"Perhaps the most concerning, however, are the changes taking place at one of the most important research tools on the Internet and, up to now, a venerable tool for online transparency: The Wayback Machine.

"... the Wayback Internet archive is trending down this slippery slope with its recently implemented labeling of snapshot results as potential disinformation.

"As a former editor, Elliot Leavy, warns in an article addressing the changes at the Wayback Machine site, “if we continue to censor the past, attaching intent to some but not to others, we will be unable to evaluate anything at all."

11/21/2019: Graham Announces Investigation Into Hussein VP Biden
Thursday (11/21/2019): Senator Lindsey Graham announces a request for documents from the State Department:
-- Joe & Hunter Biden's dealings with Ukraine
-- Joe Biden's phone calls with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko when Biden was VP.

11/22/2019: Biden Threatens Graham
Friday (11/22/2019): In an interview on CNN, Biden says, "Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he is going to regret his whole life ...,"

11/23/19, 3:29: Giuliani Announces Deadman Switch
Saturday, (11/23/2019): Giuliani announces he has a deadman's switch on his Biden files.

Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani)
11/23/19, 3:29 PM
"TRUTH ALERT:
"The statement I've made several times of having an insurance policy, if thrown under bus, is sarcastic & relates to the files in my safe about the Biden Family's 4 decade monetizing of his office.
"If I disappear, it will appear immediately along with my RICO chart."

11/23/19, 12:37: Giuliani To Disclose Hussein Admin Pay-For-Play Scheme Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani)
11/23/19, 12:37 PM
"I discovered a pattern of corruption that the Washington press covered up for years!

"I'm also going to bring out a massive pay-for-play scheme under the Obama Administration that will devastate the Democrat Party.

"Do you honestly think I'm intimidated?"

@RudyGiuliani: "If Joe Biden is not prosecuted for these crimes, then nobody in America should ever be prosecuted for bribery."

11/23/19, 3:52: Whatever Barr Said To Trump
(null) (@(null))
11/23/19, 3:52 PM
"Whatever Barr said to Trump, Giuliani must know too. Rudy's tweets today are so in-your-face confident- this sounds like someone who is about to win, and win BIG."

"I caught them. I caught them ALL. Let's see what happens."
- DJT

"Lt. Col. Vindman, if you have information that contradicts any of these 28 factual elements in my columns I ask that you make it publicly available. Your testimony did not.

"If you don’t have evidence these 28 facts are wrong, I ask that you correct your testimony because any effort to call factually accurate reporting false only misleads America and chills the free debate our Constitutional framers so cherished to protect."

"Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous - indeed incendiary - notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.

"A prime example of this is the Senate's unprecedented abuse of the advice-and-consent process. The Senate is free to exercise that power to reject unqualified nominees, but that power was never intended to allow the Senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the President from building a functional government.

"... Congress has in recent years also largely abdicated its core function of legislating on the most pressing issues facing the national government. They either decline to legislate on major questions or, if they do, punt the most difficult and critical issues by making broad delegations to a modern administrative state that they increasingly seek to insulate from Presidential control.

"... Of course, Congress's effective withdrawal from the business of legislating leaves it with a lot of time for other pursuits. And the pursuit of choice, particularly for the opposition party, has been to drown the Executive Branch with "oversight" demands for testimony and documents. I do not deny that Congress has some implied authority to conduct oversight as an incident to its Legislative Power. But the sheer volume of what we see today - the pursuit of scores of parallel "investigations" through an avalanche of subpoenas - is plainly designed to incapacitate the Executive Branch, and indeed is touted as such.

"The costs of this constant harassment are real. For example, we all understand that confidential communications and a private, internal deliberative process are essential for all of our branches of government to properly function. Congress and the Judiciary know this well, as both have taken great pains to shield their own internal communications from public inspection. There is no FOIA for Congress or the Courts. Yet Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever documents it wants from the Executive Branch at the same time that individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the Executive's internal decisional process. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government devoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when, rather than doing the work of the people.

"One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this President constantly accuse this Administration of "shredding" constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, what exactly are you referring to? I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the Travel Ban or some such thing. While the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook, he was upfront about that beforehand, and the people voted for him. What I am talking about today are fundamental constitutional precepts. The fact is that this Administration's policy initiatives and proposed rules, including the Travel Ban, have transgressed neither constitutional, nor traditional, norms, and have been amply supported by the law and patiently litigated through the Court system to vindication.

"Indeed, measures undertaken by this Administration seem a bit tame when compared to some of the unprecedented steps taken by the Obama Administration's aggressive exercises of Executive power - such as, under its DACA program, refusing to enforce broad swathes of immigration law.

"The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of "Resistance" against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly Federalist, Fisher Ames, in an essay during the early years of the Republic.

"In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

"... Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.

"In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of "review," substituting its judgment for the Executive's in areas committed to the President's discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.

"... Apart from their overzealous role in interbranch disputes, the courts have increasingly engaged directly in usurping Presidential decision-making authority for themselves.

"... Courts are now willing, under the banner of judicial review, to substitute their judgment for the President's on matters that only a few decades ago would have been unimaginable - such as matters involving national security or foreign affairs.

"The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorism activity, which lacked functional central government's and responsible law enforcement and intelligence services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry. Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit blocked this public-safety measure for a year and half on the theory that the President's motive for the order was religious bias against Muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.

"The Travel Ban case highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review.

"... What is true of police officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the President and senior Executive officials. With very few exceptions, neither the Constitution, nor the Administrative Procedure Act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of executive motive. They apply only to executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official's "real motive" - often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch's privileged decision-making process - have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge's real motive for issuing its decision. And courts' indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President's constitutional prerogatives.

"The impact of these judicial intrusions on Executive responsibility have been hugely magnified by another judicial innovation - the nationwide injunction. First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama's first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government. Both were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.

"It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.

"The legal flaws underlying nationwide injunctions are myriad. Just to summarize briefly, nationwide injunctions have no foundation in courts' Article III jurisdiction or traditional equitable powers; they radically inflate the role of district judges, allowing any one of more than 600 individuals to singlehandedly freeze a policy nationwide, a power that no single appellate judge or Justice can accomplish; they foreclose percolation and reasoned debate among lower courts, often requiring the Supreme Court to decide complex legal issues in an emergency posture with limited briefing; they enable transparent forum shopping, which saps public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary; and they displace the settled mechanisms for aggregate litigation of genuinely nationwide claims, such as Rule 23 class actions.

"Of particular relevance to my topic tonight, nationwide injunctions also disrupt the political process. There is no better example than the courts' handling of the rescission of DACA. As you recall, DACA was a discretionary policy of enforcement forbearance adopted by President Obama's administration. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the closely related DAPA policy (along with an expansion of DACA) was unlawful, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision by an equally divided vote. Given that DACA was discretionary - and that four Justices apparently thought a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful -President Trump's administration understandably decided to rescind DACA.

"Importantly, however, the President coupled that rescission with negotiations over legislation that would create a lawful and better alternative as part of a broader immigration compromise. In the middle of those negotiations - indeed, on the same day the President invited cameras into the Cabinet Room to broadcast his negotiations with bipartisan leaders from both Houses of Congress - a district judge in the Northern District of California enjoined the rescission of DACA nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations over immigration legislation collapsed after one side achieved its preferred outcome through judicial means. A humanitarian crisis at the southern border ensued. And just this week, the Supreme Court finally heard argument on the legality of the DACA rescission. The Court will not likely decide the case until next summer, meaning that President Trump will have spent almost his entire first term enforcing President Obama's signature immigration policy, even though that policy is discretionary and half the Supreme Court concluded that a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful. That is not how our democratic system is supposed to work.

"... As the Preamble suggests, governments are established for two different security reasons - to secure domestic tranquility and to provide for defense against external dangers. These are two very different realms of government action.

"In a nutshell, under the Constitution, when the government is using its law enforcement powers domestically to discipline an errant member of the community for a violation of law, then protecting the liberty of the American people requires that we sharply curtail the government's power so it does not itself threaten the liberties of the people. Thus, the Constitution in this arena deliberately sacrifices efficiency; invests the accused with rights that that essentially create a level playing field between the collective interests of community and those of the individual; and dilutes the government's power by dividing it and turning it on itself as a check, at each stage the Judiciary is expressly empowered to serve as a check and neutral arbiter.

"None of these considerations are applicable when the government is defending the country against armed attacks from foreign enemies. In this realm, the Constitution is concerned with one thing - preserving the freedom of our political community by destroying the external threat. Here, the Constitution is not concerned with handicapping the government to preserve other values. The Constitution does not confer "rights" on foreign enemies. Rather the Constitution is designed to maximize the government's efficiency to achieve victory - even at the cost of "collateral damage" that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm. The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.

"The impact of Boumediene has been extremely consequential. For the first time in American history our armed forces is incapable of taking prisoners. We are now in a crazy position that, if we identify a terrorist enemy on the battlefield, such as ISIS, we can kill them with drone or any other weapon. But if we capture them and want to hold them at Guantanamo or in the United States, the military is tied down in developing evidence for an adversarial process and must spend resources in interminable litigation.

"The fact that our courts are now willing to invade and muck about in these core areas of Presidential responsibility illustrates how far the doctrine of Separation of Powers has been eroded.

"In this partisan age, we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure. As we look back over the sweep of American history, it has been the American Presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the Founders. It has brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.

"At every critical juncture where the country has faced a great challenge ... One would have to say that it has been the Presidency that has stepped to the fore and provided the leadership, consistency, energy and perseverance that allowed us to surmount the challenge and brought us success.

"In so many areas, it is critical to our Nation's future that we restore and preserve in their full vigor our Founding principles. Not the least of these is the Framers' vision of a strong, independent Executive, chosen by the country as a whole."

-- Attorney General William P. Barr delivering the 19th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society's 2019 National Lawyers Convention, Friday, November 15, 2019

February 28, 2019

DISSENTER


Credit: Gab

Dissenter
The Comment Section of the Internet

"About Dissenter
"Dissenter is the comment section of the internet. It creates a digital public square on every URL. Leave your own comments and discover what others have commented in the past. Try it on news articles, blog posts, Wikipedia pages, YouTube links, and even individual tweets."

Tommy Robinson fans find new way to get round Facebook and Twitter bans
"Tommy Robinson supporters are using a new ‘freedom of speech’ tool to get around media ‘censors’ and social media bans ... The downloadable browser add-on is called Dissenter and it was created by Gab – a social network that claims to be a free speech alternative to Twitter and Facebook."
-- Metro.co.uk, Wednesday 27 Feb 2019 5:42 pm

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