Dems Maintain Their Tenuous Relationship With the Truth

The great homespun American humorist Will Rogers once explained that he belonged to no organized political party. "I am," he said, "a Democrat."

Democrats, however, are far more organized these days than are the Republicans, and we’ve recently received proof of this in the Mueller Report.

That report, according to U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, demonstrates that there was no collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russians, and, according to Barr, it also demonstrates that there was no obstruction of justice on the part of President Donald Trump.

Given that the special counsel was appointed because of suspicions of collusion and obstruction we now know that the basis for his appointment simply did not exist. Why, then, did that appointment occur, and from whence came the perceived need for an investigation that hobbled a duly-elected leader of the nation?

For many weeks it has been evident that the Mueller appointment and the Russia Collusion story were, in the words of discredited FBI agent Peter Strzok, and his paramour, Lisa Page, an "insurance policy," against the election and then the continuance in office of Donald Trump.

The creation of that "insurance policy," came about because of cooperation (collusion?) between the campaign of Hillary Clinton and sympathetic officials in American intelligence such as John Brennan and James Clapper, as well as  colleagues in law enforcement at the Department of Justice — such as Sally Yates, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, and probably many others.

This was the work of a very organized political party, seeking to preserve its power.

While the Russian collusion hoax, and its associated fantasy of presidential obstruction of justice, has in the words of Conrad Black, turned out to be a "Brobdingnagian canard," it's one that Democrats seem still to embrace, or at least it is the ostensible justification for what promises to be endless investigations by Democrats like Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, and Elijah Cummings.

In reality, of course, what they are about is stirring up the base of their party, and, if possible, to throw so much mud on the President that Independents, and perhaps even some Republicans, may be tempted to support his opponent in the 2020 presidential elections.

Partisan sliming and fear-mongering are nothing new in our politics, but in our time we have reached a point at which what passes for Democratic Party discourse is furthest removed from reality. Not to put too fine a point on it, but lying has become, for the Democrats, habitual and essential.

The claim that the world will end in a dozen years if  N.Y. Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez's Green New Deal (and its concomitant Luddite economy) is not enacted is another example of that despicable and fraudulent discourse.

True it is that Democrats claim it's the Republicans who are blinking at reality and who are the masters at dissembling, but the occasional exaggerations indulged in by the president cannot compare with the wholesale misrepresentation and fabrication of his enemies.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and their Democratic brethren claim, for example, that the president’s assertion that we are experiencing an emergency at our southern border is a "manufactured crisis."

Yet border officials in both the present and the last administration confirm that the surge in unlawful immigration at our southern border is dangerous, unprecedented, and impossible to contain without emergency measures.

Similarly, Schumer and Pelosi have smeared the universally respected and exceptionally experienced newly-appointed Attorney General Barr as incapable of acting in an objective and professional manner.

To suggest that Schumer and Pelosi have a tenuous relationship with truth would be an understatement.

For eight years this nation experienced a movement away from our traditional constitutional strictures of separation of powers, fidelity to the original understanding of our founding document, and our conception of the federal government as one of limited and enumerated powers.

The Russia collusion hoax was an unprecedented attempt, as many other commentators have pointed out, of a soft coup, of a highly-organized campaign of untruths designed to replace the legitimate leader of the nation. How and why the perpetrators of this hoax thought they were justified in what they did remains to be explained.

Bringing these malefactors to the justice they deserve should now be a priority of our federal government, and there are signs in the Senate and the Department of Justice that this effort is moving forward.

It's clear that Democrats are likely to do all they can to protect these miscreants, just as they did to prevent Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct regarding national security to escape consequences.

Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who still believe that ours should be a government of laws and not men should now organize to ensure that such pernicious political chicanery comes to an end.

Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, the Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and a contributor to The University Bookman. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and University College, London. He has often testified on constitutional issues before committees of the United States Congress, and is the author of "Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered" (Regnery, 1994) and "Law Professsors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law" (West Academic, 2017). Presser was recently appointed as a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado's Boulder Campus for 2018-2019. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.