"Members of Congress returned from the Fourth of July recess this week facing a series of challenging fiscal issues with looming deadlines and no agreed-upon plan to avoid potentially disastrous outcomes.

"While the focus over the holiday and into this week has been whether Senate Republicans can pass their Obamacare repeal legislation, lawmakers have an increasingly tight timeline to speed through a consolidated budget and appropriations process and raise the debt ceiling. So far, there is no clear strategy to avoid the brinksmanship that has come to define Washington, D.C., in general, and Capitol Hill, in particular.

"Neither the House nor the Senate has passed a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2018 despite the deadline to do so passing months ago. Neither chamber has yet considered a single appropriations bill, leaving them far behind schedule. Republican members have yet to coalesce around a strategy for raising the debt ceiling -- or even determine when they plan to lift it."

"When President Trump declared in his speech that 'we must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are,' he was only stating a truth demonstrated throughout history: Societies that don't want to survive won't. And that would be a particular calamity in Europe and the Anglosphere, because it is there that the conditions of ordered liberty have been most spectacularly achieved, and that achievement is fragile. Securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity did not happen naturally or spontaneously, and it is not guaranteed, except by an unflagging commitment to maintaining them -- if necessary, by force of arms.

"This is not about race. It is one of the obvious achievements of Western civilization that its values and norms aren't limited to its core countries, but have spread throughout the world, and wherever they have taken hold have contributed to the advance of human liberty and welfare.

"All of this is apparently forgotten, though, when Donald Trump is involved. That the president's critics would jettison altogether the foundations of their own liberty for dislike of him would seem to make the speech's central question -- namely, 'whether the West has the will to survive' -- all the more important."

"President Trump delivered one of the most important speeches of his young presidency on Thursday. Billed as 'Remarks to the people of Poland,' the address was as clear a statement we've heard of Trump's nation-state populism. This philosophy, which differs in emphasis and approach from that of other post-Cold War Republican presidents, is both enduring and undefined. ...

"The most important concept in nation-state populism is the people. These are citizens of the folk community, membership in which crosses ethnic, racial, and sectarian lines. Note, for example, Trump's reference to the Nazis' systematic murder of 'millions of Poland's Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.' Or as Trump put it, in a different context, in his Inaugural Address: 'Whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag.'

"Together, the people constitute the nation. Borders define the nation's physical extent, but not its nature. Indeed, the nation may exist independent of statehood or political sovereignty. 'While Poland could be invaded and occupied,' Trump said, 'and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you had lost your land but you never lost your pride.' Nor is the nation always represented in the corridors of power. 'Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another,' Trump said at the inaugural, 'or from one party to another -- but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C, and giving it back to you, the American people.' ...

"These are more than remarks to the Poles. They describe a world of sovereign nation-states, governed by peoples proud of their histories and confident in their futures, united in common cause against the enemies of civilization, of freedom and human dignity. And Trump presents a challenge in the form of a question: Are we still made of that stuff that populated a continent, became an industrial powerhouse, went to the moon, and defeated the Kaiser and the Fuhrer and the Emperor and the Politburo? I hope the answer is yes."

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"Americans may be more supportive of the president's new, post-Supreme Court order travel ban policy than many observers might have expected.

"A new Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found 60 percent of respondents supported the ban, either strongly or 'somewhat' when given this explanation of it ...

"A full 37 percent of respondents said they 'strongly' supported the ban, with an additional 23 percent supporting it 'somewhat.' Only 14 percent strongly opposed the ban. Interestingly, the poll's crosstabs show even 39 percent of respondents who reported voting for Hillary Clinton last November expressed support. Forty-four percent of 2012 Obama voters were supportive as well. Among voters who listed their top issue as security, 81 percent supported the policy."

"President Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are not going to replace the American healthcare system with a free market. There are just too many obstacles, political, moral and economic.

"But the Republican Party does have a chance to create small experiments in market-based healthcare amidst the tangle of safety net programs, and outside the reach of Byzantine insurance regulations. If they write a bill that allows these experiments by either states, individuals, or organizations, they might transform the industry in the long run and perhaps beat back the Left's hitherto relentless march toward socialized healthcare.

"Creating room for such market forces would make a Republican bill worth supporting. ...

"The virtue of markets is not that they allow businesses to profit, although they do that, but that through robust competition, risk-taking and experimentation, they provide innovation and value at the lowest price. Market microcosms around the country, structured differently in different states according to local taste, and utilizing various models of coverage, could discover products that work far better than anything available before or after Obamacare."

"Those who won our independence...valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."

"If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!"

"The progressive strategy of investigating President Trump nonstop for Russian collusion or obstruction of justice or witness tampering so far has produced no substantial evidence of wrongdoing.

"The alternate strategy of derailing the new administration before it really gets started hasn't succeeded, either, despite serial efforts to sue over election results, alter the Electoral College vote, boycott the inauguration, delay the confirmation of appointments, demand recusals, promise Mr. Trump's impeachment or removal through the 25th Amendment, and file suit under the Emoluments Clause.

"A third strategy of portraying Mr. Trump as a veritable monster likewise so far has failed in four special elections for House seats."

"Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller should immediately call off their investigations into the cooked-up Trump-Russian collusion theories.

"As real information emerges, it looks more and more like a hit job on President Trump and his administration fabricated by a witches brew of anti-Trump forces including the Obama administration, partisan DOJ/FBI officials and Democrats salivating at the notion of impeaching Trump -- to steal the election from Republicans -- with an ethically challenged left-wing media pushing fake news regularly. Add establishment Republicans such as U.S. Sen. John McCain, who helped fuel the fake scandal by giving the now-discredited Russia dossier to the FBI to investigate."

"The FBI launched a criminal probe against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn two years after the retired Army general roiled the bureau's leadership by intervening on behalf of a decorated counterterrorism agent who accused now-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and other top officials of sexual discrimination, according to documents and interviews.

"Flynn's intervention on behalf of Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz was highly unusual, and included a letter in 2014 on his official Pentagon stationary, a public interview in 2015 supporting Gritz's case and an offer to testify on her behalf. His offer put him as a hostile witness in a case against McCabe, who was soaring through the bureau's leadership ranks.

"The FBI sought to block Flynn's support for the agent, asking a federal administrative law judge in May 2014 to keep Flynn and others from becoming a witness in her Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) case, memos obtained by Circa show. Two years later, the FBI opened its inquiry of Flynn. ...

"McCabe eventually became the bureau's No. 2 executive and emerged as a central player in the FBI's Russia election tampering investigation, putting him in a position to impact the criminal inquiry against Flynn.

"Three FBI employees told Circa they personally witnessed McCabe make disparaging remarks about Flynn before and during the time the retired Army general emerged as a figure in the Russia case.

"The bureau employees, who spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said they did not know the reason for McCabe's displeasure with Flynn, but that it made them uncomfortable as the Russia probe began to unfold and pressure built to investigate Flynn. One employee even consulted a private lawyer."

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