The Russia House: FBI Director James Comey is expected to tell the House Intelligence Committee today that there’s no evidence to support President Trump’s claim that his phones were tapped last year on the orders of President Barack Obama.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the committee received a briefing Friday and said on NBC that, “I hope that we can put an end to this wild goose chase because what the president said was just patently false.”

Comey is also expected to testify about Russian interfereance in the election. Trump tweeted this morning, “James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it!”

Advice and Consent: The ideological fight starts today as Senate hearings begin on the nomination of Federal Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. As a judicial conservative, Gorsuch’s confirmation would break the 4-4 split on the court and tilt the majority to conservative opinion. The Democrats are going to grill him.

Gorsuch is a Constitutional “originalist,” which means that he does not give much leeway to interpretation of what the Constitution says. To an originalist, sometimes referred to as a constructionist, the constitution says what it says. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, the man Gorsuch would replace, said, “”The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

Oddly, originalists are not always conservatives. Some originalists have come to some of the most famous “liberal” decisions. But conservative originalists shy away from what’s described as “judicial activism,” ordering change from the bench rather than letting it be done in the legislature.

Former Constitutional law professor and President, Barack Obama once wrote, “Anyone like Justice Scalia, looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction, has one big problem: The founders themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted not just about minor provisions, but about first principles; not just between peripheral figures, but within the revolution’s very core.”

Permawar: Fighting between Syrian soldiers and rebels has broken out in the eastern side of the Syrian capital of Damascus. The rebels attacked with car bombs and suicide bombers. The government fought back with airstrikes, claiming to repulse the assault.

The Obit Page: Bare-knuckled New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who chronicled the city with a drink and a cigar, has died at age 88. New York magazine once described his style as “equal parts Dickens and Yogi Berra.”

He annoyed both politicians and mobsters. A thug once beat him up because of something Breslin had written. He became a figure in the 1976 “Son of Sam” random serial murders when the killer, a postal worker named David Berkowitz, sent Breslin a letter promising more murders.

The Pulitzer-winning Breslin wrote about the lowlifes and decent common people of New York. He said in his book, “The Good Rat,” “I can barely handle legitimate people. They all proclaim immaculate honesty but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore. To whom do you care to listen – Warren Buffett, the second-richest and single most boring person on earth, or Burt Kaplan out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn?”

The Comma Case: On the advice of the house writing instructor, the Rooney Report uses the Oxford Comma, the comma inserted before the last in a series of items. Example: Coffee, cream, sugar, and a donut.

Not everyone uses the Oxford comma and a Maine dairy company is losing a labor dispute for lack of one.

The company contract says dairy drivers may not earn overtime pay for the following:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.  

  The court noted that without a comma in front of “or distribution of,” the company rule is ambiguous and decided the drivers get overtime for delivering items 1,2, and 3.

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