In a tweet on Friday morning, national security adviser John Bolton effectively confirmed that Nicolas Maduro is paying Russia to guarantee his regime’s survival.

There’s a simple way to stop Maduro from using these lifelines. The U.S. should ask Juan Guaido whether he wishes for the U.S. to interdict Maduro’s money planes. When Guaido says yes, and he almost certainly will, the U.S. Air Force or Navy can intercept the money planes and force them to land at Guantanamo Bay or another U.S.-friendly air base.

This wouldn’t be that complicated. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group could be diverted south of its present Atlantic position to provide this air role, or other fighters could be flown from the U.S. and refueled in the air. Regardless, this legal action authorized by executive consent and international law would allow Venezuela’s gold reserves to be kept safe for Guaido once he finally takes power.

This speaks to a broader point: While the U.S. is actively facilitating Guaido’s constitutionally vested empowerment via a means of overt and covert political and financial support, we can do more. And we can do more short of using military force in any lethal sense. That’s because the U.S. has the capacity to outmatch Russian support for Maduro. In financial terms, military terms, and political terms (Maduro is an evil leader, and the region’s big players are aligned against him), we hold more cards of influence than Moscow. We should use these instruments of national power to deter and degrade Maduro’s control over power. Let the Russians and Chinese complain.

Let us empower the rightful leader of Venezuela to bring his people out of the abyss in which Maduro has them imprisoned.

In a tweet on Friday morning, national security adviser John Bolton effectively confirmed that Nicolas Maduro is paying Russia to guarantee his regime’s survival.

There’s a simple way to stop Maduro from using these lifelines. The U.S. should ask Juan Guaido whether he wishes for the U.S. to interdict Maduro’s money planes. When Guaido says yes, and he almost certainly will, the U.S. Air Force or Navy can intercept the money planes and force them to land at Guantanamo Bay or another U.S.-friendly air base.

This wouldn’t be that complicated. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group could be diverted south of its present Atlantic position to provide this air role, or other fighters could be flown from the U.S. and refueled in the air. Regardless, this legal action authorized by executive consent and international law would allow Venezuela’s gold reserves to be kept safe for Guaido once he finally takes power.

This speaks to a broader point: While the U.S. is actively facilitating Guaido’s constitutionally vested empowerment via a means of overt and covert political and financial support, we can do more. And we can do more short of using military force in any lethal sense. That’s because the U.S. has the capacity to outmatch Russian support for Maduro. In financial terms, military terms, and political terms (Maduro is an evil leader, and the region’s big players are aligned against him), we hold more cards of influence than Moscow. We should use these instruments of national power to deter and degrade Maduro’s control over power. Let the Russians and Chinese complain.

Let us empower the rightful leader of Venezuela to bring his people out of the abyss in which Maduro has them imprisoned.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Wednesday described third-trimester abortions as something done “in cases where there may be severe deformities or there may be a fetus that’s not viable.” Later that day, Northam’s Communications Director Ofirah Yheskel tried to clarify that Northam was referring to the fact that women seek third-trimester abortions only “except in the case of tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities.”

Northam’s clarification isn’t much of an improvement, it’s more of a double-down: Rather than just choosing to end the life of any baby, he would advocate or support women who play God and only choose to give birth to healthy babies. This is wrong. Yet he’s not alone in proposing to eradicate from society those who seem like they would pose problems for parents and society alike. The humane, moral thing to do is encourage parents and society to value life in all its forms and try to help parents raising children with special needs.

Northam’s comments do not represent a new concept. From ancient Sparta to the Holocaust, people with abnormalities, deformities, and diseases have been targeted and eradicated. When men give their moral compass over to the need to become like God (truly the oldest, darkest lie of all time) they lose their sense of justice, humanity, equality, and humility. In mankind’s quest to control the human population through power or or greed, dispelling of people who are deformed or “less than,” he pulls society downward through a maze of moral quagmires, bringing destruction — and with it, the spirit of humanity.

For people born with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, or any other myriad of diseases and problems, simple tasks life presents do pose tremendous challenges, to say nothing of the things that overwhelm other members of society. However, people with special needs also bring a unique kind of joy, peace, and light to many people. Watch this quick clip to get a glimpse of what I mean.

Occasionally, some people shine a light on these incredible people. When Gerber chose a Down syndrome boy in Feb. 2018 to be its “Gerber baby” poster boy that year, how could you not help but cheer? Who among us really would look at his smiling face and say abortion would have been better?

Still, the convenience of abortion perpetuates the myth that society is better off without people who might struggle — whether from autism, Down syndrome, or something else. New York offers, and perhaps Virginia will offer, abortion on demand: dangling the carrot of last-minute infanticide in front of parents who would undoubtedly be aware of the struggles raising a baby with special needs will present and choose to balk.

While political officials might tout abortion as some kind of “final solution,” many parents are tempted to choose, or do choose, abortion because they truly do fear the challenge of raising a child with needs. They worry they will be unable to withstand the emotional, physical, financial, and marital pressures. In this video on Upworthy, Christine Grounds and Jonathan Mir describe how difficult it has been to raise their son Nicholas, who was born with microcephaly. “We had no idea that, in utero, there was anything wrong with Nicholas,” Grounds recalled. “I’m pretty sure no one would have been able to say conclusively that he has microcephaly,” she said. “But I would have terminated the pregnancy.”

While it’s tempting to lash out or point fingers at parents like this, that too is a reactive solution full of the kind of righteous indignation the Left hates. We must rise up to help these parents. We must connect them with nonprofit organizations, religious organizations, pregnancy resource centers, healthcare providers, and any physical or emotional support we can offer. ( Here’s one such list to start with.) Conservatives cannot continually advocate for a culture of life without also tangibly stepping alongside those same parents who choose life, and who then must endeavor to raise a child under difficult circumstances. We must continue to call out people like Northam for advocating such a selfish, heinous “solution” to children with special needs and help parents who choose life instead.

Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has offered a private apology to the Cherokee Nation for publicizing the results of a DNA test showing she might have distant Native American ancestry, the Tulsa World reported.

“We are encouraged by this dialogue and understanding that being a Cherokee Nation tribal citizen is rooted in centuries of culture and laws, not through DNA tests,” Julie Hubbard, the tribe’s executive director of communications, told Tulsa World. “We are encouraged by her action and hope that the slurs and mockery of tribal citizens and Indian history and heritage will now come to an end.”

The reason for the apology? Warren is at most 1/1024th American Indian according to the DNA test. But she had made plenty of hay from her supposed Native American heritage for decades before that.

Before embarrassing herself with her 23andMe stunt last October, Warren submitted recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, claimed Native American heritage on her Harvard Law School job application, and even fundraised off being nicknamed “Pocahontas” by the president.

It was that mockery that inspired Warren to take the DNA test. It didn’t go well.

The Cherokee Nation was one of the first to condemn Warren’s actions as “inappropriate and wrong.”

“It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven,” Cherokee Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. said last year. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

Warren has made amends for that mistake. Whether Warren can convince primary voters her judgment is sound is another question. The apology is a start.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has temporarily blocked abortion restrictions in Louisiana from going into effect, pushing off the question for another week as to whether the high court will soon be forced to weigh in on the issue of abortion rights.

Alito stayed the law until Feb. 7, saying that filings were only completed on Friday and that justices needed more time to review them.

“This order does not reflect any view regarding the merits of the petition for a writ of certiorari that applicants represent they will file,” Alito said. The justice handles emergency requests from the 5th Circuit and can therefore act alone on the case, but may refer it to the full court to make a final determination.

The Louisiana law requires doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case anything goes wrong during an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2016 struck down similar laws in Texas in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, but the 5th Circuit upheld Louisiana’s law.

The ruling was handed down 5-3 because the Supreme Court was short-handed following the death of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Since then, President Trump has appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, tilting the court more conservative.

The Supreme Court has appeared reluctant to take up controversial cases this term following the bruising confirmation battle Kavanaugh faced regarding allegations of sexual assault when he was in high school.

Plaintiffs in the Louisiana case filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court on Jan. 25 to halt the 5th Circuit’s ruling.

Anti-abortion organizations and lawmakers who support restrictions such as the Louisiana law say they are necessary to protect women’s health, but abortion rights advocates contend that they effectively shutter clinics, placing abortions out of reach, and that they are not necessary.

In September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in Louisiana’s favor, saying that the law was different from the one the Supreme Court Struck down. The 5th Circuit then rejected the request for a rehearing en banc, or by all the judges that sit on the court.

On Thursday, the Senate gave President Trump a bipartisan slap on the wrist over his calls to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

With bipartisan support, lawmakers approved an amendment to a broader Middle East policy bill that warned that “the precipitous withdrawal of United States forces from either country could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security.”

The amendment, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refrained from directly attacking the president by name but clearly targeted his isolationist foreign policy approach: “it is incumbent upon the United States to lead, to continue to maintain a global coalition against terror and to stand by our local partners.”

Speaking on the Senate floor on Thursday, McConnell further criticized Trump for his statements about defeating the Islamic State. He explained, “ISIS and al Qaeda have yet to be defeated, and American national security interests require continued commitment to our mission there.”

Those comments come after Trump declared that ISIS had been defeated and that he would be pulling troops from Syria and considering drawing down U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Although Trump has walked back some of those comments and both acknowledged that ISIS remains a threat and slowed the timetable for troop withdrawals, the Senate vote signals continued concern about the president’s foreign policy missteps.

McConnell’s amendment, which does not have any enforcement bite, should be a warning for Trump: Even staunch Senate allies are wary of Trump’s potentially dangerous foreign policy moves. He should take those considerations to heart.

The United States, as clearly explained by intelligence leaders earlier this week, faces new and dynamic threats. To meet them, the president must base his policy positions off clear-eyed assessments and considerations of long-term impact. Senate leaders know this and, on Syria and Afghanistan, they did not see the leadership that they hoped for from Trump.

This time, the rebuke was a slap on the wrist. Next time, lawmakers might move to reclaim more power, signaling a much clearer break with the White House and further isolating the president from key allies on the Hill.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Wednesday described third-trimester abortions as something done “in cases where there may be severe deformities or there may be a fetus that’s not viable.” Later that day, Northam’s Communications Director Ofirah Yheskel tried to clarify that Northam was referring to the fact that women seek third-trimester abortions only “except in the case of tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities.”

Northam’s clarification isn’t much of an improvement, it’s more of a double-down: Rather than just choosing to end the life of any baby, he would advocate or support women who play God and only choose to give birth to healthy babies. This is wrong. Yet he’s not alone in proposing to eradicate from society those who seem like they would pose problems for parents and society alike. The humane, moral thing to do is encourage parents and society to value life in all its forms and try to help parents raising children with special needs.

Northam’s comments do not represent a new concept. From ancient Sparta to the Holocaust, people with abnormalities, deformities, and diseases have been targeted and eradicated. When men give their moral compass over to the need to become like God (truly the oldest, darkest lie of all time) they lose their sense of justice, humanity, equality, and humility. In mankind’s quest to control the human population through power or or greed, dispelling of people who are deformed or “less than,” he pulls society downward through a maze of moral quagmires, bringing destruction — and with it, the spirit of humanity.

For people born with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, or any other myriad of diseases and problems, simple tasks life presents do pose tremendous challenges, to say nothing of the things that overwhelm other members of society. However, people with special needs also bring a unique kind of joy, peace, and light to many people. Watch this quick clip to get a glimpse of what I mean.

Occasionally, some people shine a light on these incredible people. When Gerber chose a Down syndrome boy in Feb. 2018 to be its “Gerber baby” poster boy that year, how could you not help but cheer? Who among us really would look at his smiling face and say abortion would have been better?

Still, the convenience of abortion perpetuates the myth that society is better off without people who might struggle — whether from autism, Down syndrome, or something else. New York offers, and perhaps Virginia will offer, abortion on demand: dangling the carrot of last-minute infanticide in front of parents who would undoubtedly be aware of the struggles raising a baby with special needs will present and choose to balk.

While political officials might tout abortion as some kind of “final solution,” many parents are tempted to choose, or do choose, abortion because they truly do fear the challenge of raising a child with needs. They worry they will be unable to withstand the emotional, physical, financial, and marital pressures. In this video on Upworthy, Christine Grounds and Jonathan Mir describe how difficult it has been to raise their son Nicholas, who was born with microcephaly. “We had no idea that, in utero, there was anything wrong with Nicholas,” Grounds recalled. “I’m pretty sure no one would have been able to say conclusively that he has microcephaly,” she said. “But I would have terminated the pregnancy.”

While it’s tempting to lash out or point fingers at parents like this, that too is a reactive solution full of the kind of righteous indignation the Left hates. We must rise up to help these parents. We must connect them with nonprofit organizations, religious organizations, pregnancy resource centers, healthcare providers, and any physical or emotional support we can offer. ( Here’s one such list to start with.) Conservatives cannot continually advocate for a culture of life without also tangibly stepping alongside those same parents who choose life, and who then must endeavor to raise a child under difficult circumstances. We must continue to call out people like Northam for advocating such a selfish, heinous “solution” to children with special needs and help parents who choose life instead.

Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.

If President Trump tells the truth before a joint session of Congress, he will not say that what his predecessors have always said, that “the state of the union is strong.”

The state of our union is fractured. And that makes us weak.

There are plenty of positive indicators. Unemployment is still below 4 percent. Economic growth has averaged 3 percent over the past year and a half. Median wages are finally rising in real terms.

These things matter, as many others do, but they sit on the surface. The health of the republic does not begin and end with the economy. The health is not identical to wealth. What lies beneath is rotting, and good surface conditions cannot persist for long around a rotting core.

At the core of our country right now is far too much discord amounting to hatred. We have lost the ability to debate civilly. We are losing shared customs and shared culture. Our values are diverging so dramatically that we increasingly believe opposing views are not merely incorrect but intolerable and can be held only by those who are fools or are evil. Recent weeks bear this out.

The Super Bowl was traditionally a shared cultural event, something of a national holiday. This year, it became cursed ground to many cultural elites. Musicians who played at the halftime show were cursed as culture-war traitors and enemies of the people. That’s because Trump criticized NFL players who kneel during the national anthem.

A recent commercial for razor blades caused a kerfuffle for days. The seemingly banal message — don’t bully kids or harass women — was taken by thousands as a politically charged attack on the very notion of masculinity. That’s part the fault of those who made the ad, which was deliberately political, invoking the confirmation hearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an event that drove wedges deep into our society. Most of those following either unblinkingly believed allegations that were never corroborated or assumed that his accuser was a blatant and opportunistic liar.

Then there was the Covington Catholic affair. It was actually a very ordinary occurrence. For decades, student groups visiting Washington, D.C., have encountered groups like the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose purpose in life is provocation and heckling. But this encounter happened in the age of social media and of Trump.

So for days, teenagers were slandered for an imperfect, but nevertheless mostly admirable, reaction to adult hecklers and provocateurs. Politicians piled on. Even Catholic bishops and scholars attacked the boys, all without adequate knowledge of the events.

It is an unimpressive and broken society that turns such an incident into a partisan winner-take-all culture war. And ours is now such a society.

Even the State of the Union’s existence was fiercely fought over. The House speaker’s invitation to the president, typically a formality, was revoked on flimsy security concerns as a power play in hostilities over the government shutdown. When formalities become real points of contention, the well is poisoned.

Trump’s election spurred hundreds of thousands of #Resisters to take to the streets and to behave as though their ends, vague as they have always been, nevertheless justified almost any means. The advent of the Trump presidency has ended friendships, fractured conservatism, scrambled the Republican Party, and driven the Left and the Democratic Party to foam-flecked extremes.

Trump affects his critics greatly, often to their detriment. But he is also a provocateur. When former President Barack Obama weighed in on the story of Cambridge police questioning Harvard professor Skip Gates for “breaking in” to his own house, it was an extraordinary breach of protocol — a president inserting himself into an issue where he had no place. Trump inserts himself thus unnecessarily all the time.

A society where every cultural occurrence is a culture-war battlefield is not a healthy one. The state of this union is not strong.

It must sting to be compared so frequently to Barack Obama but then have the former president’s top strategist say, “Yeah, except for the ‘great speaker’ part.”

That’s what David Axelrod did Friday on CNN, shortly after Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced that he’s running for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

“[B]ooker is a very inspirational guy but sometimes he can get carried away and we saw that with his ‘Spartacus’ moment on the Judiciary Committee during the Kavanaugh hearings,” said Axelrod, referring to the embarrassing scene Booker put on last year, wherein he claimed he had released confidential congressional documents as an act of valor, even though the papers had already been cleared for release and didn’t contain the bombshell he’d promised.

Axelrod continued, “He can sort of move from being an inspirational figure to kind of a motivational speaker and sometimes it comes off a little tinny, so that’s a discipline that he’s going to have to deal with.”

This is a very polite way of saying Booker lays the theatrics on a little too thick.

A recent Rolling Stone profile on then-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., featured a perfect example of Booker’s tendency to ham it up.

Recounting Heitkamp’s ultimate decision to vote no on the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Booker shared this sticky-sweet anecdote:

“There must have been 12 of us, maybe 14 of us, down in that SCIF, trading this piece of paper around … We’re reading, and she looks up and says to all of us, ‘I just can’t vote for this person,’” Booker recalls. “To me, it was a Martin Luther moment, where Martin Luther, after pounding his defiant words on a church door … Martin Luther, he writes, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me god.’ I felt that was what I was witnessing.”

Booker also described Heitkamp as “one of those people who stitches together the gaping wounds that often exist in this place.”

You can imagine the wheels grinding under great resistance in Booker’s head as he delivers the most overwrought answers to basic questions:

Senator, what can I get you?

Booker: “All I ask is that you give every boy and girl a chance to rise up to the heavens and fulfill their god given potential in this beautiful country we call America. A country we call home.”

Uh, s enator, this is Arby’s, did you want to place an order?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she could support a border security deal that adds new Normandy fencing along about 30 miles of open border.

But she won’t bring a bill to the floor that includes Trump’s vision for a wall or steel-slat barrier, she said.

“There is not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. Pelosi controls the House floor, and her approval of a border security deal is required for legislation to make it to the president’s desk by a Feb. 15 deadline.

Pelosi said she’d back Normandy fencing used to finish approximately 700 miles authorized by the 2006 Secure Fence Act. A 2017 government report determined about 50 miles of that authorized fencing are incomplete, although Republicans have put forward higher estimates. Pelosi said only 30 miles are incomplete.

[Related: ‘A WALL is a WALL’: Trump mocks Congress for talking about fences, barriers]

Normandy fencing includes movable barriers that allow vehicles to pass through and the barriers are low enough to climb over. Pelosi said that’s as far as she’ll go on a barrier.

“If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall,” Pelosi said. “Are there places where enhanced fencing, Normandy fencing, will work? Let them have that discussion.”

Pelosi said hundreds of miles of border don’t require barriers because of cliffs and rivers.

A border security deal hinges on a bipartisan group of 17 House and Senate lawmakers who met for the first time Wednesday to try to hammer out an agreement. The group has until Feb. 15, when a short-term funding measure expires and a quarter of the federal government would be partially shuttered for a second time this year.

Senate Republican and Democrat appropriators agreed last summer to provide $1.6 billion for 65 miles of pedestrian fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, which the GOP said could be used as a starting point in the negotiations.

House Democrats on Wednesday pitched their own border security plan, and it did not include money for any wall of barrier. President Trump has indicated that he won’t sign legislation without wall funding.