DC’s Price Of Entry: Shattered Reputations, Ruined Lives

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

The mainstream media and their allies in the Deep State typically rage at anything President Trump does. It’s as predictable as the sunrise. But the attacks have recently broadened, targeting not only Trump but anybody with the audacity to work for him. The cases of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, NSC Director General Michael Flynn, and 2016 campaign aide Michael Caputo — all “former” associates of the president — are representative of a much broader search-and-destroy mission on the part of the left.
But first, some history.
In 1987, President Reagan nominated Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bork to serve on the Supreme Court, to replace retiring Justice Lewis Powell. The scathing attacks that ensued are seared in public memory, with “Bork” having entered the lexicon as a verb, to represent a full-bore mission to ruin not only the career of conservative nominees, but their reputation as well. It’s been going on ever since.
The attack on Judge Bork had been prepared for over a year. In 1986, when Justice Antonin Scalia was confirmed by a unanimous vote, two other nominations did not sail so easily. When President Reagan nominated Jeff Sessions to a Federal District Court seat in Alabama, the campaign against him was so fierce that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary refused to move the nomination to the floor, with Sen. Arlen Specter, a pro-abortion “Republican of Convenience,” providing the deciding vote.
So Sessions stayed home in Alabama, where he was elected attorney general in 1994 and U.S. senator in 1996. There he joined Republicans on the same Judiciary Committee that had defeated his nomination ten years before.
Indiana’s Daniel Manion (brother of this writer), whom Reagan nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1986, met the same torrent of opposition. Like Sessions, he was pro-life, but critics at the time could not oppose him on those grounds. To oppose Sessions, Specter had conjured up flimsy allegations of “racism,” but with Manion the manufactured complaints centered on his being “only” a small-town lawyer.
In that particular instance, Specter relented, under considerable pressure, and the committee voted the nomination to the floor, where Manion was eventually confirmed by one vote.
The leader of the opposition to all these nominees was Ralph Neas, a 1968 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and one of the most effective pro-abortion activists in Washington for an entire generation (Sen. Edward Kennedy once referred to Neas as “The 101st Senator”). The broader coalition that Neas formed and led coalesced into a permanent juggernaut which included all of the major media, as well as countless “nonprofits” (like Planned Parenthood USA), major media, members of the increasingly militant pro-abortion Democrat Party, and cultural icons of all varieties.
Curiously, organized homosexuals, one of the most effective pro-abortion groups today, had scant political presence in the 1980s. In those years, AIDS was known as the “Gay Plague”; it was only in the 1990s that AIDS morphed into an affliction whose causes were simply unknown, even though active homosexuals were the vast majority of its “victims.”

“You’ll Never Eat Lunch
In This Town Again”

In today’s Washington, this same broad coalition, well-entrenched throughout the “Swamp” at every level, has all but posted a “Trespassers Will Be Shot” sign around all 64 miles of the Washington Beltway. The resistance to Trump was well known, but even liberals raised their eyebrows when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller sent a team of FBI agents to raid the Rockefeller Center office and Park Avenue hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Even Alan Dershowitz, a well-known liberal lawyer and author, was outraged.
“This is a very dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations,” Dershowitz told Fox News commentator Sean Hannity.”
“I deal with clients all the time. I tell them on my word of honor all the time that what you tell me is sacrosanct. . . . You know, if the shoe were on the other foot, if this were Hillary Clinton being investigated and they went in her lawyer’s office, the ACLU would be on every television station in America, jumping up and down. The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is appalling.”
Cohen is not the only target to be destroyed. There was no indication to indicate that Michael Caputo, one-time Trump campaign adviser, had broken any law, but that doesn’t matter when a rogue posse of Democrat prosecutors have subpoena power. Caputo had to sell his house to pay his legal fees. His family had to weather death threats, his children were scorned.
And that can happen to anyone, however innocent. As a longtime U.S. Senate staffer, I couldn’t believe it when I discovered that it was a felony to lie to me. And several friends of mine hired lawyers costing thousands of dollars when called in by my Democrat staff counterparts to address their participation in routine foreign policy issues. It’s too dangerous to pretend that, if you just tell the truth, everything will be OK. That is not the way it works.
General Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Adviser, had to sell his house to pay his legal fees.
When Mueller threatened to go after Flynn’s son, he pleaded guilty to lying to two FBI agents, even though former FBI Director James Comey told Congress that Flynn hadn’t lied in the interview at all.
The bottom line is simple: Since the 1980s, an increasing number of Republicans, especially conservatives, have quietly turned down the opportunity to serve in senior positions in government. The rabid pro-abortion, pro-homosexual lobby will go after any pro-life nominee to the bench, and the entire Swamp will slime him — or her, as Judge Amy Coney Barrett learned when harassed for her Catholic faith by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) at her confirmation hearing.
Although abortion is the driving issue of the Democrat Left, potential nominees who have no connection to the pro-life movement are nonetheless targets of opportunity. The message from the Swamp to all conservatives thinking about public service in Republican administrations is unanimous: “Cross us, and we’ll ruin you.”

The Matter Of The Miter

“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight” — remark of Hilaire Belloc (undated) to William Temple, quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 383.
On the seventh day of May, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored an exhibit called “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” In a parade of blasphemies (Madonna appeared as a Franciscan friar), scantily dressed stars paraded and mingled, adorned with actual Catholic vestments and accoutrements. CatholicPhilly.com reported that the exhibit “includes more than 100 pieces from top designers inspired by Catholic symbolism and art, as well as 40 vestments and accoutrements from the papal office of liturgical celebrations.”
Someone named “Rihanna,” undoubtedly famous, sported an extremely revealing neckline and a stunningly bejeweled miter.
New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan joked that he lent it to her. “She was very gracious” when she returned it, he further quipped.
(A spokesman for the New York Archdiocese had to clarify that “there was no actual loan of a miter to anyone.”)
Cardinal Dolan said he had attended the event “to thank God for the gift of beauty.”
Words fail me.