"Remember the date: April 4, 2017. That's when nerve-gas bombs fell on a Syrian town, killing dozens -- including children, women and the elderly -- with no effort to disguise the crime. And the world did nothing. ...

"If we do not respond forcefully, chemical weapons will be used against our military in the future, by one rogue state or another. Worse, if the ban on chemical weapons is allowed to crumble, the taboos on biological weapons (germ warfare) and nuclear use will be the next to dissolve.

"Those agonized deaths in Syria weren't far away. They happened next door. ...

"What should we do? As with the president's rhetoric, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley's heartfelt address to the Security Council on Wednesday was no substitute for applying force. We know which Syrian air base those attack planes flew from. We should destroy every aircraft in every bunkered hangar in that facility. Call Vladimir Putin's bluff. Let the empty rhetoric be Putin's this time around.

"Why us? Who else? Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are the three horsemen of Assad's apocalypse. Strike Assad even if those nerve-gas victims mean nothing to you. Do it in our own interests, for the benefit of the living. Those who use chemical weapons must pay an exemplary price."

"Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities -- an intelligence need based on American interests -- the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

"The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president's staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests."

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"The Judiciary Committee sent Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate Monday on an 11-9 'party-line vote,' as the press likes to say. What a shame. All nine committee Democrats lined up like the Rockettes to oppose the nominee whose qualifications and temperament are universally hailed.

"At least 41 Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also committed to filibuster Judge Gorsuch on the Senate floor, so he will need 60 votes to be confirmed. This will force Republicans to change Senate rules to break what would be the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in history. Democrats and their media friends want to portray Republicans as the radicals in this case, but Democrats are the precedent-busters.

"Mr. Schumer is howling that Republicans stole this Court seat because they didn't give a vote to Merrick Garland last year. But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared before Barack Obama nominated Judge Garland that there would be no vote on any nominee in the election year. He was merely echoing the standard that Mr. Schumer had set when he declared in 2007 that Democrats would block any nominee that George W. Bush would send up in his final year as President."

"The odds favor the possibility that Obama was the king of dirty tricks. Consider that Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official whose portfolio included Russia, said in a March 2 interview that was little noticed until last week that she had urged the Obama White House and congressional Dems to gather information about Trump and protect it from the new administration.

"'If they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence,' Farkas told MSNBC. 'So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.'

"She added: 'We have good intelligence on Russia ... That's why you have the leaking. People are worried.'

"Farkas later tried to walk back her claims, but too late. Her next speech should be to a federal grand jury."

"The late terrorist Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was famous for saying one thing to American media and the opposite to Palestinian audiences. To U.S. presidents and chief diplomatic correspondents he would profess his desire for peace and for a two-state solution, while to Arabs and Muslims he would impugn Jews, hint at Israel's abolition, and incite and pay for anti-Semitic violence. His problem was that, like most liars, he was eventually found out. President George W. Bush saw through Arafat's skein of deception and disengaged the self-defeating 'peace process' that he had manipulated to his advantage for decades. By the time of Arafat's death, it was clear that any practical improvement in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship would have to bypass the Palestinian autocrat. He just couldn't be trusted.

"It is by this standard that I hereby judge Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to be the Yasser Arafat of the Democratic Party. Schumer is so practiced at saying one thing to Democratic elites and another to the Democratic base that it is easy to fall for his charade. But neither Arafat nor Schumer should fool you. Schumer is a hypocrite and a liar and out for no one but himself. And it is for these reasons that his threat to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch should be viewed with incredulity. ...

"Conniving, spineless, duplicitous, misleading, double-crossing -- Chuck Schumer is a fitting exemplar for the modern Democratic Party. All he needs is the keffiyeh."

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"Although Trump is the least ideological president in memory, the love-hate reaction he engenders reinforces the polarization Barack Obama left behind. While votes from members of Dem-leaning unions helped Trump win key states, pols like Schumer have concluded that their hard-left donors and activists want confrontation, not cooperation.

"That means no bipartisanship in the short run, and a likely filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Trump's plan to tackle tax reform also will be a single-party effort, with Dems already cranking out their usual talking points about giveaways to the rich and corporate welfare.

"The forecast, then, is for more dreariness bordering on hopelessness -- with one potential bright spot. The only way forward is for Trump to unite the Republican Party.

"If he can do that, Dems will be forced to engage in substantive negotiations because the alternative is exclusive Republican rule on every piece of legislation. In effect, GOP unity could force Dems to the table for at least a semblance of bipartisanship that would be good for the country."

"The Obama administration encouraged sanctuary cities, and President Trump is right to push in the opposite direction. The more than 300 sanctuary jurisdictions across the country release thousands of illegal immigrants subject to deportation back onto the streets every year, at a risk to public safety. Recall that the illegal immigrant who killed Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco in 2015 had seven felony convictions and had been deported five times previously; at the time of the killing, he was facing a sixth deportation order. Even as Democrats at all levels of government declare their support for deporting known criminals, sanctuary-city policies keep those individuals out of the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...

"The Justice Department plans to award about $4.1 billion in grants in the current fiscal year, according to Sessions. In places like New York City and Los Angeles, some of that grant money goes toward valuable services, so Democrats are balking at what one California state senator is calling 'blackmail.' But there'€™s no blackmail here. Every jurisdiction can benefit from the Justice Department's largesse, provided they do what they should have been doing all along: enforce the law."

"The real scandal is probably not going to be Trump's contacts with Russians. More likely, it will be the rogue work of a politically driven group of intelligence officers, embedded within the bureaucracy, who, either in freelancing mode, or in Henry II-Thomas Becket fashion ('Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?') with Obama-administration officials, began monitoring Team Trump -- either directly or more likely through the excuse of inadvertently chancing upon conversations while monitoring supposedly suspicious foreign communications."

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"There are a lot of people who want to conveniently lay the blame for this stunning failure on recalcitrant members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. If only these conservative hardliners were willing to give way, we'd be on the road to repeal, defenders of leadership would like to have us believe. This is convenient, both because there are always people in Washington eager to take aim at conservative purists, and also because it has the makings of a great ironic hot take for journalists: 'How conservatives saved Obamacare.' ...

"In this case, the hardliners were playing a productive role by pointing out the real policy consequences of the piecemeal approach being pursued by the House leadership. Though we'll never know for sure how the numbers might have looked if a vote had taken place, it's clear that many centrist members of the Republican caucus were also prepared to vote this bill down. House conservatives, if they could be blamed for anything, it's for having the audacity to urge leadership to actually honor seven years of pledges to voters to repeal Obamacare. If anybody was moving the goal posts, it wasn't Freedom Caucusers, it was those who were trying to sell a bill that kept much of Obamacare's regulatory architecture in place as a free market repeal and replace plan."

"Republican congressional investigators expect a potential 'smoking gun' establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week, a source told Fox News. ...

"The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump, according to sources. ...

"The FBI hasn't been responsive to the House Intelligence Committee's request for documents, but the National Security Agency is expected to produce documents to the committee by Friday. The NSA document production is expected to produce more intelligence than Nunes has so far seen or described -- including what one source described as a potential 'smoking gun' establishing the spying.

"Some time will be needed to properly assess the materials, with the likely result being that congressional investigators and attorneys won't have a solid handle on the contents of the documents -- and their implications -- until next week."