right to bear arms is a crucial part of American liberty. It’s also a key part of protecting oneself in a dangerous world.

This past week, a Florida woman—eight months pregnant—and her family were brutally attacked by robbers. The robbers pistol-whipped her husband and manhandled her daughter. But the woman acted quickly. She ran into her bedroom, grabbed an AR-15, and fired. The robbers raced out of the house, one of them falling dead in a nearby ditch.

This story reminds us of fundamental truths:

Don’t rob people.

Don’t violate the constitutional rights of citizens.

And definitely don’t mess with a pregnant American woman—or her AR-15.

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In Hong Kong, protestors are risking their lives to maintain their independence from China. While they put life and limb on the line, they’re waving American flags and singing our national anthem. Right now, the United States is engaged in a trade war with that very same government that the people of Hong Kong are fighting against.

That’s why the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act should be passed and signed immediately. The bill, which has bipartisan support in the Senate and House, reaffirms our commitment to Hong Kong’s special status and sanctions those who oppress the city.

Both Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell have signaled their support for the law, which is a rarity in modern politics. The people of Hong Kong deserve independence. Passing this bill won’t solve their struggle for liberty, but President Trump’s signature will show that the world’s sole superpower is on Hong Kong’s side, and on the side of freedom.

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There are three paths before Senate Majority Leader McConnell when it comes to any articles of impeachment the House eventually sends the Senate’s way.

One is short: a quick dismissal by the Senate.

One is long: an extensive trial that would let the president and his defenders expose wrongdoing by Democrats and their ”permanent bureaucracy” allies.

The third—the only approach that is obviously wrong but that may also be the most likely outcome—would be a far more limited trial that would serve only to reward Democrats for their bad behavior before reaching the foreordained conclusion that President Trump will not be removed from office.

There’s a lot of appeal to the first in my list: a long, deep dive.

There’s also a strong argument to be made for peremptory dismissal—think of it as a motion for summary judgment.

Whatever course Leader McConnell takes, he should take care to not legitimize this sham impeachment.

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$52 trillion dollars. That’s the price-tag for Elizabeth Warren’s plan to bring single-payer, government-run health care to America. And, believe it or not, that number may actually be a conservative estimate for what Medicare-for-all would cost.

Analysts across the political spectrum have panned her plan to pay for all of this. And it’s no surprise, given the details.

For example, she wants the IRS to do better at collecting tax revenue … 65 times better than even the best independent estimates suggest they can do. And even though she’s said the middle class won’t pay more under her plan, she’s calling for $9 trillion in tax hikes on payrolls—an increase that’s sure to affect job prospects and wages for the middle-income Americans.

It’s hard to believe that Elizabeth Warren’s plan stands any chance of being passed into law. But voters are the ones who ultimately have to guarantee that her ridiculous plan gets left on the ash heap of history.

 

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Abraham Lincoln remains our most revered political leader, but even some of his admirers misunderstand his rise to power. They believe Lincoln only became president in 1860 because Democrats divided, and three major candidates split the votes against him. In fact, those three opponents drew a combined total far less than Lincoln’s hefty majorities in 15 of the 18 free states of the union—providing more than enough electoral votes for decisive victory. The only states Lincoln failed to carry were the fifteen slave states, which naturally opposed a candidate who said: “If slavery isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong.”

In Lincoln’s re-election run in 1864, he won an even greater landslide: winning the popular vote by 10 percent, and carrying 22 of 25 states. His example reminds us that great presidential leadership relies on clear-cut majority support, not the cobbled together, squeaker victories that seem to obsess too many strategists and commentators as they look toward 2020.

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Representative Ilhan Omar, known for demagoguery about the Middle East, recently displayed her appalling ignorance about the United States.

Just last week, 405 members of Congress united to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenian Christians by Turkish Muslims in 1915. As one of only 14 House members refusing to support this resolution, Omar declared: “A true acknowledgment of historical crimes against humanity must include … Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of indigenous people in this country.”

In fact, peak indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans amounted to 3 to 5 million, and no credentialed historian has ever claimed than more than 18 million lived on this continent. Omar’s claim of “hundreds of millions” of victims laughably misses the mark and historians agree that the vast majority of native losses came through disease, not massacres.

Ilhan Omar’s instinct to insult and assault the USA flippantly disregards historical facts.

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The Pew Research Center is out with a sobering new report revealing dramatic changes in the American religious landscape.

The survey from 2018 and 2019 found 65 percent of American adults described themselves as Christians when asked about their religious affiliation. That figure, however, is down 12 percentage points just over the last decade. The share of the population identified as religiously unaffiliated, the nones—n-o-n-e-s—are now at 26 percent. That’s up 17 percent just over the last 10 years.

That’s a tremendous change in just one decade.

Even more alarming is the generational breakdown of the pattern.

The growth of the religiously unaffiliated, “is most pronounced among young adults.” That fact, above all, should have our attention.

We’re witnessing the rapid and accelerating secularization of America.

And the data would indicate no sign that these trends will be slowed, much less reversed.

For the Christian world, the mission field is getting ever closer to home.

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“You don’t hear it enough. You do an incredible job. The people of this country know it. And the people of this country love you.”

That was President Trump’s message to police officers in his recent address to police chiefs from across America.

He used the backdrop of Chicago, the most violent big city in America and perhaps its most anti-Trump, to contrast his values with those of Leftist enclaves like Chicago.

Trump recognized a Chicago police officer recently injured in the line of duty declaring, “An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans.”

He also took direct aim at Chicago’s sanctuary city dogmatism announcing, “I will never put the needs of illegal immigrant criminals before I put the needs of law-abiding citizens. It’s very simple to me.”

His message was very simple indeed. Trump stands with law enforcement and the law-abiding. His detractors do not.

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Recently, candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax, which is a tax on wealth that has already been earned, taxed and saved.

This sounded historically familiar to me, so I talked to my friend Amity Shlaes, a renowned economic historian and author of “The Forgotten Man,” a history of the Great Depression. She confirmed to me that under the New Deal there were, indeed, several wealth taxes.

The result of this general war on business and war on wealth was what she labeled “the Depression within the Depression”—that brutal period from 1937-1938 when unemployment, still over ten percent, shot back up even higher. The anti-business attitude of the New Deal prolonged and, she said, “put the ‘great’ in Great Depression, no doubt about it.”

A wealth tax? We’ve been there. Done that. Crashed the economy. This is one experiment that we’d be fools to try again.

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