Bloodthirsty Liberal

I am aware that the Constitution lays the responsibility of budgeting in the House of Representatives, though I couldn’t have told you exactly why.

This guy can, and so should Harry Reid:

It’s one of the clearest, easiest-to-understand provisions in the Constitution. And Harry Reid’s Senate flouts it routinely.

The Origination Clause in Article I, Section 7 states: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” In addition to clarity, this provision has an even greater virtue: It serves a very good purpose.

The Founding Fathers required revenue measures to originate in the House because they wanted this authority to belong to the legislative body closest to the people. Plus, the Framers wanted the larger states to enjoy the most influence on matters of taxing and spending, which is the case in the House (whose seats are allocated according to population) but not the Senate (where each state gets two seats regardless of population and smaller states have outsized influence). “This power over the purse,” James Madison explained in Federalist No. 58, “may, in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has taken to thumbing his nose at this clear mandate. Recently, he publicly dismissed the Origination Clause as a “hyper-technical budget issue,” raised by his Republican opponents as “a fig leaf to hide their blatant obstruction.”

We’ll be charitable and describe Harry Reid as a partisan hack and not merely an ignoramus. He should know better, and I believe he does.

But when Senior Lecturer Obama (now Lecturer in Chief) described the United States Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties”, it’s clear he was speaking for a whole political philosophy. Liberals are fundamentally constrained from doing all that they want to do, what they feel they “must do on our behalf”. That is why they chafe at “hyper-technical” “fig leafs” (what a monstrous description of such a bedrock principle of government), why they talk of deeming bills to be passed rather than passing them, why they intrude into the relationship between patient and doctor and so basically alter an industry that amounts to one-sixth of the economy.

Oh yes, if it’s not too “hyper-technical” of me to observe, the Senate hasn’t passed a budget since 2009.

And it’s not just Obama, Reid, and Pelosi—everybody’s into repealing the Constitution:

One unnamed Senate staffer even speculated that the House’s fealty to the Constitution “may be part of some Republican plan.” This is all in keeping with how the leftist intelligentsia has viewed previous efforts to ignore the Origination Clause. The New York Times characterized one such mishap as an “arcane parliamentary mistake” the enforcement of which was designed “to block . . . everything else Mr. Reid is hoping to accomplish,” while The Washington Monthly termed it “a Democratic procedural slip-up.” As Elizabeth Price Foley, a professor at Florida International University’s School of Law and author of the excellent new intellectual history of the tea-party movement (The Tea Party: Three Principles), puts it: “Nowhere in these statements is there recognition that the holdup was constitutional rather than political.”

There is a constitutionally permissible way for the Senate to make its voice heard on revenue measures. Under widely accepted precedent, the Senate could take up House-passed tax bills, amend them, and then send the amended legislation back to the House for further consideration.

Liberal columnists like E.J. Dionne love to lament in print and on TV of the passing of the reasonable Republican, the one who wasn’t so “hyper-technical” and “arcane”, so obsessed with “slip-ups” and “Republican plans”. It’s clear why. Some Republicans might have gone along to get along. But not the Tea Party. It formed organically as a movement of citizens concerned about basic liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. Its adherents (their being no such formality as “membership”) saw in the presidential and congressional results of 2008 a dangerous swing toward autocracy in government. And they organized.

Negative liberties are still liberties—indeed they may be the only kind worth having.

Not that we want it, but after the investment of blood and money, every American has a right to claim any acreage in Afghanistan, including Rodeo Drive, Kabul:

If Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, an influential member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is looking for a country to visit as a member of a congressional delegation, he can cross Afghanistan off his list.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Rohrabacher have been at loggerheads over the congressman’s push for a more decentralized Afghan government. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the disagreement, Karzai said he is against letting Rohrabacher into the country.

“Until he changes his tongue, until he shows respect to the Afghan people, to our way of life and to our constitution … No foreigner has a place asking another people, another country to change their constitution. Have we ever asked the United States to change its constitution?”

Well, there have been some issues around who declares war and how, but we’ll let that pass for now. What’s the problem with Rep. Rohrbacher?

Rohrabacher went on to call the mercurial Afghan leader a “corrupt prima donna” in the same interview.

…

Rohrabacher later released a statement through his office saying he would not “apologize to Karzai or any other corrupt leader.

“Afghanistan is failing because Karzai and his corrupt clique are incompetent leaders, not because the U.S. hasn’t pumped enough money or blood to help the brave people of Afghanistan … Right now, I’m more concerned with getting American troops out of that country so they won’t continue to needlessly die than I am getting myself into Afghanistan to meet with officials like Karzai,” Rohrabacher said in the statement.

Hmm, he’s not wrong. Let the record show that his contempt is not for the people of Afghanistan, as Karzai alleges, but for Karzai himself. That makes Rep. Rohrbacher more generous than I, but who isn’t?

That’s okay, Barack, you’ll get ‘em next time:

Another day, another congressional shutout of O’s latest unserious gimmick. That makes three in the past year. The Senate torpedoed his last budget 97-0 in May 2011, then the House dropped a goose egg on him in March with a robust 414-0 tally. Now this.

610-0:

Republicans forced the vote by offering the president’s plan on the Senate floor.

Democrats disputed that it was actually the president’s plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn’t actually match Mr. Obama’s budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president’s numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, even challenged Democrats to point out any errors in the numbers and he would correct them — a challenge no Democrats took up…

The White House has held its proposal out as a “balanced approach” to beginning to rein in deficits. It calls for tax increases to begin to offset higher spending, and would begin to level off debt as a percentage of the economy by 2022. It would produce $6.4 trillion in new deficits over that time.

…

Said Mitch McConnell of Reid’s refusal to offer his own budget, “They’re so unserious they won’t even vote for a budget that was written by a president of their own party. It doesn’t get more irresponsible than that.”

I didn’t know what to do with this story as a stand-alone—but it fits here:

Democratic leaders have defiantly refused to lay out their own vision for how to deal with federal debt and spending, arguing that last summer’s debt-ceiling deal essentially serves as an actual budget. While a budget resolution is non-binding, they say, the Budget Control Act was signed into law.

But a few centrists in the 53-member Democratic conference expressed frustration with their party’s budget inaction.

“Anything we can do to force the Senate to deal with the debt is important to do, and the sooner the better,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with Democrats, told POLITICO. “I don’t think [Democrats] will offer their own budget and I’m disappointed in that.”

Freshman Sen. Joe Manchin has often said he would have been “impeached” if he failed to produce a budget as West Virginia governor, though he conceded there are differences between the state and Senate budget processes.

“Sure I have a problem with [failing to offer a budget]. As a former governor, my responsibility was to put a budget forward and balance it, so anyone who comes from the executive mindset has a problem with that. I don’t care if you’re Democrat or Republican,” Manchin said in an interview.

I don’t know if two Democrats (one technically an Independent) qualifies as “a few”, but I take the point. While the Blue Dog Democrat may be extinct, there might still be a few in the remotest parts of the country that are genetically distinct.

As a former Democrat (for over 25 years), I can’t even imagine what I ever saw in these people.

It’s probably like the water out of your tap when the fire department is flushing the hydrants. Run it through the news cycle for a couple of days and it’ll look clear enough:

A senior federal investigator accused the White House of having stonewalled a probe into whether an administration report on the April 2010 BP oil spill was doctored by the White House to show President Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium was backed by outside experts, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The revelation of the charges comes at an unwelcome time for Obama as he tries to tout job gains and claim success at expanding drilling. The deepwater ban established soon after the spill, along with a decline in permitting for shallow water drilling, cost thousands of jobs.

The White House and the Department of Interior said the claim in the May 2010 report that experts backed the ban was an editing mistake, but the investigator, according to emails he sent in 2010 and 2011, believed otherwise. From the Times-Picayune story:

In one email obtained by The Times-Picayune, Richard Larrabee, senior special agent assigned to investigate the matter for the Department of Interior’s inspector general, wrote: “I truly believe the editing ‘WAS’ intentional — by an overzealous staffer at the White House. And, if asked, I, as the case agent, would be happy to state that opinion to anyone interested.” Larrabee declined Monday to comment on the emails.

Larrabee, a special agent assigned to investigate the misinformation in the report for the Department of Interior’s inspector general, also charged that the Secretary of Interior’s office denied investigators full access to “records, reports, audits, review documents, papers, and recommendations of other material.”

Not to worry, B-HO: look who’s got you back.

The top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee doesn’t think much of the panel’s investigation into a two-year-old Obama administration report on the 2010 BP oil spill. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said the probe is a waste of time and money.

Why, that would make it a perfect Democrat program, wouldn’t it?

Markey, who chaired the Natural Resources Committee before Republicans recaptured the House majority in the 2010 elections, said the GOP majority ought to be concentrating on more important issues than a copy editing mistake.

“Rather than wasting the government’s time and money investigating the editing of the executive summary of a two-year-old report, the administration and the Congress should be focused on the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself and making sure nothing like it ever hits Gulf Coast communities again,” Markey said. “It is quite clear based on the voluminous documents examined by the committee’s Democrat staff that this is much ado about nothing.”

“The Secretary of Interior has already acknowledged that the editing of this report was flawed and apologized to the peer reviewers for that error. I don’t see the point of wasting additional time and taxpayer dollars on a Congressional investigation of copy editing mistakes. This is a diversion and a sideshow.”

Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who spearheaded the committee’s decision to subpoena documents from the Obama administration, said the issue is far from trivial.

“President Obama pledged unprecedented transparency and it’s regrettable that a Congressional subpoena is necessary to obtain documents pertaining to the administration’s report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico,” Hastings said. “The report falsely stated the professional views of independent engineers and the moratorium directly caused thousands of lost jobs, economic pain throughout the Gulf region, and a decline in American energy production. It’s important to clearly understand exactly how this happened.”

It’s an honest mistake, I’m sure. It’s like on my American History final in college when I said the British won the Revolutionary War. I told the professor it was an “editing mistake”, but as she was 1/32 Choctaw, I think she had it in for me and failed me anyway.

PS: Everyone knows our Major Leaguers up here in Massachusetts: Kennedy, Kerry, Frank, Warren, et al. But we have an impressive list of minor league goofballs and moonbats, too, Markey not least among them.

PPS: Has anyone thought about creating a Fantasy Congress league? Draft your favorite deranged Democrats, and earn points for their moronic statements and positions? Nancy Pelosi has first-round talent, for example, but Markey would be a solid middle-round choice.

Hey, what’s another $192 million? We didn’t really need it anyway:

US President Barack Obama has lifted a ban on financial aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Obama stated that the aid was “important to the security interests of the United States.”

The US Congress froze a $192 million aid package to the Palestinian Authority after its president, Mahmoud Abbas, defied US pressure and sought to attain UN endorsement of Palestinian statehood last September. The presidential waiver means that aid can now be delivered.

…

Section 3 of Congress’s Palestinian Accountability Act, which applies to 2012, stipulates that “no funds available to any United States Government department or agency … may be obligated or expended with respect to providing funds to the Palestinian Authority.” Obama has now signed a waiver, however, the White House said Friday, and asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to inform Congress accordingly.

The AFP news agency quoted White House spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying the $192 million aid package would be devoted to “ensuring the continued viability of the moderate PA government under the leadership of [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.”

Vietor added that the PA had fulfilled its major obligations, such as recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence and accepting the Road Map for Peace.

Huh? Has it done any such things? That’s as brazen a lie as I’ve heard in a long time. That’s just sayin’ [bleep] to see who’s listening.

Of course, he didn’t say how paying the money was “important to the security interests of the United States.” Silly Congress, what part of “I won” didn’t you get?

This is just too rich (NY Times piece, if you’re counting):

DOES America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called “The Origins of Political Order,” and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?

The columnist who gets everything wrong, Tom Friedman, consults with the intellectual who got history wrong, Francis Fukuyama (end of history, my a**)—what could go wrong?

As an intellectual offering, this is completely wrong. What does he mean by an American “Arab Spring”? It’s nonsensical. And what antennae does Friedman use to “detect” such a long-winded concept, when he doesn’t even quote Fukuyama directly? If that’s what Friedman thinks, just say so, ya big dope.

Anyway, what’s wrong with the current system? President Obama had unfettered power for two full years, during which time he could have passed any crap legislation he and the servile Congress wanted. In fact, they did: ObamaCare. The people, in their wisdom, put the brakes on that in November 2010 by overwhelmingly electing Republicans, many of them Tea Party Republicans. The GOP took the House, but Democrats still run the Senate and the White House. Obama has even gotten to appoint two Supreme Court justices in two years, as many as George Bush appointed in eight. How has Obama been without “enough power”? There are so many distortions and lies in this first paragraph alone, it’s exhausting.

But as long as we’re here:

“When Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.” That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. “But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

But not easily. Even a President designated commander-in-chief of the armed forces has to seek permission of Congress to declare war.

Unless, of course, you’re Obama, and you can carry on in Libya without any checks or balances whatsoever. (Oh, and Israel says “thanks” for those missiles liberated from Qaddafi’s stock that landed in Hamass’ hands and then on Israeli territory.)

Okay, though, I’ll bite: what actions and decisions are we lacking?

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes.

Has Obama truly been blocked from making any appointments? That sounds like an overstatement. Doesn’t he just name a czar anytime he needs one? Anyway, he’s used recess appointments to go around the system, so he’s hardly suffering from senatorial sclerosis. Dishonest much, Tom?

And the majority party always squawks over the filibuster rule; yet it never gets taken out of the Senate’s rule book. Why do you think that is? Because they secretly want it. Anyway, I recall back in the day, you incorporated ideas from the opposition to get their votes. The Republicans had their own health care plan, and were eager to incorporate their ideas into ObamaCare. Obama’s answer: I won.

In addition, the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm. And, finally, the huge expansion of the federal government, and the increasing importance of money in politics, have hugely expanded the number of special-interest lobbies and their ability to influence and clog decision-making.

Oh yeah, we’re all watching C-Span 24/7. I’m addicted. But he’s even more unhinged: back-room deals are harder to accomplish (that’s a bad thing?), yet government has expanded? His whole point is that government is sclerotic—can it be both dynamically expanding and clogged up? Of course not.

And sorry if small pissant blogs like this one make Harry Reid’s life harder. I don’t know how I live with myself. That First Amendment’s a real pain in the a**, huh?

But enough of you, Friedman. I thought this was supposed to be about Fukuyama’s thesis:

To put it another way, says Fukuyama, America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.

…

“If we are to get out of our present paralysis, we need not only strong leadership, but changes in institutional rules,” argues Fukuyama. These would include eliminating senatorial holds and the filibuster for routine legislation and having budgets drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with “heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,” insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote.

Can you believe this? Less democracy, not more? Less free speech, less openness, less transparency? “Enforce the will of the majority”? And people call conservatives fascists!

I’m used to Friedman being wrong (and Fukuyama), but this wrong? I wonder if he has a brain tumor?

I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.”

I hope that will never happen! What Friedman is describing is the system of his beloved Chinese Communist Party. He’s beyond admiration; now he’s lobbying. Thank God he writes for the New York Times, or people might take him seriously.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down:

Republicans, as they have for nearly three years now, continue to lead Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot, this time for the week ending Sunday, April 15.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 36% would choose the Democrat instead. This is the largest gap between the two parties since the beginning of 2011.

I’m not sure the Republicans (save Paul Ryan) have done anything to earn their lead, but the Democrats sure have done plenty to deserve their deficit. Still planning to take that gavel back, Nancy? Don’t blink (as if!), or you might miss your chance!

Another Executive Branch power grab

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority sure to anger the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.

A State Department official said that the letter was delivered on Tuesday to key members of Congress informing them of Clinton’s decision to move forward with the $147 million package of the fiscal year 2011 economic support funds for the Palestinian people, despite Ros-Lehtinen’s hold. Administrations generally do not disburse funding over the objections of lawmakers on relevant committees.

“[The funds deliver] critical support to the Palestinian people and those leaders seeking to combat extremism within their society and build a more stable future. Without funding, our programs risk cancellation,” the official, who was not authorized to speak about the issue, said in an e-mail. “Such an occurrence would undermine the progress that has been made in recent years in building Palestinian institutions and improving stability, security, and economic prospects, which benefits Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

I suggest that we suspend elections in the United States. Obama should be “re-elected” by acclimation. The Constitution should be shredded and used for insulation in homes in poor neighborhoods. The concept of checks and balances, respect for the law, and a civil society is dead.

- Aggie

Or the government will. Or you the doctor. Or you the government.

Does it really matter? Any way you look at it, you’ve still got the latex finger up the chute:

The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president’s healthcare law.

The money is only part of the IRS’s total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate.

…

The law contains dozens of targeted appropriations to implement specific provisions. It also gave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a $1 billion implementation fund, to use as it sees fit. Republicans have called it a “slush fund.”

HHS plans to drain the entire fund by September — before the presidential election, and more than a year before most of the healthcare law takes effect. Roughly half of that money will ultimately go to the IRS.

HHS has transferred almost $200 million to the IRS over the past two years and plans to transfer more than $300 million this year, according to figures provided by a congressional aide.

That may sound like a lot of money, but jack boots don’t come cheap.

Neither do the consequences of an election:

The Supreme Court has long had the role of declaring what the law is. That’s becoming a harder and harder task thanks to the White House and Congress concocting laws so complex that no one knows their meaning before, during or after they’re passed.

In an era when people expect transparency and abhor complexity, three days of skeptical Supreme Court hearings on the president’s health law showcased a complex law collapsing under its own weight. Information is supposed to flow freely, but consumers of health care operate in the dark, including without any understanding of how the law is supposed to work. And they are not alone.

Consider how Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer—one Reagan appointee and one Clinton appointee—tag-teamed to declare the law unreadable. “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” Justice Scalia asked during the oral argument, referring to prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? And do you really expect the court to do that? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

Justice Breyer made a similar point: “I haven’t read every word of that, I promise. . . . There is the mandate in the community, this is Titles I and II, the mandate, the community, pre-existing condition, OK? . . . There is biosimilarity, there is breast-feeding, there is promoting nurses and doctors to serve underserved areas, there is the Class Act, etc. . . . So what do you propose we do other than spend a year reading all this?”

The justices focused on the complexity of the law to debate what happens if they find some parts unconstitutional, such as the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance. Can the rest of it stay, or must it all fall, and the political branches start on health-care reform from scratch? And how could the court practically pick and choose, given the law’s great length and complexity?

This shouldn’t surprise even supporters of the law. Before the bill was passed in 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it,” and Rep. John Conyers complained, “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means?”

So, Congress doesn’t know what it means; the Supreme Court doesn’t know what it means—to the executive it’s just another slush fund (like TARP, ARRA, etc.). Are there any grown-ups in Washington?

I saw this in another blog, and it feels apt:

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
Ernest Rutherford

Same should go for legislation, Ernie.

PS: Maybe that’s why Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd were so fond of those waitress sandwiches. They were trying to get a feel… for complex legislation, of course.

I went through Obama’s extortionist warning to the Supreme Court yesterday. (“Nice robe ya got there. Shame if it burst into flame. While you were wearing it.”)

But his words were so layered with lies, one slipped past me. He referred to a democratically elected Congress. My first thought, as I’m sure was yours, was what Congress is not democratically elected?

And then I remembered how the Democrat-controlled Massachusetts legislature rigged the succession law twice in recent history—once to hog-tie a Republican governor, then more recently to allow Democrat Governor Deval Patrick to appoint a Kennedy coat-holder (who even remembers his name?) to fill out Ted Kennedy’s term.

Is that the sort of democratic process Obama was referring to?

UPDATE:

More of the Democrat process:

Felony charges related to election fraud have touched the 2008 race for the highest office in the land.

Prosecutors in South Bend, Ind., filed charges Monday against four St. Joseph County Democratic officials and deputies as part of a multiple-felony case involving the alleged forging of Democratic presidential primary petitions in the 2008 election, which put then-candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Indiana ballot.

The officials are accused of taking part in a scheme to fake signatures and names on the primary petitions needed to run for president. Court papers say the plan was hatched by local Democratic Party officials inside the local party headquarters.

And more Democrats behaving badly [via reader Yerushalimey]:

The Democratic Party’s newly appointed Jewish outreach liaison is pictured on Facebook in a series of provocative photos with her friends holding dollar bills and referring to themselves as “Jewbags” and the “Jew cash money team.”

Dani Gilbert, who has been a staffer in the office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), was recently appointed as the Democratic National Committee’s Jewish outreach liaison, according to her Twitter feed.

Photos publicly available on her Facebook page depict her engaged in the kind of youthful displays that social media like Facebook and Twitter have made increasingly common and problematic for young Washington staffers.

In one photo, Gilbert is seen kissing paper currency of undetermined denomination. The caption at the bottom of the photo reads “JEWBAGS.” A comment left on the posting refers to Gilbert and a coterie of female companions as the “Jew cash money team.” Other photos depict Gilbert as a bit of a party girl, including one featuring an assortment of condoms.

…

Update (9:31 p.m.): A senior GOP aide with close ties to the Jewish community emailed the Washington Free Beacon in response to this report.

“A lot of folks on both sides of the aisle know Dani and these photos do not reflect her professionalism,” the aide wrote.

No, she just looks to be an idiot. But then, look at her party affiliation.