Column archive
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Roy Moore and the Double Standard
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 14, 2017
Personal scandals by Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Barney Frank are just fine with the liberal media, who endorsed them for election and re-election. Ted Kennedy was celebrated as the Lion of the Democratic Party for 40 years despite having driven a young woman off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and abandoning her there to drown.
But woe to any conservative candidate, such as Roy Moore, who might have an imperfection in his distant past. Somehow that renders him unfit for elective office in D.C., according to the same people who supported Bill Clinton throughout the scandal concerning his conduct with Monica Lewinsky in the White House.
The double standard in American politics needs to stop if we are going to make America great again. Voters overcame the double standard by electing Donald Trump as president, despite the Billy Bush tapes and unproven allegations by women, and Roy Moore should do likewise in the upcoming Senate election in Alabama.
The criticism of Roy Moore is not about something that happened 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. The accusations against Moore, which he has denied, relate to misdemeanors he supposedly committed in December 1977 and January 1979, nearly 40 years ago.
Marrying later in life has become the norm today, but for most of American history it was considered normal and even desirable for a young woman to marry, or at least become engaged, in her teenage years. Only in the last two decades has the median age of first marriage risen to 27 for females and 29 for males.
In 1977, the year Roy Moore supposedly flirted with a teenage waitress at the Olde Hickory House in Gadsden, Alabama, half of all young women in America were married by the age of 21. By her own account, as she read her tearful statement under the watchful eye of Gloria Allred, the now 56-year-old woman refused Roy Moore’s advances because she already had a boyfriend, thereby conceding that she wasn’t too young to have one.
In that same year of 1977, a prominent feminist lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the “age of consent” for sexual acts should be lowered to the age of 12. In her book entitled “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code,” the future Supreme Court Justice also called for repealing laws against statutory rape, bigamy, prostitution, and sex trafficking because they perpetuate a stereotype that such laws are needed to “protect weak women from bad men.”
Ginsburg has never disavowed her radical writings, so it is particularly hypocritical for feminists to criticize Roy Moore’s alleged dating of teenage girls as though there was anything improper about it. As usual the feminists want to have it both ways, as they sanctimoniously insist that Roy Moore quit the race for dating teenage girls when he was a 32-year-old bachelor.
Liberals and the Establishment hate Roy Moore for his conservative positions today, not what he allegedly did 40 years ago as an unmarried district attorney looking for a future wife. Judge Moore subsequently married his beautiful wife Kayla, who had been a runner-up for Miss Alabama, when she was 24 and he was 38.
If elected, Roy Moore would join a U.S. Senate in which one Democratic member, Bob Menendez, is on trial for allegedly accepting bribes, including the use of a private jet to Paris followed by three nights in a $1,500-a-night hotel room for Menendez and his girlfriend. The same people who are calling on Roy Moore to step aside have failed to call on Menendez to resign for the many felonies of which he was charged.
The Establishment has insulted Alabama voters who have a right to decide the election for their Senate seat, not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the D.C. swamp. McConnell staked his future on trying to defeat Roy Moore in the September primary, but Moore won by a landslide precisely because voters reject the same-old, accomplish-nothing politics of both parties in Washington.
The allegations against Roy Moore pale by comparison to what is the norm in Hollywood, which has long been one of the biggest financial backers of the Democrat Party. First they ridiculed Roy Moore for supposedly being too much of a goody two-shoes, and now they criticize him for supposedly being too much like themselves.
We cannot make America great again if unproven allegations are allowed on the eve of elections to ambush only conservative candidates. Those who had any beef about something Roy Moore did nearly 40 years ago should have spoken up long before now, or forever held their peace as voters pick the best candidate for the future: Roy Moore.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Never-Trumpers’ Violence Goes Unpunished
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 7, 2017
Today is the 365th day after President Trump was elected president. Yet like a few Japanese soldiers after World War II, there are still pockets of holdouts who refuse to accept Trump’s leadership.
Some holdouts can be found among professors on college campuses, where the feminist culture remains scornful of President Trump. Other holdouts are holed up within the federal bureaucracy, where workers continue to block the agenda that Trump was elected to implement.
Pop psychologists say there are five stages of grief. First there is denial, and then anger or resistance, and beyond that there is acceptance, reconstruction and hope.
Democrats and Republican Never-Trumpers have long been in the stage of denial, as displayed by the books of Hillary Clinton, Donna Brazile, Jeff Flake, and the Bushes. Sen. Jeff Flake, facing a certain landslide defeat in his own primary due to his continuing denial of Trump, seemed finally to accept reality when he decided not to seek reelection, despite being one of the youngest senators.
The peaceful deniers do not pose a threat to our Republic, but the violent objectors do. This began on Inauguration Day, when hundreds of anarchists rioted in downtown Washington, D.C., smashing windows at McDonalds, Starbucks, and Bank of America.
The media have failed to sharply criticize the anti-Trump violence, and the Department of Justice has been slow in prosecuting it. It seems that crimes against almost anyone other than Trump supporters qualify as hate crimes, while authorities turn the other way to allow Leftists to commit violence against those on the side of our President.
When a burly man rushed toward President Trump from behind during a rally at an airport hangar in Ohio last year, as captured on national television, he was merely charged with a misdemeanor and ultimately fined only $250. His slap-on-the-wrist punishment of one-year probation was lifted before he served even half of it.
Hate-filled acts of violence by the Left have dominated the headlines for much of this year. In June a supporter of Bernie Sanders shot up a baseball practice by Republican Congressmen, and in September a refugee gunned down church attendees in Tennessee.
When a Leftist goes on a shooting rampage and then kills himself, or is killed by a bystander, then there may not be much to prosecute. But last Friday a frightening assault against a leading conservative in the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul, has left much to prosecute in order to deter future attacks like it.
The brutal attack by an outspoken liberal against Sen. Paul was cowardly, to put it mildly. Senator Paul had been peacefully mowing his own lawn while wearing sound protectors, when his assailant sneaked up behind him to hit him so hard that it broke five of Senator Paul’s ribs and caused lung contusions.
It bloodied Senator Paul’s face, too, which suggests that the assailant did not merely “tackle” Senator Paul as initial media reports described. Instead, the substantial injuries suggest that this was a calculated attempt to inflict pain on the conservative senator.
The assailant was a wealthy middle-aged man who, like the murderer Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, apparently had lots of time on his hands. Rene Boucher, aged 59, is listed by a Kentucky government website as being a retired physician who no longer practices medicine.
Like most of the other perpetrators of recent violence, Boucher is a registered Democrat who has posted rants against President Donald Trump. Boucher has advocated for gun control but apparently was just fine with an ambush of a U.S. Senator that injured him with physical violence.
The Department of Justice spends many millions searching for non-existent crimes by supporters of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate will be without one of its finest members for some time due to this attack on him by a Democrat.
Boucher’s attorney quickly insisted that the attack has nothing to do with politics. Yet Boucher has not yet publicly provided a real apology or plausible explanation for his violent ambush.
This was the second time that Senator Paul was subjected to an ambush, the first being the shooting on the ballfield near D.C. where the unarmed conservative Representative Steve Scalise was gunned down in that politically motivated ambush. Yet the Department of Justice has apparently done little to protect Trump supporters since.
Imagine the outrage if any of the above acts had been by a registered Republican against a liberal politician. There would be deafening calls for prosecution of such conduct as a hate crime, and a flurry of immediate activity at the Justice Department to deter repetition of such a crime.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Where’s the Oversight of Mueller?
by John and Andy Schlafly
October 31, 2017
After spending millions of dollars on his 15-lawyer dream team, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort primarily for failing to file paperwork that many Democrats also failed to file. Indeed, a group co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser John Podesta failed to timely file the same paperwork that Manafort allegedly overlooked.
Yet Mueller did not indict anyone in John Podesta’s group, or anyone opposed to Trump. The American people elected Donald Trump as president after he promised to prosecute Hillary for her apparent corruption, and now the exact opposite is transpiring as it is Hillary’s side that is bilking the American taxpayers to lock up Trump supporters.
Many innocent people are being forced to spend enormous legal fees to defend against the out-of-control Mueller, who is acting like an independent federal prosecutor even though that law was terminated in 1999. There was nearly unanimous consensus after abuses by independent federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 90s that such spectacles should not recur, yet Mueller apparently has carte blanche to pursue President Trump and his supporters.
Mueller was installed under the pretext of being merely a “special counsel” for the purpose of looking into possible interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, Mueller has acted without accountability or real oversight in going far beyond the outer limits of his charter.
Nothing in Mueller’s indictment of Manafort has a shred of evidence connecting President Donald Trump or his Administration to the unusual charges against Manafort, which relate to activities predating his involvement with Trump’s campaign. Where’s the beef that justifies giving Mueller a blank check on the U.S. Treasury to engage in such a partisan, one-sided witch-hunt against persons, rather than any real crimes that would be within Mueller’s authorization?
The real purpose of Mueller’s bizarre indictment of Manafort is not to end lobbying on behalf of foreign interests, which is rampant in D.C., but to intimidate former and current Trump officials into playing ball with Mueller’s war against Trump. Already many potential targets of Mueller’s one-sided investigation are being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by having to hire $1,000-per-hour attorneys simply to defend themselves against alleged crimes that never happened.
Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, has a track record of over-the-top prosecutions ultimately reversed on appeal. As pointed out in a stinging exposé at TheHill.com, Weissmann had a lead role in the destruction of the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen and the loss of its 85,000 jobs, by seeking a conviction that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed, after it was too late to save the company.
Supposedly Mueller’s conduct is made constitutional by a modicum of supervision and accountability that he should be receiving from the Department of Justice. But judging by Mueller’s off-the-rails indictment of Manafort, Mueller is not being reined in by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or anyone else.
It is time to do so. President Trump, for whom the Department of Justice works, should begin by demanding an accounting of how much money Mueller’s team is wasting, and Trump should tweet that information directly to the American people.
With Attorney General Jeff Sessions having recused himself from this issue, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein is supposedly in charge of Mueller. But Trump can fire Rosenstein, and should do so if there is not immediate transparency on Mueller’s expenses and significant changes that rein in the runaway prosecutions.
Mueller’s team is obviously picking the targets and then searching for crimes, even obscure ones, to charge that target with. “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted,” as renowned U.S. Attorney General (and future Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940.
The indictment against Manafort even seems to be written more for the newspapers than for a court of law. “Conspiracy against the United States” shouts the first charge, a rarely used, politically misleading phrase.
The indictment also tosses in a laundry list of demands for forfeiture of assets, a widely criticized technique of prosecutors ordinarily reserved for drug kingpins and notorious criminals. But its message is for other Trump supporters: tell us what we want to hear, or you’ll lose your home too.
“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,” the future Justice Jackson said to a gathering of U.S. Attorneys in 1940, “a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.” That is tyranny-by-prosecution, and Trump should instruct the Justice Department to stop it.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Wins Again with Transparency on JFK Files
by John and Andy Schlafly
October 24, 2017
President Trump wins more kudos for allowing the release of the JFK assassination files. Proving again why he is a welcome alternative to the Establishment, Trump has stood up for the American people in ending the 50+ years of cover-up by government of these documents.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a radical communist who described himself as a "Marxist" during his post-assassination interrogation. It was widely known then that Oswald hated America so much he sought to renounce his American citizenship, and he had even defected to the communist Soviet Union.
What is not yet known, which perhaps this final document release will shed light on, is who allowed Oswald back into the United States to pass out pro-Fidel Castro literature months before he assassinated President Kennedy in 1963. Why would the federal government allow the known America-hater to immigrate back to our country after he attempted in Russia to renounce his American citizenship?
If that question sounds familiar, then it is because the practice of letting America-haters into our country, or back into our country, has continued until recently when President Trump issued his so-called travel ban to stop the influx. Trump’s travel ban is designed to cut off the immigration of people from areas hostile to the United States, but federal courts have worked overtime to block Trump’s sensible executive orders.
A half-decade ago, the federal government let Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev back into the United States despite being put on full notice of how much he hated our country. To this day government withholds information about the likely participation by Tsarnaev in the brutal murder of Jewish acquaintances on Sept. 11, 2011.
Obvious clues linking Tsarnaev to the 9/11 anniversary killings were ignored by law enforcement, just as the risks posed by Oswald to our Nation were downplayed. After more anti-American training in foreign countries Tsarnaev was let back into the United States to carry out his bombing at the Boston Marathon in spring 2013, just as Oswald was let back in to hurt America.
Even the Warren Commission, not known for the depth of its investigation, admits that Oswald had attempted to murder the outspokenly anti-communist Major General Edwin A. Walker in Dallas in April 1963, less than nine months before his assassination of JFK. The bullet that narrowly missed General Walker in his home was traced to the same make of rifle Oswald used against JFK, and Oswald’s wife admitted to her husband’s attempted murder of General Walker.
The narratives preferred by liberals about the JFK assassination are that Oswald was “a 24-year-old loser who was mad at the world and wanted to make a name for himself,” in the words of Minnesota federal judge Jack Tunheim, who reviewed these soon-to-be-released documents as Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Commission.
But an angry-at-the-world 24-year-old merely seeking to make a name for himself does not stalk to kill a little-known anti-communist general. Similarly, Tsarnaev was not merely angry at the world or merely trying to make a name for himself when he bombed the Boston Marathon.
Judge Tunheim, after reviewing the documents, conceded that the federal government destroyed some documents after the JFK assassination, preventing the public from ever seeing them. Whether that destruction was ideological or simply to avoid institutional embarrassment may forever remain a mystery.
Liberals are nervous about the upcoming data dump on Thursday and seek to downplay its significance, anxious to smear anyone who analyzes them as a "conspiracy theorist." Yet liberals are currently wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on their wacky theory that there was a Russian conspiracy that somehow interfered with the 2016 presidential election.
Wikileaks is popular because for eight years the Obama Administration did conceal or lie about information. Despite numerous laws like the Freedom of Information Act that attempt to compel the government to be transparent, Clinton and Obama routinely hid and withheld information from the public.
For example, the federal government continues to hide evidence about other potential crimes even older than the JFK assassination. More than 200 years ago Meriwether Lewis died of a gunshot wound, either by murder or suicide, after having led the marvelous Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Northwest.
Lewis is buried in a national park owned by the federal government, and President Bill Clinton refused requests by historians and Lewis's descendants to exhume his body probably because Clinton did not want to set a precedent that might result in the exhumation of his deceased Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, sought around the same time. The Bush Administration later approved an exhumation of Lewis in 2008, but then the Obama Administration blocked it without any reasonable justification, presumably as a favor to the Clintons.
Government will hide information as long as the public allows it. Fortunately, President Trump is siding with the public.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
How Trump Is Improving Health Care
by John and Andy Schlafly
October 17, 2017
“Since Congress can’t get its act together on Health Care,” Donald Trump tweeted last week from his personal Twitter account, “I will be using the power of the pen to give great Health Care to many people.” Trump’s tweet was followed by a series of presidential actions that offer substantial relief for middle-class Americans hurt by Obamacare.
Unlike Barack Obama’s executive actions that were justifiably criticized by conservatives, President Trump’s use of the presidential “pen” was entirely within his lawful powers under the Constitution. Trump’s new actions on health care were authorized by laws that were previously passed by Congress, including Obamacare itself.
Trump’s first action was to restore the freedom to buy short-term policies as a viable alternative to high-priced Obamacare policies. These policies were increasingly popular until Obama imposed a nationwide 90-day limit on such policies, which severely limited their usefulness.
Short-term policies lack some of the costly coverages that many Americans do not want or need, such as maternity care and drug rehab, but they are much more affordable. Typically costing less than half of what Obamacare-compliant policies cost, they could be just what the doctor ordered for millions of middle-class Americans who have been priced out of the individual market for health insurance.
Only about 20 million Americans rely on the individual and small-group market for health insurance, but that small fraction of our nation has been forced to bear the burden of caring for people with costly pre-existing conditions. That unfair burden of cost-shifting is the main reason premiums and deductibles have been rising so rapidly.
Although some low-income people have received credits to help pay those rising premiums, millions of self-employed and other middle-class people are not eligible for any subsidy. About 8 million Americans have been hit with Obamacare penalties despite the lack of affordable insurance.
The unaffordability of Obamacare has not affected the 155 million Americans with employer-based health insurance, which continues to benefit from a loophole dating back to World War II. Not only do employer plans receive a $260 billion-a-year tax break, which is by far the largest so-called “tax expenditure,” but large and medium-sized employers can also opt out from many of the regulations that increase the cost of individual policies.
The employer-based tax break can be changed only by Congress, but President Trump is doing what he can to alleviate the unfair discrimination against individual and small group insurance. In the second part of his health care order, Trump ordered the U.S. Department of Labor to consider how associations of small employers (including self-employed individuals) can qualify for the same privileges as large employers.
The Labor Department is already authorized by Congress to enforce a 1974 federal law called ERISA, which regulates employer health plans. For decades, large employers have exploited ERISA to exempt themselves from some of the regulations that drive up the cost of individual and small group health insurance.
Association health plans have long been promoted by Senator Rand Paul, a medical doctor who specialized in eye surgery before being elected to the Senate in 2010. Despite voting against the unwieldy repeal-and-replace bill that failed in Congress last summer, Senator Paul recently enjoyed a round of golf with the President at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
The goal of association health plans is to create a level playing field so that small employer groups and self-employed individuals can obtain the same type of health insurance as large employers who currently enjoy an unfair advantage. While the Labor Department goes through the process of changing its regulations under Trump’s direction, Congress should pick up on this idea and extend to individuals, whether employed or not, the right to buy health insurance across state lines.
Trump took another welcome action last week, by cutting off “cost sharing reduction” (CSR) payments to insurance companies. “That money is a subsidy for insurance companies,” Mr. Trump said as he announced his long-awaited decision. “Take a look at their stocks. Look where they are. They’re going through the roof.”
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled last year that the CSR payments by Obama were illegal, because Congress never appropriated the money to fund them, but the liberal litigation factory is gearing up to block Trump’s decision to discontinue them. Democratic attorneys general announced plans to file a new lawsuit in California, where they are more likely to find a judge willing to issue an injunction against Trump.
With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backing failed candidates as he did in the recent Alabama primary, and criticizing the America-first populism of Steve Bannon, it is unlikely the Senate will accomplish anything soon. Fortunately, President Trump is taking the initiative to lead Americans out of Obamacare and other failed programs of the prior administration.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
The NFL Leaves America
by John and Andy Schlafly
September 26, 2017
“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Ronald Reagan famously said when he began his political career in the 1960s. “The party left me.”
Now the same is being said by many former fans about the National Football League. Americans who grew up admiring NFL football in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, can candidly observe that the NFL has left them.
Donald Trump, like Reagan, was elected President with the votes of millions of former Democrats, and Trump did NFL football fans a favor by using his bully pulpit (on Twitter) to expose how un-American America’s pastime has become. As with other issues in the public eye, Trump’s smackdown of the anti-American stance by the NFL is welcome change.
Behind the scenes, the NFL had already been pandering to the radical Left for years. Entirely dependent on the liberal media for profits, the NFL cares more about maintaining its massive revenues than it does about American values.
With attendance and viewership in decline, the NFL has increasingly embraced gambling as a way of boosting its own profits at the expense of those vulnerable to that addiction. Its decision to move the Raiders to Las Vegas will make football seem more like a game of roulette or blackjack than family entertainment.
Near Detroit, the now-roofless Pontiac Silverdome sits as a colossal piece of litter that contributes to the blight of that once successful center of automobile manufacturing. Other cities, from Saint Louis to San Diego, have been harmed by the NFL taking big subsidies from local taxpayers and then, before public bonds are paid off, skipping town to a more profitable deal somewhere else.
Halftime performances at the Super Bowl, in front of the largest television audience of the year, have gone the way of commencement addresses at colleges where no conservative performers are allowed and no conservative messages permitted. Bizarre occult themes are imposed on the captive audience during these shows.
This is not the same NFL where Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney ordered his head coach not to cut Rocky Bleier from the team after Rocky returned from Vietnam, where he was wounded in combat. That patriotic decision created one of the many genuine heroes who played during the golden era of the game, and Rocky Bleier caught the extraordinary winning touchdown pass in the 1979 Super Bowl.
Today, the NFL is more likely to cut talented players in order to pander to liberals, as in the exclusion of the Bible-quoting Tim Tebow. Burgess Owens, a member of the Super Bowl champion Oakland Raiders in 1981, was a dynamic speaker at our recently concluded Eagle Council in St. Louis where he explained how special the NFL was then, and how different it is now.
Phyllis Schlafly applauded Pete Rozelle, founder of the modern NFL and inventor of the Super Bowl, for respecting our traditions by not scheduling football games on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Rozelle also kept gambling out of football during his nearly 30-year tenure.
The current NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, has played footsie with gamblers by making deals with weekly fantasy football games, which are thinly disguised gambling, while fans are deciding not to fill stadiums in several major markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Goodell’s spokesman is Joe Lockhart, who managed the White House press during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and who recently sold his 9-bedroom Washington, D.C. home to Barack Obama for $8.1 million.
Today’s NFL has become a massive entitlement program for billionaires, one of the worst examples of corporate welfare. Like others who enjoy lavish lifestyles based on government handouts, many NFL owners are ungrateful to the American system that makes their success possible.
Of course not all players put their game above the American flag. Pittsburgh Steelers’ lineman Alejandro Villanueva, a former Army Ranger, gave us all something to cheer about when he stood alone on the field to honor the American flag and the National Anthem while his teammates cowered in the tunnel.
But then even he had to pay a price for being patriotic, as his own head coach and teammates began criticizing him for it. He was apparently forced to apologize for supposedly embarrassing his teammates.
President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin summed this issue up well on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, remarking that NFL players “can do free speech on their own time.” They do not have to insult our Nation in taxpayer-built stadiums before captive audiences.
Congress should hold hearings on how much taxpayer money is flowing to support the anti-American conduct of the NFL, and state legislatures should consider passing laws to cut off that money at the local level. While people have a right to be unpatriotic, Americans should not be forced to support them.
