"Last week's missile strike on a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a vicious chemical weapons attack will not make it any easier to solve the Syrian quagmire, but it was the right thing to do.

"Dictator Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly attacked his own people over the past six years of that three-sided civil war. Last week's attack on a rebel-held town, reportedly with sarin gas, killed at least 86 civilians.

"It also made a mockery of the Obama administration's boasts that Assad has surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles.

"President Donald Trump's decision that the use of chemical weapons presents a clear threat to American interests provided the legal justification for the attack, which is sufficient given the degree to which Congress has surrendered its war powers over the past half century."

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"To be sure, there are reasoned arguments to be offered on both sides of the filibuster question. It is true that the need for a supermajority does encourage compromise and coalition building. But given the contemporary state of hyperpolarization -- the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats of 40 years ago are long gone -- the supermajority requirement today merely guarantees inaction, which, in turn, amplifies the current popular disgust with politics in general and Congress in particular. In my view, that makes paring back the vastly overused filibuster, on balance, a good thing.

"Moreover, killing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations (the so-called nuclear option) yields two gratifications: It allows a superb young conservative jurist to ascend to the seat once held by Antonin Scalia. And it constitutes condign punishment for the reckless arrogance of Reid and his erstwhile Democratic majority. ...

"The Gorsuch nomination is a bitter setback to the liberal project of using the courts to ratchet leftward the law and society. However, Gorsuch's appointment simply preserves the Court's ideological balance of power. Wait for the next nomination. Having gratuitously forfeited the filibuster, Democrats will be facing the loss of the Court for a generation.

"Condign punishment indeed."

"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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