The Wall Street Journal sends a daily email to subscribers with highlights from the news. Today’s (12/26) email begins:

“Stocks and bonds are staging an extraordinary run. They are on track for their biggest simultaneous gains in more than two decades. The S&P 500 has soared 28.6% this year, while a bond rally has pushed the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note down by three quarters of a percentage point. Yields move inversely to prices.

Behind this year’s gains: An improving economic outlook, progress on trade and the Fed’s interest-rate cuts.  The progress on trade includes, most recently, China’s announcement that it will lower tariffs on more than 800 product categories.”

And that’s just for openers for good news for all Americans.

We hear a great deal these days about the “deep state,” especially as it applies to the Trump Administration. The president’s supporters use the term to describe the entrenched federal bureaucracy and what they believe to be its efforts to derail the president’s policies.

Until recently, the president’s critics have dismissed the idea of a deep state as a crazy right-wing conspiracy.  But, in fact, the deep state is a particularly virulent form of the “administrative state,” which has been described by such scholars as John Marini, Ronald Prestritto, and Paul Moreno as a perversion of constitutional self-government.

It is a “fourth branch of government” that fits nowhere within the scheme of the Constitution as understood by its authors. It is enabled by Congress’s unconstitutional delegation of its legislative powers to the executive, leading to the creation of the pestilent “alphabet agencies” that plague American life.

[Note by JW:  This is absolutely one of VDH’s best.  Here is the money quote.  Consider sending the quote to everyone you know.

 “If and when fascism comes to America, it will not arrive with jackboots, stiff arms, and military uniforms. The attempt to suppress political opposition in anti-constitutional fashion, to regiment the economy by denying constitutionally protected freedoms, and the efforts to change the Constitution to reflect political utility, will come under the auspices of ‘equality,’ ‘fairness, ‘saving the planet, and ‘social justice—as a way to combat ‘climate change,’ ‘racism,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism’.”  ---Victor Davis Hanson

Be sure and read and absorb this masterful VDH essay entire. – JW]

Last Thursday (12/19), the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote an editorial calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

In my view, this editorial only serves to confirm one of the sadder realizations of my life: that religious conviction guarantees neither moral clarity nor common sense.

The gist of the editorial -- and of most religious and conservative opposition to President Trump -- is that any good the president has done is dwarfed by his character defects.

This is an amoral view that says more about Galli than it does about the president. He and the people who share his opinion are making the following statement: No matter how much good this president does, it is less important than his character flaws.

Why is this wrong?

It is said there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and government budgets.

Now we can add impeachment to the list of stomach-turning sights to avoid.

The arcane rules, phony cordiality and debates over the second sentence in paragraph G of Point Six were bad enough, but the nausea meter hit the roof when Nancy Pelosi took the microphone. Wearing a funereal black dress, she stood next to a cardboard American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

I would have counted her more honest if she had pledged her allegiance to a Democrat donkey.

In a series of tweets this morning (12/19), legal eagle and talk show host Mark Levin gave some pointers to Senator McConnell on how to handle Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate.

Levin said:

“Nancy Pelosi was apparently advised by leftwing Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe to delay sending the impeachment to the Senate.  So she’s unilaterally sitting on the impeachment. This is another brazen unconstitutional act.

Here’s what Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans must do in response: 

[This is the full text of the President’s to Pelosi issued yesterday, 12/17.  The italics are ours for emphasis. –JW]

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

 By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy.