Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
CFIF on Twitter CFIF on YouTube
More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

Liberty Update

CFIFs latest news, commentary and alerts delivered to your inbox.
Can Al Franken Be Rehabilitated? Print
By Byron York
Thursday, July 25 2019
The sheer partisanship would be funny if the results weren't so serious.

Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat and former "Saturday Night Live" star forced out of the Senate in late 2017 by #MeToo allegations, is back in the news.

The New Yorker has published a long article suggesting Franken was "railroaded"  author Jane Mayer's word  and reporting that several of Franken's old Senate colleagues now regret calling for him to resign.

Two reactions: First, Franken was railroaded. Faced with a number of iffy allegations, Senate Democrats panicked and pushed him out before any investigation could be done. It was, as I wrote at the time, an example of the "kangaroo court justice of the college campus coming to the U.S. Senate."

Second, it is striking that Mayer would come to Franken's defense, and use the word "railroaded," given that just last year she tried to railroad Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with a flimsy, damning and unverified allegation of sexual misconduct. And, of course, in an earlier generation, Mayer tried to railroad Justice Clarence Thomas. The sheer partisanship would be funny if the results weren't so serious.

Mayer's new piece examines the most-publicized allegation against Franken, that he inappropriately kissed Leeann Tweeden, a radio host with whom Franken appeared in a series of USO shows in 2006. It was the most publicized because Franken posed for a gag photo in which he appeared to be grabbing Tweeden's breasts as she slept on a flight home from the USO tour.

Mayer applies all of her investigative skills to the case and discovers a number of holes in Tweeden's story. (The photo, however, is what it is, and Franken is still apologizing for it.) As for the other allegations against Franken  there were seven other women who said he behaved inappropriately  Mayer implies that maybe there's not much to them, either, although she did not actually check them out.

Of course, nobody really checked out any of the allegations in November and December 2017, when the Franken frenzy erupted. At the time, Democrats were trying to capitalize on accusations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama and did not want to complicate matters by appearing to shield one of their own. So they dispensed with even a hint of due process  in this case, an Ethics Committee investigation  and hustled Franken out the door.

Now, Mayer has found seven current or former Democratic senators who say they regret dumping Franken. "One of the biggest mistakes I've made," said Sen. Patrick Leahy. "A rush to judgment," said Sen. Jeff Merkley. "We needed more facts," said Sen. Tammy Duckworth.

But the regrets don't matter. Once Franken resigned, no matter how precipitously, he was out. And he has not adjusted well to life outside the Senate. From Mayer: "When I asked him if he truly regretted his decision to resign, [Franken] said, 'Oh, yeah. Absolutely.'"

There are two types of villains in the Franken story, as Mayer tells it. First are the accusers, whom she suggests were conservatives targeting Franken for political reasons. Second are the senators who ran him out and still believe they did the right thing. Chief among them is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. Gillibrand has no regrets; she told Mayer the allegations against Franken were credible, and "he wasn't entitled to me carrying his water, and defending him with my silence."

Now Mayer is the one carrying the water. It's not clear what effect, if any, her work will have on the Franken case. What is clear, though, is that Mayer's rescue mission is not playing well in progressive circles.

"Al Franken did the right thing by resigning; If he could remember that, everyone would be better off," was the headline of a story in Vox.

"What drove the New Yorker's Jane Mayer into Al Franken denialism?" asked Salon.

"What Jane Mayer gets wrong about Al Franken," wrote Slate.

The articles all suggested that Mayer had minimized the seriousness of Franken's conduct, and that she did not fully appreciate the importance of Senate Democrats setting a standard of behavior for themselves in the #MeToo era. Some could not imagine the bad optics, had Franken not resigned, of him sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he was a member, during the Kavanaugh hearings.

That, of course, didn't happen. And Franken won't be back. Judging from reaction to the New Yorker story, he is unlikely to regain the support he once had in the progressive world  no matter how hard some might try to rehabilitate him.


Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.
COPYRIGHT 2019 BYRON YORK

Notable Quote   
 
Happy Easter!…[more]
 
 
— From All of Us at CFIF
 
Liberty Poll   

Do you believe the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately reject the new Biden administration automobile emissions rule as beyond the scope of administrative agency authority?