Buck Sexton on Obama scandal week: “there's no way that they will be able to get out of this unscathed”

Glenn spoke with TheBlaze national security editor and host of Real News Buck Sexton about the horrific week the Obama administration is having as several lies and scandals are finally becoming front page news. Most of the time the press feigns interest for a day or two and moves on - why will this time be different?

Read Buck's Op-Ed on the White House scandals HERE.

GLENN: Buck Sexton is here. He is our national security editor for TheBlaze. He just wrote a piece: Obama under siege from scandals. And it's ‑‑ you seem to be saying here, Buck, that you think this could take the administration down?

BUCK: Hey, Glenn. Yeah, there's no way that they will be able to get out of this unscathed meaning that the, at a minimum, nevermind what the actual mechanisms could be in play here for resignations and perhaps even ‑‑ I've never said that anyone ‑‑ that I thought that President Obama was at risk of impeachment. Depending on what we find out from this, I can't say that I don't think that's a possibility anymore. It depends on what these investigations show us. But the ‑‑

GLENN: Yesterday I ‑‑ yesterday I didn't call for it. I called for a thorough investigation and an independent committee to look at because let's see if they rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors provable, provable high crimes and misdemeanors. But I think he's absolutely impeachable on this if you can get enough whistleblowers to actually testify, if they don't scare them all away.

BUCK: I'm absolutely with you on that, Glenn. That's the question. What's provable here. What this administration is incredibly adept at is making sure that the bureaucracy is a place where they can hide, you know, the midlevel people and no one ever thinks that they are really going to get in trouble. It's easy to blame them and they always cut off the top level guys from that direct exposure. But, you know, the character and the intent of the administration now, I think for really any American who's ever going to open their eyes ‑‑ and there are some who won't ever do it. I know that. You know that. There's some who will just, they will be on the hope and change train until it goes off the cliff. They don't care. But anyone who's actually paying attention knows now that Benghazi has proved they will lie, the IRS scandals prove they will cheat, and the AP has proved they will steal, at least when it comes to records of journalists. So it's really astounding that all these things have come together at once and I think no matter what happens now, Glenn, nobody is ever going to be able to look at the Obama administration the same way. Claiming grotesque incompetence and negligence to get you out of scandal after scandal at some point changes people's opinion of you at a minimum if they can't prove, as you point out, that there was direct White House orders given for any of these issues.

GLENN: Okay. So let me take Benghazi. Let's play this audio from Panetta. This was the first real red flag. I mean, we were getting sources on this the night that it happened, but I ‑‑ for the regular people, if you're watching, when Leon Panetta went to congress and said, "Here's what happened on that day." Listen to this little piece of information.

PANETTA: But as to specifics about time, et cetera, et cetera, no, he just left that up to us.

AYOTTE: Did you have any further communications with him that night?

PANETTA: No.

AYOTTE: Did you have any other further communications, did he ever call you that night to say how are things going, what's going on, where's the consulate?

PANETTA: No.

AYOTTE: Did you communicate with anyone else at the White House that night?

PANETTA: No.

AYOTTE: No one else called you to say, "What ‑‑ how are things going?"

PANETTA: No.

AYOTTE: But just to be clear, that night he didn't ask you what assets we had available and how quickly they could respond and what we could do to help those individuals?

PANETTA: I think the biggest problem that night, Senator, was that nobody knew really what was going on there.

AYOTTE: And there was no followup during the night, at least from the White House directly?

PANETTA: No.

GLENN: Okay.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: So when I heard that, Buck, I thought, okay, we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. What he is saying is the president, while an ambassador was being killed and we had an embassy under siege, you want to make the president look like this robust hero. You want to make him look ‑‑ I mean, he was practically PhotoShopped into the picture in the Osama Bin Laden compound, and what do they do here? They make sure to announce clearly to everybody he was nowhere near. He had nothing to do with it, no calls, no nothing. I knew immediately, gun‑running. There's something very, very bad going on in this embassy and they know if it comes out, it will taint him. So he just disappeared that night. Am I reading this wrong?

BUCK: Yeah, I don't want to be flippant about this, but I was willing to stay up all night many times to study for sociology tests when I was in college. And the fact that the president didn't roll up his sleeves and didn't not go to sleep at all until he found out exactly what was happening with the U.S. ambassador. I mean, he's the commander this chief.

PAT: Incredible.

BUCK: It's so beyond the pale of what's acceptable and even the ideas that you've laid out now about how he may have been ‑‑ I think there were two things going on. There was a panic, if you will, a panic that came from the possibility that maybe things would come to light that they did not want to come to light and, you know, I'm being circumspect about these things on purpose. There's also the other side of this which is just the recognition that if the president accepted the fact, accepted his responsibility that he was in ‑‑ he was the head of the military that night, he is the leader of this country, then he would have to make decisions that would be attributable to him. Instead ‑‑ because you understand how the machinery works ‑‑ he allowed subordinates to handle this. I'm sure he gave them direction, don't get me wrong, but he just left enough plausible deniability so that we are where we are now, which is a place where we recognize all these decisions that were made were political. We left people out there to die. We did not call in the cavalry but, oh, the president, we don't know what he was doing then. They managed to do what they intended to do that night.

GLENN: I tell you that doesn't make any sense to me and here's why: Because, you know, if somebody is on the scene of the ‑‑ now, here's the scary thing. It doesn't seem to matter to America. But if you're really, if you're the president of the United States, it is better to have tried and failed than to not try at all. And our president walked away and said, "I'm going to bed, guys. Goodnight." I'm telling you, what they did was they had to isolate.

Buck, I know you're being circumspect of all of this stuff, and it's the right thing to do, but I'm telling you we were running guns and missiles over to Turkey. We know about the boat, we know about the captain, we know about all of it. Between what was happening with the ambassador and what was happening with gun‑running ‑‑ and I'll let the press figure that one out ‑‑ between those two things, they told the president, "You can't be anywhere near this." He knew. He knew. So Buck, you have faith that this is ‑‑ this somehow or another is actually going to be pursued, that the media is not somehow or another, they actually get it this time?

BUCK: Glenn, if it's not now, it's never. If the American people, if the media specifically in this case ‑‑ I mean, this isn't a shot across the bow for the media. I mean, this is a full volley into their hole. I mean, this is absolutely a declaration that you have no rights whatsoever under the First Amendment as a press organization. If the federal government believes that you have this was that it wants, it's going to get it, and it doesn't matter if they bring in a whole lot of innocent people in the process. There is so little dignity left, I think, Glenn, for the big media. And by the way, I know you must have felt a tremendous amount of pride, I know I did just being a member of TheBlaze team when this IRS story breaks and we're like, "Hey, yeah, TheBlaze, we were writing about this over a year ago. We were telling you about this, you know, this organization that's relatively new compared to the New York Times. And they now, if they want to get any shred of credibility back, if they want anyone to think that they are, in fact, worthy of the title "journalist," they will go after this like it is the D‑day invasion. I mean, they will put all their resources into exposing the administration on this.

Will they do it, Glenn? At this point it's hard for me to be disappointed in the media and it's hard for me to be disappointed in honestly Americans who just refuse to accept what this administration is, which is an administration that is completely lacking in character, that politicizes everything, and views its hold on power as the single most important end that it has.

GLENN: Real quick I've only got about a minute but there is one other factor in them not covering things and that is fear. This administration is going after whistleblowers and they are destroying. And you being a guy in the CIA and have worked at the White House, you know what happens to everybody underneath. You just said it: They take care of everybody on top an they destroy anybody underneath.

BUCK: It couldn't be any easier, Glenn, for them to intimidate. You said whistleblowers coming forward, you are absolutely right. There are people right now I think who have information that could fill in the blanks that could change our ‑‑ already, I mean the perception, how much worse can it get? Oh, it can get worse.

GLENN: Oh, it's much worse.

BUCK: But there are people right now with that information who are facing financial ruin, the loss of their career and the loss of their freedom. They are not above doing that. They will put people in federal prison who speak out of turn, and they have ways of doing this. I mean, they can hold over. They can say, "We're not going to bring the charges now. We're going to bring them in a year when no one's paying attention to this issue." So anybody who comes out is taking a tremendous personal risk, they know that, and they threaten people. They threaten people all the time in the bureaucracy. And what do you have? You're a guy, you're not making that much money. You're going to go up against the federal government. They get paid to ruin your life. They don't care how much it costs. Meanwhile you've got a family to feed. So Glenn, this he know that they can probably stifle some whistleblowers but at this point some people may just say, "You know what? America's too precious and I don't even care anymore." And that's the wild card that they can't account for.

GLENN: I hope you're right, Buck. Thank you very much. The article is up on TheBlaze now: Obama under siege from scandals by Buck Sexton, why he thinks that this will neuter and forever change, scar, and neuter the White House, if not kick them out of the White House. Thanks, Buck. Talk to you again.

BUCK: Thank you.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

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The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

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The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

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Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

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The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

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Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

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America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

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Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

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Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.