After Voter ID Defeats, Lessons From Indiana’s Law That ‘Has Stood Test of Time’

Josh Siegel, The Daily Signal

As courts over the last few weeks dealt a series of blows to voter identification laws in states across the country, Indiana’s Secretary of State Connie Lawson was feeling fortunate.

More than a decade ago, before it was the rage to do so, Lawson, then a Republican state legislator, co-sponsored a bill in the name of preserving election integrity that requires Indiana voters to produce photo identification to vote.

Three years after the legislation became law in 2005, the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional, and today, Lawson, as the state’s chief elections official, is describing Indiana’s photo identification law as a success story. She says it’s a triumph that states discouraged by recent court rulings should learn from.

“When we wrote the legislation, we did everything we could do to make elections honest and make sure everyone can participate in the election process,” Lawson told The Daily Signal in an interview. “So we added protections [against disenfranchisement] that maybe some of the other laws don’t have. And now, our law has stood the test of time. It passed the test with the U.S. Supreme Court, and it’s been in place for over a decade now.”

Lawson says that turnout for presidential elections has increased since the law’s implementation—it jumped from 58 percent in 2004 to 62 percent in 2008, a year when President Barack Obama became the first Democrat to carry Indiana since 1964. Turnout fell back to 58 percent in 2012.

And she contends there is “no compelling evidence” to prove voters are being blocked from the ballot box because of stricter identification requirements, although she says it’s “impossible to measure” whether the law has prevented a case of in-person voter fraud.

The courts are making their own declarations on voter identification laws.

On July 20, a federal appeals court ruled Texas’ 2011 voter identification law violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by discriminating against black and Latino voters. On Wednesday, Texas, responding to the court’s request to adjust the law, agreed to expand the types of identification required to vote.

Last week, a federal appeals panel went further and overturned North Carolina’s more sweeping 2013 voter identification law, which included other measures such as shortening the early voting period and banning same-day registration.

That same day, a U.S. district judge struck down several parts of Wisconsin’s 2011 voter identification law, in addition to other election laws passed by Republican state lawmakers. And on Monday, a federal judge blocked a 2013 voter identification law in North Dakota, ruling that it harmed Native Americans in the state.

While Lawson is using these court rulings against voter identification laws as an opportunity to share what she considers to be Indiana’s successes, opponents of her law say they are emboldened to try and get rid of it again.

“What’s happening now is courts are starting to look at these laws and asking the very valid question of whether they are disenfranchising more voters than the number of people who are stopped from engaging in voter impersonation fraud,” said Bill Groth, an Indianapolis attorney who represented Democratic lawmakers in their Supreme Court challenge to the state’s voter identification law.

“If we can find the right group of plaintiffs to challenge the Indiana law anew, I would feel much better undertaking that lawsuit in light of recent legal developments,” Groth told The Daily Signal in an interview. “There is nothing I would enjoy more than to see the Indiana law struck down or more workarounds be mandated so that it doesn’t continue to stand as an obstacle to people who want to participate in the democratic process.”

How Voter ID Came to Be

Indiana’s experience with a voter identification law, and how different constituencies interpret its impact, showcases the tension around an issue that touches on people’s freedoms, sense of fairness, and fears.

Since the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, paranoia about the integrity of the U.S. election system has increased. A Pew Research Center survey found that 48 percent of Americans were confident that “the votes across the country were accurately counted” in the 2004 election.

After the 2012 election, that percentage fell to 31 percent.

Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., recognized these fears and seized on them before he came to Congress and began his service as Indiana’s secretary of state. When he was elected in 2002, Rokita was 32 years old and the youngest secretary of state in the U.S. at the time, looking to make a mark.

“Back in 2001 and 2002, election integrity was a huge issue for the secretary of state,” Rokita told The Daily Signal in an interview. “It was the thing. It was the main promise I told people I would do. I look at it as a promises made promises kept situation. The problem was that people were losing confidence in the system. There was a perception that people were not taking the process seriously—there was a fear of votes being stolen. Even if the fear didn’t pan out to be true, and in some cases it wasn’t, the fear was still there.”

In 2005, Rokita, who helped write the original legislation, implemented one of the first photo identification laws in the country, and defended it before the Supreme Court.

With little precedent to work from, Rokita said he and the other authors sought to craft a “narrow law” with “reasonable” exceptions for those who can’t obtain the identification the law requires.

Rokita’s effort in Indiana was occurring at a time prior to what is considered a turning point in election laws, when the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

That decision eliminated the requirement that the federal government approve changes in election procedures made by certain states with a history of racial discrimination.

“Maybe that’s part of our success because we approached it as a all whole cloth,” Rokita said. “We made it ourselves. We stitched it up. And that caused us to do a lot of thinking and soul searching and making sure we were balanced and honest in our approach to prove it was not politically motivated.”

What’s in a Law

Indiana’s law, considered one of the strictest in the nation at the time, requires people present at a polling station on election day to provide a government-issued identification.

Accepted forms of identification include an Indiana driver’s license, an Indiana state ID card, and a U.S. passport. Photo identification issued by the military also qualifies. The state provides free photo identification to those who can’t afford to pay for one, but a potential voter still has to provide documentation, like a birth certificate, to prove who they are.

The law contains “workarounds,” or exceptions.

A person who comes to the polls without identification can cast a provisional ballot, but their votes are only counted if within 10 days they can produce valid identification or sign an affidavit stating they can’t afford it, or have a religious objection to being photographed. In addition, a person who is 65 years old or older, or disabled, can submit an absentee ballot through the mail without providing identification.

“What you have to pay attention to with Indiana and how it may be a little different than other laws is the Indiana law is written in such a way that it’s relatively easy to get around showing ID if you don’t have one,” said Michael J. Pitts, an Indiana University law professor and elections expert, in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Impact on Voting

Still, the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court challenge to Indiana’s law, which included the local branches of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, argued it would impose burdens on people who are old, poor, or minorities, groups that the challengers said are less likely to have the accepted types of identification.

Pitts, in the only study of its kind in the state, tried to measure if the law disenfranchised voters in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

To determine this, Pitts decided to look at the number of provisional ballots cast in each election, and how many were counted.

Pitts found that in the the 2012 general election, about 650 people in an electorate of nearly 2.7 million did not have a ballot counted because of a problem with voter identification.

However, less than 10 percent of provisional ballots voters casted due to a lack of identification were ultimately counted.

Those results were enough for Pitts to declare in the study that “at the moment, there is no compelling evidence to demonstrate that the amount of actual disfranchisement [of potential voters] is in the hundreds, or even tens of thousands within Indiana.”

Meanwhile, Lawson, Indiana’s secretary of state, has her own data looking at a longer time frame. She said since the state’s 2006 primary elections, 8,614 provisional ballots have been cast, with 3,659 of those actually being counted.

In addition, she said, the state has distributed 1,866,955 free photo identifications to voters since 2005.

Despite the fact the state has not counted a majority of provisional ballots, Lawson insists “it’s not fair” to say those whose votes were not included were “disenfranchised.”

“There has not been one case where one person can name a single voter who has been disenfranchised by our voter ID requirement,” Lawson said.

But critics maintain that the process to verify a provisional ballot during the 10-day period is too burdensome for some people, and that others are choosing to stay at home because they’re intimidated by the law’s requirements.

“There are people out there hurt by this law,” said Groth, the Democratic attorney. “We know they are out there. But because they kind of operate in the shadows of life, we don’t often cross paths with them. If somebody is willing and able to navigate the obstacles, yes, they can vote, but the question is why are we imposing those obstacles on people struggling just to make ends meet and who want to participate in the electoral process.”

Impact on Fraud

Just as it’s hard to put a face to those harmed by Indiana’s voter identification law, supporters acknowledge the challenge of proving it has prevented fraud.

“Obviously I think voter fraud convictions are rare,” Lawson said.

A 2014 study by Justin Levitt looking at in-person voter fraud found there to be 31 instances out of more than 1 billion ballots cast in local, state, and national elections over 14 years.

Rokita, the former Indiana secretary of state and current congressman, admitted it’s difficult to detect acts of impersonation at polling places, but he argues there’s a reason why.

“I am not ceding the point it is rare,” Rokita said. “It’s rare because the type of crime we are talking about isn’t like a murder where there’s evidence. There isn’t a dead body. The crime happens in an instant, and all the evidence walks out the door, walks out of the voting booth or precinct hall.”

Lawson and Rokita pointed to a 2012 case when a jury convicted Charlie White, Indiana’s secretary of the state at the time, on multiple charges of voter fraud, including felony charges for false registration, voting in another precinct, submitting a false ballot, and theft.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said Indiana should be especially concerned about fraudulent absentee ballots that are filed through the mail.

In 2003, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated East Chicago Mayor Rob Pastrick’s Democratic primary victory because of fraudulent absentee ballots. According to The Washington Post, 46 people, mainly city workers, were found guilty of committing absentee ballot fraud by giving their ballots to another person.

“We know from this major case that fraud does occur in the state,” von Spakovsky said. “So while it was a good first step for Indiana to enact a law addressing in-person voter fraud, I think the state should have taken a second step to extend it to safeguard against absentee voter fraud, as some states like Kansas have.”

‘Law of the Land’

Even if the impacts of Indiana’s voter identification law are disputed, elections experts say the state’s legacy in election reform will be watched closely over the coming months, as other states try to satisfy court rulings, and possibly take their challenges to the Supreme Court.

“Indiana at the time of the decision was the strictest [voter ID law] in the nation, but some of the other laws that have been struck down are even stricter,” said Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor who specializes in elections. “So the courts may be saying you can go up to the severity of the Indiana law, but you can’t go farther. That may be the message from the courts in this slew of cases.”

Pitts, the Indiana University law professor, cautioned to be careful in evaluating Indiana’s law in relation to other states.

“I do worry about people trying to take broad conclusions state to state on these kinds of matters,” Pitts said. “Because all of these laws are written differently, and to some extent, Republicans were emboldened by Crawford [Indiana’s law] and thought they could do quite a bit more. They really are very individual with different legal provisions being invoked.”

As voter identification law opponents look to continue their momentum, Rokita is confident Indiana’s law will remain standing.

“The Indiana case is still very much the law of the land and I don’t expect that to change,” Rokita said.

The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

Victor Davis Hanson, Real Clear Politics

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness.

Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word "terrorism," was airbrushed from the new administration's vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like "overseas contingency operations," "man-caused disaster" and "workplace violence."

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism."

Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.

The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.

Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger -- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.

There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.

Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.

In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.

More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.

In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.

(C) 2016 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Erdogan’s Turkey

Erdogan’s Turkey

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Erdogan is NOT the head of a democracy. He is a de facto dictator for life. Here is why:

He destroyed the free press.

He ended free speech.

He went far in destroying an independent judiciary.

He hopelessly corrupted Turkey’s democracy when his ruling party lost the national election and he flouted the constitution by allowing them to form a new government.

Afterwards, to keep power he destroyed opposition parties and imprisoned their leaders.

He ended the peace process that had made great strides with the Kurdish minority.

Erdogan was never a friend of the United States. 

Beginning in 2003, he secretly supported the creation of the jihadist pipeline into Syria that then went into Iraq to kill Americans.

Ironically, the same pipeline was used to feed the Islamic State until Erdogan finally closed it down when they turned on him. What a jerk.

That helps to explain the troubles in Turkey today.

Enemies See America As Vulnerable Prey

Sitting duck...

Enemies See America As Vulnerable Prey

by Victor Davis Hanson

Our domestic tensions embolden our enemies.

Here is a sampling of some recent news abroad:

A Russian guard attacked a U.S. diplomatic official at the door to the American Embassy in Moscow, even as NATO leaders met to galvanize against the next act of Russian aggression.

The Islamic State continued its global terrorist rampage with horrific attacks in Baghdad and Istanbul.

Iran rebuffed United Nations warnings and defiantly boasted that it will continue testing ballistic missiles. German intelligence believes that Iran, empowered by the release of $100 billion in impounded cash, is violating its recent American-led nonproliferation deal in an effort to import nuclear bomb-making technology.

North Korea conducted a test (unsuccessful, apparently) of a submarine-based guided missile.

There are various ways of interpreting these ominous events.

They could represent just more empty chest-thumping by our enemies.

Or, because this is an election year in the U.S., enemies are posturing in order to advance their agendas, as they often do in times of uncertainty about who will be the next president.

Or, Obama is perceived as an exceptionally lame lame-duck president who is hoping to wind down his tenure in passivity, without a major incident abroad that might imperil his presidential legacy.

Or, after the explosive rise of ISIS, the disaster in Benghazi, the failed reset with Russia, the unchecked Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the concessions in the Iran deal, the veritable implosion of the Middle East, and the president’s counterproductive sermonizing about Brexit, enemies sense that the U.S. is directionless. These enemies may be unsure whether America still wishes to — or even can — exercise its traditional leadership of the free world and remain the custodian of the post-war international order.

But perhaps there is yet another catalyst prompting such events.

The United States appears to be entering another era of dangerous internal instability similar to the one it endured in the 1960s-1970s.

After the attacks by radical Islamists in San Bernardino and Orlando, Americans did not rally together as they had after 9/11. Instead, almost immediately, the country was torn further apart. About half the nation saw the terrorist killings as a reason for stricter gun control rather than a reason to fear the continuing spread of radical Islamic terrorism. The other half worried that political correctness and the president’s refusal to even mention radical Islamic terrorism are eroding the ability to deter it.

America’s enemies draw their own conclusions.

After the Orlando attack, al-Qaeda urged lone-wolf terrorists in the U.S. to focus exclusively on white targets. The organization’s leaders apparently worry that if terrorists again hit minority communities, it will prompt a bickering America to blame itself rather than give full credit to the attackers.

After the recent deaths of two black men in confrontations with police (in Minnesota and Louisiana), followed by national Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of five law-enforcement officers in Dallas, it might appear to our enemies abroad that the American superpower is internally unwinding into tribalism in the fashion of the Balkans, Iraq, or Lebanon. 

As in the case of Islamic terrorism, America seems to have no answers to racial tensions. Half the country believes African Americans are inordinately targeted by police and that inner-city violence can be attributed to a long history of racism, national neglect, and economic stagnation. The other half blame disastrous social-welfare and big-government policies for creating dangerous dependencies and a dearth of jobs in America’s inner cities, as well as a popular culture that glorifies rather than discourages the excesses of many young black males.

One America believes that the Obama administration genuinely tried, but so far has failed, to resolve the tensions between inner-city residents and police. The other America thinks Obama sought to leverage those tensions for political reasons.

Either way, most of America privately thinks that Islamic terrorist acts and racial tensions are going to get far worse — a perception that is probably shared overseas as well.

Our enemies increasingly may gamble that provocations won’t elicit a U.S. reaction. Or that even if America did respond, the resulting domestic divisions and turmoil would diminish the effectiveness of the response.

Add to the equation record debt and vast cuts in the defense budget, and our enemies may conclude that we are Rome of AD 500, Britain of the late 1940s, or Russia of the 1980s.

To be blunt, America’s vulnerable post-war global order may already seem to those abroad to be bloated carrion ready to be picked apart by opportunistic vultures.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Obama's Biggest Failure

Obama's Biggest Failure

The president has substantially set back race relations in the United States

Steven Malanga, City Journal

When the country elected Barack Obama president in 2008, those of us who disagreed with many of his policy ideas were nonetheless consoled by the fact that his victory illustrated that America had moved well beyond institutional racism. Certainly the fact that Obama had succeeded in both a hard-fought Democratic primary and a general election meant that the country was ready to move past the intense focus on race in our national politics. Boy, were we wrong! Rather than seeing his own victory as a significant advance in American social life, Obama and those he appointed to his administration vigorously put forward the idea that America remains a deeply racist country, and they have redefined racism in the broadest terms possible. It’s not a coincidence, then, that more than seven years into the administration of the nation’s first black president, Americans are more deeply divided on race then they have been in decades. Their own president has fostered the divide.

Several Obama administration initiatives have distorted the national conversation on race. In 2010, for instance, the administration’s education and justice departments launched investigations against school districts around the country for disciplining black students more often, proportionately, than students of other races. A Department of Education study observed that black students were three and a half times more likely to be disciplined. The study alleged that, “everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity.” In making its charges, the department ignored compelling data showing that black students were more likely to misbehave in and around school—including crime statistics revealing that blacks were 25 times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested at schools for serious offenses like battery.

Similarly, the administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, through a policy known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, now is essentially charging wealthier suburban communities like those in Westchester County, New York, with housing discrimination if their populations are not diverse enough for the administration’s taste. Under the new rules, the federal government no longer must prove that these communities are actively engaging in racial discrimination in order to compel them to cast aside local zoning rules and build housing that would attract low-income residents. The mere fact that a town’s population is not diverse suffices for the Obama administration to demand that the community make efforts to transform itself. “HUD’s power grab is based on the mistaken belief that zoning and discrimination are the same,” Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino wrote in 2013. What’s particularly ironic about this implication of racism in Westchester’s case is that the county voted by nearly a two-to-one margin for Obama in 2012.

The president himself has sadly made significant contributions to the notion that America remains deeply racist with his consistent attacks on the police, even in cases where officers’ actions against black perpetrators have subsequently been demonstrated to have been justified. “Too many young men of color,” the president said in November of 2014, “feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness. We know that, statistically, in everything from enforcing drug policy to applying the death penalty to pulling people over, there are significant racial disparities.” Later, he added that, “Communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. . . . These are real issues.” But the president has launched the charges while ignoring significant facts. As Heather Mac Donald has observed, more than 6,000 blacks die of homicides yearly, the overwhelming majority of which are committed by other blacks in minority neighborhoods. The police are more likely to patrol these neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is. And as the Dallas killings sadly illustrate, cops are far more likely to die at the hands of black perpetrators than black men are to be killed by cops. About 40 percent of all cop killings, in fact, are committed by black males. Data also reveal no significant racial component to police shootings. Black officers are far more likely to fire their guns at black citizens than are white officers.

The Obama administration’s tendency to see discrimination in so many crevices and corners of American life has created a new standard for what constitutes racism, as demonstrated by Minnesota governor Mark Dayton’s remarks in the wake of the tragic shooting of a black man, Philando Castile, by police in suburban Minneapolis last week. Implying that race played a role in the killing of Castile, who was legally licensed to carry a firearm, Dayton said that he doubted the shooting would have occurred if Castile had been white. But while the horrific video, taken by Castile’s girlfriend in the immediate aftermath of his shooting, shows that the officer was highly agitated, and the woman claims that the cop overreacted in firing on Castile, there is nothing in the video that is overly racist, and there is no reason to conclude that the outcome would have been different if Castile had been of another race. In America today, however, when a black man is killed by an officer of another color, that fact alone is prima facie evidence for some people that the killing was racially motivated.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against the president and his administration is that in the last four years alone, the percentage of Americans who believe racism is on the rise has nearly doubled. That sharp increase has come even amid little evidence that verified incidents of racism are on the rise. Indeed, efforts by the media to document a significant increase in police shootings of minorities have yielded little. New York City data, for instance, show that the number of times that police discharge their weapons every year has been declining for decades. And a close analysis of a Washington Post database on current shootings by police across America, which describes them in detail, reveals that many were justified.

It’s difficult now to ignore the role that President Obama has played in our growing racial divisions. Elected on themes of hope and renewal, his very ascendancy a powerful statement about the country’s racial journey, he chose to use the White House as a vehicle to introduce a new era of racial grievance into our national discourse. Unfortunately, he succeeded in this effort—and failed America.

Cotton Hits Clinton

Cotton Hits Clinton
John Hinderaker, Powerline

Tom Cotton is rapidly earning a reputation as the hardest-hitting spokesman for the conservative cause. Earlier today he spoke at the Western Conservative Summit. Breitbart has a report on his speech:

The Arkansas senator…told activists Saturday at the Western Conservative Summit that Hillary Clinton’s reckless and criminal behavior disqualifies her to become America’s commander-in-chief.

He also delivered that message forcefully at this year’s Lincoln-Reagan dinner in Minnesota.

A combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Sen. Thomas Cotton (R.-Ark.) said he was glad [to] make it on time for his speech after a series of travel delays.

“We were on the tarmac, I thought Bill Clinton might be boarding my plane to talk to me,” said the former Army Airborne Ranger officer.

Heh.

Clinton’s decision to conduct all her official business on her own private email account on her own private server and the way she has handled official and media inquires about it was just teaser of how her administration will approach transparency and national security, Cotton said.

That’s true. Barack Obama has run the least transparent administration in modern history, but the paranoid Mrs. Clinton would undoubtedly be more secretive still.

The FBI still does not have 30,000 emails the expected Democratic nominee for president claimed to have deleted. 

“It has gotten so bad, the FBI is on the verge of asking Vladimir Putin for his copies of Hillary’s emails,” Cotton said.

Ouch again. Humor is a powerful weapon.

In addition to the criminal nature of the former first lady’s scheme, he said, conducting official and classified business on an unsecured server exposed American national security to our enemies. 

Americans should not be surprised that the former secretary of state would put America at risk, he said. Working with President Barack Obama, Clinton oversaw a foreign policy that treated allies as troublemakers and our enemies as victims with legitimate complaints about the United States. Chief among the enemies is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Obama-Clinton empowered by lifting sanctions, thawing frozen assets, and ignoring Iran’s support of violent terrorism.

Some have speculated that Tom Cotton is on Donald Trump’s list of potential vice-presidential candidates. I have no idea whether that is true, nor do I know whether Cotton would accept the post if it were offered. (I believe he has downplayed that speculation.) But I do know that we need someone on the ticket who will hit Hillary hard and effectively, with the sort of credibility and stature that Tom’s history and abilities bring.

The FBI Investigation of Hillary: Is the fix in?

Slick Willy wiggling through the terrain....

The FBI Investigation of Hillary: Is the fix in?

Steven Hayward, Powerline

Now I know what you’re thinking based on this headline: Of course the fix is in, you idiot! What makes you think the Obama Administration will allow the First Woman President to be indicted for mere sloppiness about emails?

And then there’s this breaking story out of Arizona this morning:

Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton meet privately in Phoenix

PHOENIX – Amid an ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of email and hours before the public release of the Benghazi report, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton. 

The private meeting took place on the west side of Sky Harbor International Airport on board a parked private plane. 

Former President Clinton was visiting the Phoenix area and arrived to Sky Harbor Monday evening to depart.

Sources tell ABC15, Clinton was notified Lynch would be arriving at the airport soon and waited for her arrival.

Lynch was arriving in Phoenix for a planned visit as part of her national tour to promote community policing.

ABC15 asked Lynch about the meeting during her news conference at the Phoenix Police Department.

“I did see President Clinton at the Phoenix airport as he was leaving and spoke to myself and my husband on the plane,” said Lynch.

The private meeting comes as Lynch’s office is in charge of the ongoing investigation and potential charges involving Clinton’s email server. . .

Whatever could they possibly have talked about?

Lynch said the private meeting on the tarmac did not involve these topics. “Our conversation was a great deal about grandchildren, it was primarily social about our travels and he mentioned golf he played in Phoenix,” said Lynch Tuesday afternoon while speaking at the Phoenix Police Department.

Sources say the private meeting at the airport lasted around 30 minutes.

Yeah, we can really trust all of these people to tell the truth.

Defeating Jihad

Talk about "sustainability".... we are faced with real threats that are being ignored in a practiced disciplined way all to our detriment and our ability to sustain our way of life. Trump is right, there is something afoot, there is a reason that the real danger and enemy is being scrubbed from our records and language. (BH)

“What I have been trying to convince this city of for many years now is that we have not even begun to engage in the information operations battlefield. We do almost everything at the tactical level and have allowed political correctness to infect the way we do Information Operations and Psychological Warfare. America is preeminent at the application of kinetic force. The U.S. Abbottabad raid will be taught from the Beijing Military Academy to Sandhurst for the next hundred years as how you do a kinetic application of lead-on target. But tactical perfection does not automatically add up to victory. Tactical victories do not necessarily bring strategic success. We must delegitimize the ideology of the enemy or this will be exercise in “whack-a-mole.” Your children, my grandchildren, will be hunting jihadists a hundred years from now unless we take down their ideology of Global Jihadism.” —Dr. Sebastian Gorka

Testimony to House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, 8 Jan 2016

 Dr. Gorka currently serves as the Chairman of the Threat Knowledge Group (ThreatKnowledge.org) based in McLean, VA, which provides high-level training and analysis at the strategic and operational level to those in the Defense, Intelligence, Law Enforcement and Homeland Security communities.

We are a Fish, Rotting from the Head

We are a  Fish, Rotting from the Head

 John Hinderaker, Powerline

Glenn Reynolds’  USA Today column addresses the rapid decline of the United States as a high-trust society, something that sociologists have found to be critical for economic development and security:

[T]he CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.

The IRS scandal would have sunk a Republican administration, perhaps leading to impeachment. But the Democratic press is in on the joke, and the Obama administration is set to run out the clock in its usual fashion.

Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

The only way Hillary will be indicted, as she certainly deserves to be, is if the Democrats decide that she can’t beat Donald Trump–an increasingly likely eventuality–and decide to go with someone else.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

Sad but true. Worst of all, perhaps, is the way Barack Obama and his Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have corrupted the Department of Justice. Time after time, federal judges have found that DOJ lawyers have lied to the courts on behalf to the Obama administration’s political agenda. 

Then there is the fact that Barack Obama is a scofflaw. Repeatedly, he has ignored the Constitution and violated federal law, refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, imperiously changing his own Obamacare statute with no legal authority, and so on. Years later, the courts sometimes catch up with him; the administration has lost a number of 9-0 Supreme Court decisions where its lawbreaking was indisputable. But more broadly, the Obama administration’s campaign of lawbreaking and stonewalling has succeeded.

Glenn asks the right question: if our purported leaders are scofflaws, why should the rest of us be honest?

So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.***[P]eople may obey the law because they think that being law-abiding is an important part of maintaining a viable society. But that’s the kind of law-abiding behavior that’s at risk when people at the top treat the law with unconcealed contempt. 

Being law-abiding for its own sake is a traditional part of bourgeois culture, and our ruling class has lately treated the bourgeoisie with contempt as well. Which raises the risk that this contempt will be returned.

It is being returned, as evidenced by the Trump and Sanders candidacies.

America has been — and, for the moment, remains — a high-trust society. In high-trust societies, people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. In low-trust societies, trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.
High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten.

Which is why this year’s election is so important. Barack Obama’s legacy must be repudiated, root and branch.

REPORT: Clinton Donor Bought Spot on National Security Board

REPORT: Clinton Donor Bought Spot on National Security Board
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

ABC News reports, based on State Department emails, that “a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field.” The decision “baffled” the department’s professional staff.

The emails further reveal that, after inquiries from ABC News, Clinton’s staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter, and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

The Clinton Foundation donor in question is Rajiv Fernando. The agency is the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB). Fernando, a Chicago securities trader who specialized in electronic investing, possessed no known background related to the matters the ISAB deals with, such as nuclear disarmament and other arms control issues.

Fernando himself would not answer questions from ABC News in 2011 about what qualified him for a seat on the board or led to his appointment.

When ABC News finally caught up with Fernando at the 2012 Democratic convention, he became upset and said he was “not at liberty” to speak about it. Security threatened to have the ABC News reporter arrested.

It isn’t difficult, though, to see what “qualified” Fernando for his national security gig:

Fernando’s history of campaign giving dated back at least to 2003 and was prolific. He was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 bid for president, giving maximum contributions to her campaign, and to HillPAC, in 2007 and 2008. 

He also served as a fundraising bundler for Clinton, gathering more than $100,000 from others for her White House bid. After Barack Obama bested Clinton for the 2008 nomination, Fernando became a major fundraiser for the Obama campaign. 

Prior to his State Department appointment, Fernando had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation, and another $30,000 to a political advocacy group, WomenCount, that indirectly helped Hillary Clinton retire her lingering 2008 campaign debts by renting her campaign email list.

It seems to have been Cheryl Mills, not surprisingly, who pushed through Fernando’s appointment. When the State Department searched for an explanation as to why he had been placed on the ISAB, it concluded that “the true answer is simply that S staff (Cheryl Mills) added him.”

Soon after Fernando’s appointment came under media scrutiny, the trader resigned. He said he needed to devote more time to his business.

Fernando continues to devote time to raising money for Hillary. According to ABC News, he emerged as one of the first “bundlers” to raise money for Clinton’s 2016 bid and in July 2015 hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at his Chicago home.

Fernando has also continued to donate to the Clinton Foundation. He now is listed on the charity’s website as having given between $1 million and $5 million.

The ISAB isn’t a normal, or suitable, landing place for a big donor. Fernando “served” alongside David A. Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group and United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector; Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a former National Security Advisor to two presidents; two former congressmen; and former Sen. Chuck Robb. William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, chaired the panel.

Moreover, the emails confirm that the appointment qualified Fernando for one of the highest levels of top secret access.

It is scandalous that Fernando could buy himself a seat at that table. And it is a sign of things to come if corrupt Hillary becomes president.