Cagle World

It doesn’t matter whether the impeachment trial of President Trump is already over or it drags on for months.

Two-thirds of the U.S. Senate is never going to find the president guilty of the House Democrats’ vague and bogus charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress.

Everyone’s always known that’s how it will end, even the deranged Democrats.

But Adam Schiff and his supporting cast still wasted several days of the country’s time in the Senate this past week declaring over and over that President Trump must be removed from office.

Among other hysterical things, they charged Trump is a threat to our national security, an archenemy of the Constitution and a corrupt dictator who intends to steal the 2020 election.

Democrats have proved for the last three years now that they can spot a new impeachable crime in every other presidential tweet or executive order.

But as Jay Sekulow of the Trump defense team warned the Senate on Tuesday, in their rage to take down Trump the House Democrats have made a serious mistake.

By drastically lowering the bar of impeachment, he said, Democrats have put the constitutional framework of our republic in “unimaginable” danger.

Sekulow also said he thought the impeachment of President Trump is not based on whether or not he exceeded his constitutional authority but is actually a political fight over “deep policy concerns” and “deep policy differences.”

There’s nothing new about wide policy differences between Congress and the White House and between the White House and the State Department.

One reason for that is because members of Congress and the employees of the State Department usually serve for 20 or 30 years while a president lasts eight years at most.

When a new president comes into office with his new policies – getting tough with the Soviets, expanding government health care, putting tougher economic sanctions on Iran – he often meets resistance from veteran congressmen and career bureaucrats in the state department who have their own long-held policy positions.

We saw exactly that kind of White House-State Department tension on display during the House impeachment hearings into President Trump’s Ukraine policy.

The hard anti-corruption policy the president wanted to pursue in Ukraine was criticized, resisted or subverted by state department officials who had been hired by previous presidents.

Making policy is a complicated process for any president. It’s like making sausage. It’s messy, has lots of ingredients and not pretty to watch being made.

It’s the piece of sausage – Obama’s Iran policy, for example, or Trump’s Ukraine policy – that counts in the end.

When my father had to make important decisions on national security and foreign policy matters he would have the National Security Council write up three different versions of what he could do.

The NSC – which is made up of the vice president, cabinet officials, military leaders and other top advisers – and my father would discuss all three options. Then my father would make his decision and the policy would go forward.

No one at the New York Times ever saw those other policy choices and the arguments that went on in those NSC meetings were never leaked to the media.

If transcripts of those meetings had fallen into the hands of today’s deranged Democrats, Adam Schiff would have impeached my father because he didn’t accept one of the other two choices.

Jay Sekulow was right to warn the Senate about the danger to our republic of lowering the bar of impeachment.

If we start impeaching presidents just because we don’t agree with their policies we’re never going to have another one who can get anything done.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

I must have said it a dozen times since the Democrats’ impeachment miniseries took over our televisions, but I’ll say it again.

The Democrats and their allies in the liberal media think history began this morning when they rolled out of the left side of their beds.

It happened again during the Democrats’ opening impeachment tirades in the Senate.

Democrats are still wasting our time – and ignoring their jobs – trying to prove that President Trump should be impeached because he abused the power of his office and because he obstructed Congress by claiming executive privilege.

The obstruction charges against Trump are for refusing to let administration officials testify before the impeachment hearings in the House and for withholding documents the House had requested.

Well, if using or threatening to use executive privilege for those reasons are impeachable crimes, George Washington and every president since JFK, including my father, is guilty – often on multiple counts.

In 1962, for example, JFK used executive privilege to order his military adviser General Maxwell Taylor to refuse to testify before a congressional committee investigating the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Between 1980 and 2012 it was used 25 times.

President Clinton, the all-time modern leader, asserted executive privilege 14 times to try to keep his staff from appearing before various grand juries and congressional committees.

George W. Bush used it six times, including in 2008 when he told his Attorney General to assert executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena for documents related to an investigation into who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

Meanwhile, President Obama employed executive privilege so many times that even the liberal media of the day questioned the legitimacy of invoking it.

The prime example was the infamous “Fast and Furious” case in 2012, when Attorney General Eric Holder used executive privilege to shield documents from Congress that were related to the Obama administration’s program to let illegally purchased guns flow across the Mexican border.

Congress obviously didn’t rush out and impeach those pre-Trump presidents for obstructing Congress or for posing an existential threat to the U.S. Constitution.

They let the legitimacy of invoking executive privilege in each case be decided in the courts, where it belonged. That’s why we have three branches of government.

But now, thanks to the Democrats’ blind hatred of President Trump, the bar has been lowered to where if a president doesn’t immediately roll over and give Congress whatever people or documents it wants, he’ll get impeached.

It’s been frustrating having to watch the first three ridiculously long, tedious days of the Senate impeachment hearings, which Democrats are cynically using as a weapon to stain Trump ahead of the 2020 election and hurt some Republican senators who face tight races in the fall.

Everyone has known for months what the outcome of the House Democrats’ impeachment show trial will be – the Republican Senate will never find Trump guilty.

I’m starting to really feel sorry for the members of the Senate who are trapped at their desks for twelve-hours at a time without their smartphones.

They have to sit in silence as Schiff and his solemn crew say over and over again how the U.S. Constitution and our national security were put at risk by a phone call our treasonous president made to the president of Ukraine last summer.

All those poor senators are allowed to drink is milk and water. The rest us watching the hearings on TV are lucky.

We can always get up and do a few Jello shots or drink some tequila to pass the time and ease the pain.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

You’re excused if you didn’t hear about the latest impeachment “bombshell” that exploded in the media on Wednesday.

Wednesday, after all, was a really crowded big-news day.

It was the super-duper historic day when Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats finally got their act together and solemnly paraded over to the Senate to present their articles of impeachment against the president.

It was also the day President Trump signed Phase 1 of the long-awaited and hard-fought U.S.-China trade deal – a historical event the fair-and-balanced reporters at CNN and MSNBC apparently didn’t notice.

And wasn’t it Wednesday night when the Democrats held their last debate on CNN before the Iowa caucuses?

Really? It was Tuesday night? You could have fooled me. I only watched for a few minutes. It was all I could stand.

I remember hearing something the next day about Bernie and Liz caught on an open mic accusing each other of having called each other a liar.

I also remember seeing that awful commercial my brother Ron did years ago to drum up support for the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

It’s the one where he says, “Hi. I’m Ron Reagan, life-long atheist. I’m not afraid of burning in Hell.”

I swear CNN has run that dumb ad in every Democrat debate. It’s a cheap dig at my father, and it tells me all I need to know about the values of CNN and the Democrat Party. Both stand for nothing I believe in.

The impeachment bombshell most people didn’t hear explode on Wednesday was dropped by the Government Accountability Office, which Democrats had asked last year to look into the legality of President Trump alleged “withholding” of military funding to Ukraine.

The GAO, which is an independent agency, announced that its investigators had determined that when the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget delayed the military aid to Ukraine it broke the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

The ICA is a Nixon-era law requiring the executive department to spend the money Congress has appropriated in the way Congress wants it to be spent.

It was designed to give Congress more power over the federal budget process by curtailing the president’s power to impound federal money for programs he didn’t like.

The act was passed by Congress during Watergate to punish President Nixon, who was so politically weak he didn’t even try to fight it.

It’s no coincidence, by the way, that once Congress got the upper hand over the budget process the annual deficit exploded, which is why every president since my father has supported the restoration of the impoundment power.

Democrats and the media made a really big deal out of the GAO’s decision that Trump’s OMB had violated the ICA on the Ukraine military funding issue.

“Oh my God, the president broke the law! He broke the law.”

But let’s wait half a minute. No law was broken.

The money for Ukraine was held up. It was not withheld. And it was sent by the OMB to Ukraine weeks before Congress’ deadline, which was the end of the fiscal year on Oct. 31.

Anyway, violating the Impoundment Control Act isn’t an impeachable offense. The act says Congress can try to get a court to force the president to spend what it appropriated.

The Democrats running Congress threatened to do that twice to make my father spend money he didn’t want to spend, but they never threatened him with impeachment for it.

Today’s Democrats are too deranged to be patient and do things right. They skip the going-to-court parts on everything and go straight for the death penalty – impeachment.

But don’t worry about the OMB bombshell. It was a media bombshell for half a day, but now it’s already another forgotten dud.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

The shortest world war in history is history.

Did you miss the news?

I’m talking about the big war between the U.S. and Iran that Democrats and the liberal media were hoping and maybe even praying would explode in the Middle East this week and prevent the re-election of President Trump.

The war never really happened, though. President Trump called it off before it started just before noon on Wednesday.

Actually, he never planned a war with Iran or wanted one in the first place. But I suspect some desperate Democrats did.

I think they were secretly hoping Iran’s feeble missile attack in response to the obliteration of its terrorist-in-chief Qasem Soleimani by a drone really had killed a few American soldiers in Iraq and ignited a full-scale U.S.-Iran war.

(It would have been a very short war, too, and the Iranian mullahs know it. They are thugs, but they aren’t stupid or suicidal, and they now understand the penalty for crossing one of Trump’s bright red lines.)

It’s a cynical thing to say, but a new war in the Middle East with Iran was the last hope Democrats had to achieve their dream of unseating President Trump.

The Russian Collusion Hoax was a dud. The Trump Recession didn’t happen. Trump didn’t lose the trade war with China.

And impeachment – which Democrats claimed had to be hurried through the House because Trump was a mortal danger to the Constitution and America’s national security – has turned into a prolonged partisan dirty joke with no punchline.

As anyone over 40 knows, or should know, the hysterical fear of a Republican president starting World War III is nothing new for Democrats and the liberal media.

It’s the same dumb stuff Democrats tried when my father ran for president in 1980, a year after Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah and basically handed Iran over to the mullahs.

“If you elect that warmonger Ronald Reagan,” they claimed, “the first thing he’ll do is turn Iran into a parking lot.”

And don’t forget, “He’s a dangerous anti-communist just itching to start World War III with the Soviets.”

You’d think the Democrats would have learned something when their dire predictions about my father’s foreign policy didn’t pan out, but 40 years later fearmongering about war and other calamities is still one of their favorite go-to political weapons.

For them the sky is always going to fall the day a conservative Republican is elected president.

Grandma is going to die. The KKK will make a comeback. The economy will crash. World War III will start at noon on Inauguration Day.

Another major forever-war didn’t arrive in the Middle East this week because President Trump had the sense not to use Iran’s token, face-saving response to the droning of General Soleimani as a pretext to level Tehran.

Once again he has turned out not to be as reckless or clueless as deranged Democrats and Rachel Maddow and her MSNBC/CNN pals continue to believe he is.

As long as Donald Trump is president, which looks increasingly like it will be until 2024, Democrats and the liberal media will see World War III lurking around every foreign corner.

I seriously doubt the president will get us into a real war with Iran or anyone else, including North Korea.

But to make sure WWIII doesn’t start in Iran, House Democrats and a few non-interventionist Republicans like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida passed a resolution on Thursday that specifically limits President Trump’s ability to strike Iran militarily without first getting the approval of Congress.

The resolution, which still has to pass in the Senate, is highly partisan and largely symbolic.

Putting a president’s war-waging powers back in their proper (but long ignored) Constitutional shackles is never a bad thing for Congress to do.

In this case, though, it’s at least two presidents too late.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

I’d like to see everyone have a happy and prosperous New Year.

But I’m afraid a lot of freelancers and independent contractors in California are going to have it tough in 2020.

Thanks to Democrat lawmakers in Sacramento, in fact, hundreds of thousands of part-time Uber drivers and freelance writers like me could lose their jobs or face drastic cuts in their incomes.

The culprit is Assembly Bill 5, the “progressive” new state law that rewrites the rules for part-time “gig” workers and forces companies to reclassify their independent contractors and turn them into full-time employees.

As of Jan. 2, Uber and Lyft drivers, independent truckers, freelance writers, photographers, artists and musicians and the companies who hire their services have to abide by AB 5.

The law, which was originally concocted to destroy the business models of Uber and Lyft and has exemptions for 50 professions, is a cynical and transparent gift to unions from the same Democrats who have been wrecking my one-party state for decades.

AB 5’s proud mother, leftwing Democrat Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, claims it’s intended to protect part-timers and freelancers from being “exploited” by their evil, greedy employers.

Her law is supposed to provide independent contractors with the same benefits and workplace protections that full-time employees get and – most important to the Democrats – therefore make it possible for them to unionize.

Given its leftist genes, it’s not surprising that when AB 5 was signed into law last September unions, progressives and the Uber-hating liberal media were equally thrilled.

The liberal web site Vox, calling AB 5’s passage “a historic moment” for U.S. labor, ran the headline “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere.”

Ironically, however, Vox itself has become a victim of AB 5.

The law’s many arbitrary and inflexible rules about who can work for whom and for how often include restricting freelance contractors at places like Vox from writing more than 35 columns or submissions per year.

Until the other day, Vox’s parent company, Vox Media, had about 200 part-time freelancers from California under contract to write for its sports blogging network, SB Nation.

The media company could have reclassified the California freelancers as full-time employees to comply with AB 5, as it’s in favor of forcing other companies to do.

Instead, the hypocrites running Vox Media reportedly decided to replace 200 freelancers with just 20 new part-time and full-time staffers.

Meanwhile, AB 5’s completely arbitrary number of 35 contributions per year, per “independent contractor” affects me, too.

I’m still figuring out how to legally comply with law, but I can assure that I’m not planning to move out of the state.

The good news in this latest act of liberal political lunacy is that the legal experts say there will be years of court battles over the enforcement of AB5, which has been accused, correctly, of being “irrational, vague and incoherent,” not to mention unconstitutional.

The resistance has already begun.

The California Trucking Association has filed a lawsuit seeking an exemption for its 70,000 independent truckers.

Earlier this week Uber and Postmates, the courier services provider, asked a federal court to block the law.

And California’s freelance photographers and writers are also seeking a restraining order, arguing that AB 5’s rules will destroy their livelihoods.

I wish all the lawyers well in their fight against AB 5, but in the long run, it’s probably going take a U.S. Supreme Court decision to undo all its predictably bad and unintended consequences.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

What a great holiday season it is.

Know why?

Congress is on vacation, which means all the rest of us get a break from politics.

We’re in the middle of what amounts to a national Christmas ceasefire in our never-ending, 24/7 political civil war.

Political bombshells, childish name-calling, stupid tweet battles, partisan posturing, congressional hearings, Democrat primary debates, FBI leaks, trade wars, Brexit, Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide” … all are almost totally absent from the news media.

The best present I received this year was that no one talked politics at my house all Christmas day.

The “Trump” word was never spoken. Neither was the “Pelosi” word or the “Impeachment” word.

We actually wished each other Merry Christmas, opened gifts and watched our grandkids go bonkers opening their toys.

That’s what Christmas Day in the U.S. is supposed to be all about – and used to be.

The nicest and most important present of all for me this year, however, was that my sister Patti came over and spent part of the day with us.

She and I share little common ground when it comes to politics, to put it mildly, and she had never even been to my house in Los Angeles before.

Actually, until this year, I hadn’t spoken to her since 2004, when my father’s will was read.

But when Patti was recently asked to do a TV program about our family for a cable station, she asked me for my help.

The project was going to be about what life was like for us Reagans before my father ran for governor of California and politics took over his life and changed ours forever.

The program idea didn’t work out for Patti in the end, but it brought the two of us together this year for first time since 2004.

I met her for lunch a couple of times, but we had not been with each other at Christmas since 1992 or 1993, when the family got together at my dad’s house when he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

On Wednesday Patti came over for several hours and saw my kids Cameron and Ashley. She met her grand-nieces Marilyn, who will be 4, and Penelope, who will be 2.

Patti and I sat down and talked about the family, what we we’ve been up to lately and lots of other things – but not a word about politics.

We had no good reason to discuss or argue politics.

I know how she feels about conservatives and President Trump. She knows what I think. Why bring it up?

The two of us Reagans were able to enjoy Christmas Day without getting mad at each other because, as our father used to do when his politically divided family was together, we completely avoided politics.

If Patti and I can exchange gifts and have a wonderful time without letting it be ruined by politics, I don’t see why everyone could not do the same.

In fact, keeping partisan politics out of Christmas – and all our family holiday gatherings — is the best resolution I can think of in 2020.

Happy New Year.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Did anyone else not watch the Democrat presidential debate on TV Thursday night?

I thought so.

After three months of watching Saint Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats stage their solemn impeachment circus, I decided to skip the latest “historic” debate.

I figure I had suffered enough.

I desperately needed some laughs, so on Thursday I began what I hope will be a week of binging on Christmas movies like “Elf.”

Only seven Democrats – a couple of socialists, a couple of zillionaires, a couple of moderates and small-town mayor from Indiana – qualified for this week’s primary debate in L.A.

Did moderate old Joe Biden have a “commanding performance” that quelled what the New York Times’ pre-debate piece called “the quiet rumblings” about his “abilities and long-term strength”?

Did the leftwing oldsters Liz and Bernie beat up moderate young Mayor Pete for being insufficiently socialist or a member of the donor class?

Did entrepreneur Andrew Yang, billionaire Tom Steyer, Sen. Amy Klobuchar or anyone else say anything new, interesting, bold or politically unpredictable?

Based on previous debates, I doubt all of the above.

I bet the seven Democrats on stage gave the same false promises and same canned answers to the same softball questions we’ve heard a hundred times before.

Meanwhile, in Washington, where the Democrats’ two weak and fuzzy articles of impeachment are supposed to travel from the House to the Senate for a trial, Mother Pelosi is playing games as usual.

Now she wants a quid pro quo with the Senate – “Do the trial the way I want, or I won’t send over the articles of impeachment.” 

Pelosi and other House Democrats have said over and over that they are impeaching the president not for partisan reasons but because it is their sacred duty to uphold the Constitution.

Yeah, right.

Everyone knows what it’s really all about – their blind hatred for Trump for his having beaten Hillary in 2016.

Democrats have been shoving this phony impeachment stuff down the country’s throat for three months, but the irony is that they’ve only succeeded in strengthening the president and weakening themselves.

Because of their impossible dream to impeach and remove President Trump everything is going in reverse for the Democrats.

They’ve already lost one moderate House congressman from New Jersey who’s switching to Republican and according to the polls impeachment has not hurt Trump with independent voters.

The increasingly leftist Democrat Party, which looks incapable of finding a candidate who can unseat Trump, is weaker because of impeachment.

Democrats are so blinded by their hate they don’t care how much their partisan impeachment sham has hurt themselves or the country.

In the long run, there’s a silver lining to the ugly black cloud of impeachment that has been hanging over America for three years.

Despite Pelosi’s maneuvering and the fevered hopes of Democrats and the liberal media, impeachment is going nowhere.

President Trump will never be convicted and removed by two-thirds of the Republican Senate and chances are getting better every day that he’ll be reelected next fall.

Of course, if the House of Representatives isn’t switched back to Republican control in 2020, the day after Trump is sworn in for a second term Democrats will come up with a new slate of bogus impeachment charges and our national political headache will start all over.

If there is a silver lining for today, it’s that Congress has closed down their partisan circus and gone home for Christmas so the rest of us can have a happy holiday. Merry Christmas to all.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Forget the phony solemnity about the Constitution and the rule of law.

Forget the malarkey about the president committing high crimes and misdemeanors.

We all know the real reasons Democrats are hell-bent on impeaching Donald Trump.

It’s because they hate him beyond reason and because they still believe their own hoax that he stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton.

But Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and the Democrats in the House are going to be very sorry someday for lowering the bar for impeaching a president to almost nothing.

Blinded for three years by Trump Derangement Syndrome, slobbered over and cheered on by the liberal media, thinking only in the political short-term, House Democrats have seriously hurt the country.

From now on, because of Pelosi and her motley crew, every future president will face the constant risk of being impeached for their executive decisions by a congressional body controlled by a different political party.

That means the next time a Barack Obama launches a foolish secret experiment like “Fast and Furious” that puts guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels and then refuses to give Congress whatever information it demands, Republicans in the House could file an article of impeachment against him.

Likewise, the next time a president decides to please Russia by pulling U.S. anti-missile defense systems out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as Obama did, Republicans could claim it’s a threat to national security that’s worthy of impeachment.

It’s been clear for a while that Pelosi and the Democrats have totally lost their minds over impeaching Trump.

They’ve known from the get-go that two-thirds of the Republican Senate will never vote to remove Trump, yet they have continued to pursue their impossible dream.

But let’s get real.

Even if by some miracle Trump is removed by the Senate, who do they think is going to replace him? Hillary Clinton?

House Democrats don’t seem to have thought very hard about how lowering the bar on impeachment might someday backfire on themselves.

They are fixated on damaging Trump’s chances for 2020 with whatever fake personal or weak constitutional crime they can invent – quid pro quo, bribery, cheating at golf, whatever.

If it takes Democrats two months of laughably unfair impeachment hearings and gridlock in Congress, so what?

If it takes lionizing a bunch of whining state department bureaucrats who disagreed with Trump’s Ukraine policies, so what?

If it takes making excuses for the shocking behavior of a rogue FBI, so what?

This week the Democrats and their Trump-hating allies in the liberal media fully betrayed what unprincipled hypocrites they are.

They showed they don’t give a hoot about the over-reach of a powerful government intelligence agency as long as the targets of its illegal surveillance and spying are Trump or his administration.

They Dems hardly blinked at the long list of lies, dirty tricks and abuses of power that Inspector General Michael Horowitz said the FBI’s bosses, agents and lawyers used to get federal judges to approve four surveillance warrants and ruin an innocent Trump supporter’s life, finances and reputation.

The FBI has been caught red-handed spying on Americans, entrapping innocent people and lying about evidence – and many more FBI wrongdoings will be exposed.

This whole impeachment process has been very sad for America. The whole world is laughing at us for wasting so much time on it when there’s much work to be done.

Unfortunately, thanks to Democrats’ new low-low standards for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power by a president, we might soonbe holding impeachment hearings year-round.

–

Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Impeach! Impeach! Impeach!

Removing Donald Trump from office before he can get re-elected is the only thing in Washington that Democrats and the national media really care about.

But while Thelma Pelosi and Louise Nadler speed down their constitutionally crooked backroad to impeachment, the Trump administration has been quietly tackling issues like education that are actually important for Americans.

Covered by the constant media glare of impeachment, for instance,Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is doing a great job of fixing our broken public education system.

DeVos hasn’t just been delivering the usual canned speeches lamenting our sorry public schools or extolling the blessings of school choice.

She’s doing her best to get the federal government out of public education, where it never belonged.

Described on her department’s web site as “an unrelenting champion for America’s students, educators and taxpayers,” DeVos plans to do major structural things like combining the Department of Education and the Department of Labor and spinning off a new independent agency that would handle the federal government’s $1.5 trillion student-loan portfolio.

She already has a list of smaller accomplishments too long to detail.

She’s overhauled the management of her department, implemented a pro-taxpayer budget, cut staff by 10 per cent, transferred duties to other federal agencies, thrown out 29 major regulations and done her best to do what she promised she’d do from Day One – work herself out of a job.

She’s restoring local and state control of education by ending the failed Common Core program and implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.

She’s expanded school choice opportunities in Washington, D.C. and rescinded Obama-era guidance on school discipline that tied the hands of teachers and principals.

DeVos has introduced Education Freedom Scholarships, which the department web site boasts is “the most transformative K-12 policy ever” and would provide families with up to $5 billion in scholarships to help them get the best education option possible.

Meanwhile, in higher education she’s also stuck up for free speech and religious freedom on campuses and drafted new regulations on sexual misconduct that protect survivors, hold schools accountable and ensure due process for alleged perpetrators.

It will take all of these large and small reforms, and many more, to fix our failing public schools, return genuine local control to our classrooms.

We have a long way to go to provide maximum school choice for parents – and the Democrats, unions and education industrial complex hate everything DeVos is doing.

But too bad for them.

Before Jimmy Carter invented the Department of Education in 1979, our public schools were the envy of the world. Today, 75 percent of our black and brown kids are unable to read or do math at grade level.

The federal bureaucracy in D.C. accounts for about only 9 percent of the $700 billion-plus that we spend each year on public education. But in 40 years it has managed to spend nearly a trillion bucks and done immense damage to our education system.

If I had young kids today, I wouldn’t put them in public education if all they took was recess.

I’d either homeschool them or send them to a good private school. Millions of parents would do the same if they had the choice or could afford it.

DeVos wants every kid in America to have the chance to get the same high-quality schooling hers had.

The best way to attain that goal is to get rid of the Department of Education, which is something my father said in 1979 he would do if he were elected in 1980.

Unfortunately, he was never able to fulfill that promise as president, and until Trump and DeVos came along to drain D.C.’s swamps, Carter’s gift to the teachers unions survived and grew as it slowly ruined our public schools.

It’s not hard to see why Democrats would love to impeach DeVos, too.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

“Laws are like sausages,” Otto von Bismarck supposedly said. “It is better not to see them being made.”

Suffering through far too many hours of the House impeachment this week reminded me of the truth of that political quip.

Making laws is a dirty, smelly, partisan, often corrupt business, even in the best democratic republics.

Making foreign policy is just as messy, as the parade of witnesses from the state department who appeared before Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee proved again and again.

Ambassador Yovanovitch, Ambassador Volker, Col. Vindman, Kent, Taylor, Sondland, Williams, Hill…

Schiff’s carefully chosen cast of “fact witnesses” was called in this week in hopes of proving that President Trump should be impeached for allegedly holding up U.S. military assistance to Ukraine to benefit his personal political interests at home.

The witnesses offered different, often conflicting opinions about what Trump and the U.S. should or should not have done in Ukraine.

They testified for days about what they presumed the president wanted to happen in Ukraine, what they thought he said and what they heard secondhand or thirdhand that he had apparently said.

Of all the witnesses who testified, the only one who did the right thing in the confusion of Ukraine was Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.

When he kept hearing different versions of what Trump wanted to see the Ukrainian government do or say about corruption before the hold on U.S. military aid was lifted, he dialed up the White House and asked the president directly what the heck he wanted.

That’s when Trump blurted his famous line, “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.”

Schiff’s witnesses were supposed to make the case that President Trump was guilty of offering the president of Ukraine a quid pro quo – or guilty of bribery, or abuse of power, or obstructing Congress, or too many tweets, or any impeachable “crime” that works.

The quid-pro-quo charge was the most idiotic.

Getting “something for something” is how presidents, governors, mayors, kings, dictators and popes have dealt with each other forever in the real world.

For example, JFK got Khrushchev to pull the Soviet missiles out of Cuba by secretly agreeing to take our ICBMs out of Turkey – a presidential quid pro quo we didn’t learn about for decades.

FDR and Churchill traded a few quids for quos with Joe Stalin at Yalta that meant Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe became part of the Evil Empire for half a century.

And when President Obama made his botched nuclear deal with Iran it included air-mailing the mullahs $1.8 billion in cash as extra leverage – another secret quid pro quo that was accidentally discovered.

If you don’t think those important quid pro quos benefited the domestic political fortunes of the presidents who made them, you’re living in the same fantasy world as the Democrats and the liberal media who think presidential history started this morning.

What Trump is accused of doing wrong in Ukraine is small potatoes to everyone but the desperate Democrats who are going to be real sorry they started down their Impeachment Highway to Nowhere.

There were no bombshells, no smoking guns, just lots of blown smoke.

The polls are already trending in favor of Trump. Independent voters are not buying Schiff’s Ukrainian impeachment sham.

The people who think Trump should be impeached today are the same ones who wanted him impeached on the day he was elected.

The good news today for all Americans is that the hearings are over and the House and the Senate are taking about 10 days off for Thanksgiving.

You might say the turkeys are leaving Washington so the rest of us can enjoy ours. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Copyright 2019 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].