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Michael Sussmann Free And Peter Navarro In Shackles Epitomize America’s Two-Tier Justice
What do you do when your every institution has been weaponized against you? What do you do when there is a two-tier, no-justice system?
The split-screen of a smug and triumphant Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann walking free from D.C. federal court, and a harried and bewildered former Donald Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro being hauled before it, following his account of a harrowing arrest and detainment, ought to be ingrained indelibly in the American mind.
It sends an unmistakable message: We can get you anytime, anywhere, on any grounds we choose. You can’t touch even a single one of ours.
If by some strange occurrence one of ours is brought before a court, the judge and jury will be rigged against you. “I dare you to ask me to recuse with an acquaintance on the stand,” the judge will say. “What’s a lie to our FBI among friends,” the jury will say. Especially when the lie is a useful one.
The institutions Democrats’ comrade colluded with will be absolved of blame by the putatively adversarial prosecutor representing you, the people. That prosecutor will be plodding, and hew to process crimes against bit players, while the statutes of limitations for the most serious crimes committed by the biggest fish lapse.
You won’t be able to discern whether he is building a masterful case to take us all down, or insulating the very institutions he has served for and with for years, and to which he ultimately answers. That’s the point.
Real conspiracies to concoct fake ones aimed at destroying your singular representative against us will neither be fully revealed nor prosecuted. You will be made to accept it, hanging on every unredacted morsel and revelation, yet waiting in vain for justice.
Conversely, if anyone who can even be remotely affiliated with you ever lashes out in any way — say, over an election in which rules were changed on the fly by non-legislators; an election in which those altered rules created an unprecedented opportunity for fraud that could never be audited because of its remote nature; an election that the most powerful institutions in the country colluded to “fortify” on behalf of their man; an election in which not a court in the land would hear the cases on their merits — it will be cast as an insurrection undertaken by terrorists. (If you raise these points, of course, you too may be cast as a potential terrorist, and at minimum censored.)
Never mind your universal condemnation of the worst acts among the small percentage of the tens of thousands of peaceful, which opponents use to smear your entire movement; that the Democrat narrative is fraudulent: that the only fatalities were found among the putative terrorists. Leftists lie about that point and won’t release the thousands of hours of footage of what transpired. They won’t tell you what their assets were doing on the ground and won’t actually charge anyone with insurrection while they equate them with 9/11 hijackers, kamikaze pilots, and Confederates.
They’ll hold some of the “insurrectionists,” even those slapped with trumped-up trespassing charges, in jail for months on end, and make their lives a living hell. They’ll argue to similarly disposed judges that political wrongthink makes Americans a danger to society, demanding they be kept in jail. They’ll argue for giving the accused terrorism enhancements in their sentences. Some will be pushed to suicide.
When their allies burn down cities, they’ll release them en masse, and if absolutely unavoidable, ensure their sentences are minimized. You won’t mind.
They’ll smear your entire political movement as terroristic in the court of Congress when they can’t do it in the court of law. They’ll pursue again your singular representative, his colleagues, allies, and on down to the most remotely related activists with a congressional probe consisting entirely of us — kind of like the juries you’ll be up in front of.
The probe will be of dubious constitutionality. It will break their own rules. It will abuse targets with the most awesome and chilling powers they have, and seek to break and bankrupt them. They won’t be able to do a thing about it. The process, at minimum, will be the punishment. If they refuse to participate in their own self-immolation, the ruling class will sic their friends in law enforcement on them to hold them criminally liable.
They’ll wreck executive privilege and destroy a whole host of norms in the process while claiming we’re defending them. Do you think your leader will hold us to account?
And then they’ll engage in a society-widewar on wrongthink aimed at smearing and toxifying anyone who dares hold your views, censoring them, hounding them out of public life, and threatening to treat them as terrorists too. They’ll begin the work of building a social credit system with American characteristics where your every wrong thought can and will be used against you.
If you question the ruling class’s authority or the legitimacy of their rule, well, they have a domestic counterterrorism plan for that. This is our democracy, you see. And in our democracy, we win, and you lose.
What do you do when your every institution has been weaponized against you? What do you do when there is a two-tier, no-justice system? What do you do when all the foundations of the system you thought we had have been eroded?
These are the questions those who ask our vote must answer. If they cannot, or will not do so — if they refuse to even recognize the magnitude and gravity of the rampant injustices we are facing as a people — they are simply unfit to lead.
Ben Weingarten is a Federalist Senior Contributor, senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Claremont Institute. He was selected as a 2019 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow of the Fund for American Studies, under which he is currently working on a book on U.S.-China policy. Ben writes on national security and foreign policy, economics, and politics for publications including City Journal, Conservative Review and PJ Media. He is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media, a media consulting and production company dedicated to advancing conservative principles. Ben is also a 2015 Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute. You can find his work at benweingarten.com, and follow him on Twitter @bhweingarten.
Open letter to President Obama (Part 644)
(Emailed to White House on 6-10-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here.
The federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation. We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding principles that made our country great. We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. The recent scandals in our government have proved my point. In fact, the jokes you made at Ohio State about possibly auditing them are not so funny now that reality shows how the IRS was acting more like a monster out of control. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.
______________________
We can fix the IRS problem by going to the flat tax and lowering the size of government.
Did President Obama and his team of Chicago cronies deliberately target the Tea Party in hopes of thwarting free speech and political participation?
Was this part of a campaign to win the 2012 election by suppressing Republican votes?
Perhaps, but I’ve warned that it’s never a good idea to assume top-down conspiracies when corruption, incompetence, politics, ideology, greed, and self-interest are better explanations for what happens in Washington.
Writing for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has a much more sober and realistic explanation of what happened at the IRS.
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
And my colleague Doug Bandow, in an article for the American Spectator, adds his sage analysis.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
I actually think he is letting the IRS off the hook too easily.
- It has thieving employees.
It has incompetent employees.- It has thuggish employees.
- It has brainless employees.
- It has protectionist employees.
- It has wasteful employees.
- And it has victimizing employees.
But Doug’s overall point obviously is true.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
Amen. Let’s rip out the internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
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At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme asthis Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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