Tea at Trianon: Some Helpful Ideas For Biden’s Impeachment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 8, 2022

Some Helpful Ideas For Biden’s Impeachment

From David Harsanyi at The Federalist:

Biden again knowingly subverted the will of Congress when he transferred loan payments for millions of affluent students to taxpayers in hopes of affecting the 2022 midterms. The president does not possess the statutory power to “forgive” or “cancel” loans. Just ask congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who correctly noted that “[p]eople think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness — he does not.” He did it anyway. Unilaterally. The president used the emergency powers found in the HEROES Act, passed after 9/11 to help U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to justify his decree. We know that Biden cynically exploited the bill, because, by his own recent admission on “60 Minutes,” he concedes there is no emergency.

Let’s hope that Republicans don’t limit themselves to a presidential impeachment, either. There might be numerous reasons to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland, but none deserves more scrutiny than his role in chilling dissent by intimidating parents who opposed critical race theory and Covid mask mandates.

In October 2021 the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting the FBI investigate school board protests, offering a handful of alleged acts of criminality as justification to treat millions of parents as potential “domestic terrorism” threats. The letter uses this phrase (twice) to provide the administration with the justification to trigger a PATRIOT Act investigation. Then again, all of it was coordinated. We learned later, through a FOIA request, that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona had likely solicited and helped with the verbiage of the letter. Garland, who regularly ignores violence and threats directed at conservatives, acquiesced and directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate parents.

The NSBA later apologized. The Biden administration, which regularly libels millions of political opponents as would-be violent extremists, never did.

Not every investigation leads to impeachment, sadly. But that doesn’t mean the GOP shouldn’t scrutinize whether the president benefited financially from his brother’s and son Hunter’s leveraging of the family name and the United States government to extract millions from Chinese and Ukrainian energy concerns—for which there is plenty of circumstantial evidence. We already know Biden lied about the extent of his knowledge regarding Hunter’s “work.” And, in a functioning democracy, it is imperative we know everything about the president’s finances.

While they’re at it, it would also be nice if we could learn more about the chaotic and inept Afghanistan pullout that left 13 service members dead and thousands of Americans stranded in theocratistan. Did Biden dismiss intelligence reports warning about a swift collapse of our Afghan allies for political considerations? Why did the administration mislead the public about the number of citizens and green-card holders who were stranded? We have yet to hear a coherent explanation for why the administration handed a list of allied names to the Taliban. Nor do we know the story behind that face-saving drone strike that ended up killing 10 innocent Afghans, seven of them children. Let’s find out.

Maybe they could also get to the bottom of the FBI’s role in limiting speech on social media platforms during the 2020 election. The White House, after all, has proven to be quite comfortable attempting to dictate speech. In July 2021, the White House admitted it was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” The White House not-so-subtly threatened social media platforms to suppress certain political opinions and stories. Under what constitutional power does the president get to dictate what should be considered mis- or dis-information? And under what power does Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas get to create an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board?” How pervasive is the law enforcement agency’s contact with media companies? (Read more.)