Why haven't efforts to impeach President Trump gained Watergate-style momentum? The lack of energy has created a sense of bafflement and disappointment among some of the president's most determined adversaries. But there are some simple reasons for it. Here are three: 1. The facts are different. In Watergate, the underlying crime was a break-in at…

"Know what I was most proud of?" presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd on Wednesday. "For eight years, there wasn't one single hint of a scandal or a lie." In an era where every presidential tweet is an existential threat to democracy, there are probably plenty of people who believe this myth. Off the bat, though, it should…

"Socialism only works in two places:  Heaven, where they don’t need it, and Hell, where they already have it."  —Ronald Reagan One hundred years since its introduction, socialism stands unrivaled as the single most monstrous, repeatedly discredited governing principle in human history.  No other political…

Is there any doubt that many Democrats agree with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she says she wants to see President Trump "in prison"? After the Mueller report, House Democrats seem to believe almost unanimously that the president is guilty of obstruction of justice. Their increasingly heated internal debate is whether to impeach Trump…

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump's election and the "yellow vests" protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election…

One of the more unfortunate effects of the Trump-Russia investigation — and there have been many — is the weakening of traditional standards of argument and proof in the public debate over allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election. (Just for the record: It didn't.) In particular, angry…

"Our people look for a cause to believe in.  Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?  A political party cannot be all things to all people.  It must represent…

One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti…

House Democrats are jubilant because last week, they won two court victories in their ongoing battle to get President Donald Trump's tax returns and decades of his personal and business banking records. But their glee won't last long. These federal district court rulings are likely to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump will prevail, along…

In February 2018, the House Intelligence Committee released the so-called Nunes memo. In four pages, the document, from the committee's then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, revealed much of what the public knows today about the FBI's reliance on the Steele dossier in pursuing since-discredited allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to…

The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible. One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump. Two, the Trump administration's Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped…

From now on, the Trump-Russia affair — the investigation that dominated the first years of Donald Trump's presidency — will be divided into two parts: before and after the release of Robert Mueller's report. Before the special counsel's findings were made public last month, the president's adversaries were on the offensive. Now…

There was a school of thought that said former Vice President Joe Biden would begin to sink in the polls the moment he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden's first day in the race, the thinking went, would be his best day. In fact, the opposite has happened. Since formally becoming a candidate on April 25, Biden…

Since at least June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced his White House candidacy, we’ve been warned that he poses a threat to our very existence.  Yet here we are four years later, somehow surviving.  Our inexplicable endurance, however, hasn’t interrupted the hyperbole and histrionics.  Listen to celebrated plagiarist…

Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr's indifference to their hysteria over the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Barr recently released a brief summary of special counsel Robert Mueller's conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough…

At his contentious hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr dropped a big hint about his investigation into the conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. "Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant and a FISA warrant," Barr said. &…

On the day of Attorney General Bill Barr's testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, there was, as always, a selective leak dropped into the fray. With bated breath, we learned Special Counsel Robert Mueller had sent the attorney general a sternly worded letter grousing that Barr's four-page March 24 explanation of the core conclusions…

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller's massive report. She concluded of the report's assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump's words and actions that "any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted." Psychologists…

Presidential contender Joe Biden is under attack from fellow Democrats for how he treated Anita Hill in 1991 after she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. #MeToo advocates are warning that Biden had better apologize if he wants the women's vote in next year's election. Biden's an expert panderer. He's already expressing…

After the horrific mass murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was widespread coverage and a torrent of mainstream news networks contemplating the threat of white supremacy. These conversations, completely reasonable and necessary in the face of violent attacks from a racist gunman, soon began deteriorating into politically…

This week marks World Intellectual Property (IP) Day, which merits celebration of IP’s outsized role in making the United States the most innovative, prosperous and powerful society in human history.  For most Americans, the role of private property rights as a primary driver of what we know as American Exceptionalism goes almost without…

Special counsel Robert Mueller's two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. Despite compiling private allegations of loud and obnoxious Trump behavior, Mueller also concluded that there was not any actionable case of obstruction of justice by the president. It would have been hard in any case to…

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is over, but the reverberations of the Trump-Russia affair live on. One such after-effect is the reluctance of some important figures in the 2016 campaign to speak out, for fear of continued legal entanglements. Take J.D. Gordon, who served as the Trump campaign's director of national security. Never…

Democrats have spent the past two-plus years accusing the president of the United States and his allies of seditiously conspiring with our enemies to destroy "democracy." For the most part, this fairytale has been cynically deployed by politicians to undermine the legitimacy of a Republican presidency, yet millions of Americans now believe…

Economist Herbert Stein's old adage — "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop" — still holds. Take illegal immigration. There are currently somewhere from 11 million to 15 million immigrants living in the United States without legal authorization. Last month, nearly 100,000 people were apprehended or turned…

Attorney General Bill Barr will release a redacted version of the Mueller report this week. It will, of course, consume the political conversation for days, but even now it is clear that as much as the report might be talked about, it will not settle the main arguments that have raged about the Trump-Russia affair for more than two years. Here are…

Rev. Al Sharpton's fortunes have been on the upswing. A few years ago, then-President Barack Obama claimed that Sharpton was "the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden." In the real world, of course, the only downtrodden Americans helped by Sharpton's activities are the ones who find themselves on the payroll benefitting…

Whatever their differences, the two front-runners in the Democratic presidential race, Joe Biden, born Nov. 20, 1942, and Bernie Sanders, born Sept. 8, 1941, share one common trait: They are too old to be president. Biden, leading the RealClearPolitics average of polls, will be 78 years old on Inauguration Day 2021. Sanders, No. 2 in the field, will…

The Democratic Party has lots of radical new ideas, and lots of radical presidential candidates and politicos. But the common hatred of President Donald Trump has united otherwise quite disparate Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.); former Vice President Joe Biden; Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and…

Progressive candidates and new Democratic representatives have offered lots of radical new proposals lately about voting and voters. They include scrapping the 215-year-old Electoral College. Progressives also talk of extending the vote to 16- or 17-year-olds and ex-felons. They wish to further relax requirements for voter identification, same-day…