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Mask Police Not the Answer
By John and Andy Schlafly
July 21, 2020
A stark difference between the approach of President Trump and the newly radicalized Democratic Party is revealed by the issue of mandatory face masks. The “mask police” mentality of the Dems is inciting an Orwellian society of snitches and bullies.
Democrats are now insisting that everyone be required to wear masks, and that anyone seen not wearing a mask be reported to the authorities. This is despite how leading liberal television commentators, including Chris Cuomo of CNN, were spotted outside without masks while they were being quarantined for COVID-19.
The wearing of masks in public places causes harm beyond COVID, which is why face coverings have long been against the law in many U.S. states and in other countries. There is no substitute for seeing the faces of strangers on the street and in stores.
A witness cannot give proper evidence in court while masked, for example. Reading a witness’ face is essential to determine his credibility.
The idea of a faceless society has long symbolized descent into totalitarian control, but that is where we are headed. The mask police are determined to exploit the COVID crisis to turn us into a faceless society.
A woman with a medical condition preventing her from wearing a mask recently entered a Walmart in Summit County, Utah, where masks are mandatory. In that Utah county, residents are required not only to wear masks, but to report on anyone seen without a mask so that the police can rush out and give the person a summons or ticket.
Is this what our society should become? With all the violent protests occurring, one would think that local authorities have better ways to spend their scarce resources than to be mask police.
A fellow Walmart shopper apparently saw the woman's bare face and took the law into his own hands. He accosted the woman, allegedly yelling sarcastically “thanks for wearing a mask!!!”
Then the male shopper rammed his shopping cart repeatedly into the cart of the maskless woman, as captured on surveillance video in the store. The bare-faced shopper was allegedly injured by the attack.
Some countries, such as Sweden, have rejected the suggestion that masks be required, and never shut down its society. Sweden indicated that masks can do more harm than good, and could create a false sense of security.
The mortality rate from COVID-19 in Sweden is not significantly worse than in the United States, or in Western European countries which have required masks for many weeks. All have mortality from the disease of less than one in a thousand in the overall population.
Sweden is not the only country to successfully reject masks. Iceland, as another example, rejected going the route of the mask police and never locked its country down either, but still successfully defeated COVID-19.
The latest data show that Iceland has had a mortality of only 29 per million residents, which is less than 7% the reported mortality rate in the United States. Iceland had an outbreak of COVID-19, but then did what Democrats should have supported here: quarantine travelers from other countries.
These steps were what Peter Navarro, the trade advisor to Trump in the White House, wanted to do by closing travel from China when the COVID pandemic first began. But it was Trump's opponents, including Hillary Clinton-supporter Anthony Fauci, who opposed adopting sensible measures early to protect the American people from the Wuhan virus.
There are many valid reasons why a particular individual may be better off not wearing a mask, like the Walmart shopper who had a medical justification. Besides, in a vast open store with high ceilings like Walmart, it is not obvious how a mask would really make a difference as people still touch shopping carts and check-out counters.
When people take off their masks after returning to their cars, their hands typically touch their faces, which the CDC has long said is a particularly dangerous habit. Dr. Fauci even wants us to stop shaking hands permanently to reduce germ transmission by touching.
One might wonder if people will ever be allowed to see others smile again, as the mask police enforce their unreasonable demands. We cannot allow the government to deprive us of the ability to see emotions of other people through their facial expressions, as depicted in the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Once Democrats get a new rule installed, such as mandatory masks, it becomes very difficult to ever remove it. Democrat President Truman delayed lifting restrictions imposed for World War II until a landslide Republican victory in November 1946 forced him to.
President Trump is right to reject wearing a mask in most places. Bandits and anarchists wear masks, not the leader of the free world.
OTC for HCQ to End COVID
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 14, 2020
It is time to take the bull by the horns to conquer the Wuhan virus. Drastic action is necessary, like on December 8, 1941 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
President Trump should order immediate public access to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) by making the medication available over-the-counter (OTC). Liberals have interfered with public access to this medication for COVID-19 through the old-fashioned route of requiring a prescription and then having a pharmacist fill or reject the prescription.
Millions of Americans do not visit physicians, and cannot obtain a prescription for HCQ if they did. Even if you have been exposed to COVID-19, you cannot obtain a prescription for HCQ in most states because regulators prohibit dispensing it without a positive test result, which typically cannot be obtained until late in the progression of the disease.
No one credibly doubts that HCQ is safe, and safer than many medications currently available OTC. No one credibly doubts the dozens of studies showing that early use of HCQ, pre-exposure and immediately after exposure to COVID, has helped many overcome this dreaded disease.
Americans do not need a prescription to obtain hundreds of medications which once required a prescription. Nexium, Prevacid, Prilosec, Claritin, Flonase, and Primatene Mist are medications that have been shifted from Rx to OTC in recent years, not because the medical establishment pushed for the change, but because of public demand for it.
No demand is higher at this time than for a medication which helps prevent against COVID. Yet Americans are not being allowed to access the medication which they want and need, and instead are being told by FDA and state officials that they cannot have it.
Last month the Oregon pharmacy board, for example, blocked HCQ access as follows: “Prescription orders for chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 infection may only be dispensed if written for a patient enrolled in a clinical trial by an authorized investigator.”
They based their ban on an improper statement issued by FDA, which is controlled by opponents of Trump’s reelection. Of course, many government officials in Oregon are against Trump, too.
Every state board of pharmacy or medicine is controlled by left-leaning government workers who, by and large, despise President Trump and hope he loses in November. They are accomplishing their dream by choking off public access to HCQ.
In other countries, such as Costa Rica and Honduras, HCQ is being given freely to the public to successfully defeat coronavirus there. In some countries officials are even going door-to-door distributing HCQ to build up protection against the virus, with great success.
The mortality rate from COVID-19 in the United States is far higher per case, and per million of residents, despite how we have the finest hospital system in the world. We don’t currently have public access to HCQ to protect against the disease, however, and that is what is needed at this time.
An executive order by President Trump, through use of his full emergency authority, could give Americans the same rights to HCQ for COVID which some of the poorest people in the world enjoy. Trump could even dispense HCQ at his rallies, which would both restore their massive numbers and help safeguard against spread of the virus.
But the medical establishment, such as Dr. John Fleming who is advising Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, is impeding this solution to the crisis. As a physician, Dr. Fleming is instinctively trained to oppose OTC status for most medications, and he is beholden to the mindset of requiring people to see physicians first.
Americans are accustomed to being advised to consult a physician before starting a weight-loss plan, an attorney before writing a will, and an accountant before filing a tax return. In ideal situations, recommending use of a professional is non-controversial.
When there is a crisis, however, the dynamic is different. When thousands are dying unnecessarily, and millions are paralyzed by fear, directly alleviating that mortality and fear becomes paramount.
There is no valid reason to deny public access to low-dose HCQ, which studies show can protect against COVID, just as there is no legitimate reason to require a prescription for low-dose steroid cream (Cortisone) and many other over-the-counter medications. The political motivation to block access to HCQ justifies making it publicly available.
This is not a decision for Anthony Fauci or the medical establishment or FDA to make during a national crisis. This is for President Trump to decide, and make HCQ available quickly to the public.
If an intruder is discovered in one’s home in the middle of the night, no responsible father tries first to call an expert to get an opinion about what to do. Instead, quick and decisive action is taken, and that means OTC status for HCQ to conquer COVID.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Anti-Trump Book Channels Farcical Faulkner
By John and Andy Schlafly
July 7, 2020
The latest fake news to come after President Donald Trump is a book by his Hillary Clinton-supporting niece, Mary L. Trump, to be released on July 14. It should be sold as fiction because it apparently channels the made-up Compson family of William Faulkner’s novels.
The Washington Post reported that the initial listing of this book concealed Mary Trump’s name by saying it was written by Mary “Compson,” and Mary even used the name “Compson Enterprises” for the company she created. The Post also found that as a student Mary was engrossed in Faulkner’s novels, which portray the Compson family as having immigrated from Scotland just as Trump’s mother did.
William Faulkner was a liberal icon imposed on many of us in high school and college, despite how few students could make sense of his stream-of-consciousness writings. Faulkner was an obscure writer until he was put on the map by a surprise award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor never bestowed on conservatives.
Faulkner wrote novels about the rural South, often in stereotypical language that would be considered offensive today. His fictional characters frequently used the N-word, and if the Left were consistent about tearing down monuments they would be demanding expulsion of Faulkner from schools, too.
The liberal-controlled Pulitzer Prizes honored him not just once but twice for his writings, and he doubly won the prestigious National Book Award, too. Like other favored liberal authors of the last century, Faulkner has been a mainstay of the academic elite who are not anxious to admit their errors.
Princeton University recently scrubbed the name of Woodrow Wilson from its campus buildings and programs, even though Wilson had been Princeton’s president before being elected twice as president of the United States. But English departments are notably more liberal and less willing to drop sacred cows like Faulkner down the memory hole.
Unless the author is Shakespeare, of course, who has been a target of the cultural destroyers for years. Or the movie Gone With the Wind, which is being censored despite never using the N-word which Faulkner used so copiously.
Faulkner’s favorite fictional family, the Compsons, was as dysfunctional as imaginable. As the leftwing Daily Beast observed, the Compsons were “a clan plagued by alcoholism, depression, suicide, hypochondria, teen-age pregnancy, and incestuous urges.”
Few Faulkner readers would take the Compson name and adopt it as their own, or draw inspiration from such fiction to smear a president of the United States. But there is big money to be made in fake news, particularly when the presidential election is less than four months away.
Mary L. Trump had been publicly silent about our president throughout his tenure in office, and her book appears timed to exploit the publicity of her uncle’s reelection campaign. It is hardly credible that all of a sudden this disgruntled family member, long estranged from Donald, has something fair to say about him.
The book complains that her grandfather Fred Trump Sr. shouted in front of employees that “Donald is worth ten of” her own father, Fred Jr. It is hardly Donald’s fault if his father spoke of him more highly than his older brother, and no one doubts that Donald was more successful in continuing his father’s real estate business.
Mary L. Trump, a psychologist in New York City, is as biased a relative as anyone could be. She felt shortchanged by a family property settlement after bitter litigation, and she is politically opposed to Trump, too.
Mary’s father Fred Jr. died from an alcohol-related heart attack after becoming an airline pilot. Donald Trump has frequently spoken graciously of Mary’s father in a caring and sympathetic way, while noting that his brother’s tragic fate motivated Donald not to drink alcohol.
While Trump has spoken highly of his relatives, including Mary’s father, the media desperately gives a platform to those who want to criticize our president. The media’s promotion of a fiction-based book by a disgruntled relative is beyond the pale.
This was a bit much even for the Daily Beast, a website that has long been opposed to Donald Trump. That website wondered about this book on Trump as written by someone who apparently views herself and her famous relatives to be characters in a work of fiction.
Why not simply read Faulkner’s famous novel itself, if you have time to waste, instead of trying to retrofit Faulkner’s fiction into the life of President Trump? the Daily Beast implied. On that point many can agree.
But then, nothing about President Trump fits the “Southern Gothic” narrative of a Faulkner novel. Trump grew up in multicultural Queens, made his mark as a builder in diverse New York City, and his approval rating among black voters has been comparable to that of other Republican presidents.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Unmasking the COVID Fear Factor
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 30, 2020
As the media sound alarm bells about a possible second wave of COVID, we should firmly reject another nationwide economic shutdown enforced by stay-home orders and mandatory masks. Republicans need an approach that gets Americans back to attending church, Trump rallies, and in-person voting at local polling places.
Forcing everyone to wear a mask, even while jogging or boating, will do nothing to conquer the virus or restore public confidence. Sending the expensive new intravenous drug Remdesivir to hospitals, for COVID patients on their deathbed, will do nothing to calm public fears.
President Trump should turn instead to the approach which liberals fear and oppose the most: making hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) widely available to the American people. Trump may not realize that the medication which he took in May to successfully protect himself against COVID-19 is still inaccessible to most Americans.
A recent compilation of 50 studies of HCQ shows that it is effective as a prophylaxis and as early treatment, but less effective when used late in the course of the disease. This is similar to other anti-virals, such as Tamiflu, which are best given within 24 or 48 hours of first exposure to influenza.
Prophylaxis (or prophylactic) means using a medication to keep from getting sick or to minimize symptoms if you do get sick. Yet Americans are prevented from obtaining HCQ within a few days of exposure to the virus, before they develop symptoms or soon after.
A survey conducted this week by the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons yielded scores of responses by physicians about how their patients cannot obtain HCQ. Lives continue to be lost by denial of this inexpensive, safe medication to the public.
Based on impediments by liberal regulators, all but four small states have blocked the ability of Americans to obtain treatment by HCQ soon after exposure to COVID-19. Virtually nowhere can Americans, even health care workers on the front lines, obtain HCQ as a prophylaxis as Trump took for himself.
Indeed, most world leaders have taken HCQ as a prophylaxis to protect against COVID-19, according to the president of El Salvador as quoted by CNN. And millions of ordinary folks in many foreign countries now have early access to this medication, which is helping conquer the virus outside of the United States.
South Korea was hit early and hard by the Wuhan virus, but that conservative country made HCQ widely available and held its mortality down to only 2.3% per case and 6 per million in its overall population. Contrast that with the deprivation of HCQ from Americans, where the mortality per reported case is 4.8%, and 390 per million at large.
During a presidential election in which voter turnout depends on access to medication that protects against an infectious disease, Trump should not be beholden to biased advice by opponents of his reelection. Yet Never-Trumpers have so far pulled off one of the greatest election-year scams in American history.
Trump supporters did not vote for Anthony Fauci, whose emails gushing praise for Hillary Clinton were published by Wikileaks in 2016. But Dr. Fauci has dictated the most important policy decisions by the Trump Administration in 2020, with disastrous results for the American people and Republicans in November.
Contrast the interference with ordinary Americans’ access to HCQ with the successful response to COVID-19 elsewhere. Russia, India, Israel, and Turkey have all used HCQ to keep their mortality rate from the disease an average of half below ours, and their death rate below 70 per million which is less than one-fifth of the death rate in our overall population.
Sports fans would eagerly take HCQ to attend games and root for their favorite teams, and churchgoers would do likewise. As adults making decisions to protect their own health as they do every day in other contexts, Americans should be allowed to do so for COVID-19.
Everyone who has an allergy, diabetes, asthma, or other affliction knows the fear factor that results from lack of access to immediate treatment if needed. Without access to HCQ, many Americans will not be going to football games, Trump rallies, church, or even polling booths.
Peter Navarro observed how the Deep State has been sabotaging Trump’s reelection by blocking HCQ. He told the New York Times that this “is a Deep State blindside by bureaucrats who hate the administration they work for more than they’re concerned about saving American lives.”
It’s time for others in the Trump Administration to admit that Navarro was right, and make HCQ available immediately to all the American people, not just the well-connected few. Allowing a climate of fear to continue whereby Americans will not even attend church, let alone vote, is unhealthy for our country and unfair to Trump
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Removing Statues, to Smear America
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 23, 2020
Americans first watched in horror as mobs of anarchists seized the streets of our major cities, breaking windows, setting fires, and looting stores. Then they began pulling down statues that had stood for decades, or in many cases, more than a century.
The real targets of the violent Leftists are not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore. Rather, the goal is to discredit America itself by smearing those who gave us the freedom and prosperity we enjoy today.
Local police in Democrat-controlled cities have mostly stood and watched silently, neither stopping the destruction nor arresting and charging those responsible. At the White House, President Trump reacted on Twitter, promising to restore order if local officials fail.
The restraint by our president came to an end last night when a mob reached Lafayette Square in front of the White House. Cheered by onlookers who broke through a chain link fence, a small group of men tied ropes around the massive bronze figure of our 7th president, Andrew Jackson, mounted on a horse at the center of the park.
United States Park Police arrived at the scene to disperse the unruly crowd mere moments before the vandals would have toppled the 15-ton statue, though not before it was defaced with ugly words like “Killer Scum” that will be costly to remove. It is unlikely that the vandals had any appreciation for what Jackson achieved and stood for.
Andrew Jackson was perhaps the most influential American between the founding of our nation and the Civil War, who more than anyone else defined the scope of presidential power. He was also the first president to represent the common man, triumphing over the elite of his day, and voluntarily retired after two terms when he could have won reelection repeatedly.
“Last night, we stopped an attack on a great monument,” Mr. Trump told reporters the next morning. “I just want to thank law enforcement. Numerous people are in jail and are going to jail today.”
Aside from the character of the man it commemorates, the Jackson statue is remarkable in itself as an important work of art. It was the first bronze statue cast in the United States, and the first equestrian statue in which the horse is balanced on its two hind legs.
“We are looking at long-term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums. They’re bad people, and they’re not taking down our monuments.”
What a difference from last Friday, when a mob succeeded in toppling and burning a statue of a Masonic leader, Albert Pike, in Washington’s Judiciary Square. The statue of Pike had been erected in 1901 with the approval of Congress after a nationwide fundraising campaign by the Masons.
Some weak Republicans have sought compromise with the radical anarchists by evicting Confederate statues from public spaces. But what about Arlington National Cemetery, where America’s honored dead are buried?
Arlington sits on the 1,100-acre estate once owned by the Virginian Robert E. Lee and his wife, who inherited the property from Washington’s adopted grandson, George Washington Custis. Some 400,000 American heroes rest in peace there under the silent watch of the now-empty Custis-Lee Mansion.
The ongoing attacks on statues has little to do with the Confederacy, as the vandals are just as resentful of most of the men in American history. The mob has attacked statues of patriots who fought for our country under the Stars and Stripes, including Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt.
The mob continued to depose statues of other great historical figures, including Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem; Father Junipero Serra, the humble Franciscan friar who brought Christianity to California; and Christopher Columbus, who started it all in 1492. The orgy of destruction culminated last week with the toppling of a statue of George Washington by protesters in Portland, Oregon.
The victims of this outbreak of anarchism were not promoters of slavery. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was born in New York City merely two years before the Civil War started, but Democrats have agreed to remove a remarkable statue of him outside its famed American Museum of Natural History.
Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, was the man who penned the revolutionary phrase “all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words were instrumental in ending slavery.
Ironically, it was white Leftists in Portland, Oregon who used an ax to tear down a statue of Jefferson. Portland is one of the least diverse cities in the nation, and yet wants to accuse great Americans of racism.
This is not really about a sculpture or monument, of course. It is an attempt to make America the object of scorn, while denying credit to those who made America great.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Judicial Supremacy Bites Again
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 16, 2020
What took Justice Antonin Scalia decades to build as a doctrine of textualism, his self-described heir Neil Gorsuch burned down in one decision on Monday. Applauded by the liberal media, his incoherent opinion throws federal courts into the middle of the culture war over transgenderism.
Justice Scalia could be rolling over in his grave at this demolition of the house that he so painstakingly built. This 6-3 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County granted a broad new right of transgenders and homosexuals to sue their employers in federal court.
Congress never intended to create special employment rights for transgenders and homosexuals when it enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The text of the statute is crystal clear in protecting against only historical kinds of discrimination.
“But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands,” Gorsuch bizarrely wrote for the 6-3 court in creating privileges for transgenders and homosexuals to sue employers. By reinterpreting a statute beyond its drafters’ imagination, Gorsuch implicitly mocks textualism and originalism which have been the hallmark of conservative jurisprudence.
Instead, the court again falls for the bankrupt approach of legislating from the bench, as demanded by liberal culture. This abandons the role of a judge as a neutral umpire, to which Chief Justice John Roberts pledged fealty during his confirmation hearings but did otherwise by joining this activist decision.
To be confirmed, Roberts echoed the view of Phyllis Schlafly who had written about how Supreme Court justices should behave like umpires rather than legislate from the bench. She never thought we had a conservative court, as Roberts disappoints again.
Like scraping nails across a blackboard, Gorsuch even quoted Justice Scalia twice in an attempt to maintain a façade of adherence to what Gorsuch promised when he was nominated. That is as discordant as an off-key performance by an amateur without permission by the songwriter.
Three justices in dissent dismantled the majority opinion. The dissenters could have gone further and echoed Scalia’s “hide my head in a bag” comment about the embarrassment of the same-sex marriage opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, which read like a “fortune cookie” rather than legal reasoning.
“There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation,” began Justice Sam Alito’s dissent on Monday. “The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive,” he continued.
Properly quoting Scalia, Justice Alito wrote that “our duty is to interpret statutory terms to ‘mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.’” Title VII certainly did not mean at the time it was enacted to give special rights to transgenders and homosexuals.
The dissents, including the one written by Trump-appointed Brett Kavanaugh, are logical in contrast with the pandering to the liberal elite permeating the majority opinion. Justice Elena Kagan’s distorted view of textualism at oral argument made it into the opinion, which suggests that she was the ventriloquist for Gorsuch.
Together they began their opinion by posing the deceptive question of “whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender.” That is not a proper question for a federal court to ask, which is limited in authority by federal laws, and it was improper for the Court then to answer its own misleading question.
The phony question incorrectly implies that federal courts can and should create new rights whenever a handful of unelected justices want to do so. They should have asked whether Congress has commanded the federal judiciary to recognize special rights for transgenders and homosexuals to sue in federal court, which of course it has not.
When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, delusional liberals thought that it settled the issue of abortion once and for all. Instead, it converted the judiciary into a political football and caused confirmation hearings to become theaters of the absurd.
Now unelected justices tell Americans that the Court has decided the cultural war concerning special rights for transgenders, so everyone should just accept this elitist teaching and fall in line. But the opposite will occur, as the Court creates unresolved issues about transgenders in school and sports, where girls are harmed by unfair competition from biological males.
On the same day that the Court rendered its decision giving extraordinary priority to cultural liberals, the Court denied ten petitions by Americans who have had their Second Amendment rights infringed. Rights that are actually in the Constitution, like the right to bear arms, are not as important to liberals on the Supreme Court.
The Court also refused to review California’s statewide sanctuary law, which prohibits cooperation with federal immigration authorities. This Court is a far cry from anything that is conservative.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
How Rioting Ended the Shutdown
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 9, 2020
After a second full week of mass demonstrations, protests, riots and civil disorders in over 30 cities, many law-abiding Americans are wondering why we were forced to comply with stay-home orders. Tens of thousands of people have congregated in confined public spaces for the last two weeks, many of them not wearing masks except to avoid being captured on video while they were looting stores or setting buildings on fire.
Whatever happened to the dire warnings of death and disease if ordinary people ventured outside to meet each other in restaurants, bars, and sporting events? Despite massive crowds filling the streets of our major cities, there is no evidence of any spike in cases of people getting sick from COVID-19.
Churches remain closed, unless they limit attendance to 25 people or 25% of capacity and require worshipers to wear masks and stay 6 feet apart from each other. No similar limits or restrictions have been imposed on street protesters, demonstrators, rioters and looters.
Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and other familiar experts from the CDC are suddenly nowhere to be found. In their place, “1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders” published a statement declaring that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.”
“Protests against systemic racism must be supported,” even if not done safely, the 1,288 public health professionals wrote in their widely circulated manifesto. “Our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.”
“This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders” like those who peacefully gathered outside the Michigan State Capitol last month, the experts continued. Those peaceful protests, the experts agreed, were “rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.”
One of the peaceful Michigan protesters was Karl Manke, a 77-year-old barber in Owosso, a town of 15,000 people in central Michigan. A judge in Michigan’s Shiawassee County issued an order that Manke’s barber shop “shall be locked and closed,” and agents from the state attorney general’s office showed up in Owosso to enforce the order. Manke appealed that decision to the Michigan Supreme Court, which summarily overturned it last Friday. The order shutting Manke’s barber shop without full briefing and argument was “extraordinary” and “inexplicable,” Justice David Viviano wrote.
“Courts decide legal questions according to the rule of law,” Justice Viviano continued. “One hopes that this great principle -- essential to any free society, including ours -- will not itself become yet another casualty of COVID-19.”
In Altamahaw, North Carolina, population 347, Ace Speedway was the scene of stock-car racing last weekend for over 2,000 spectators. The crowd that half-filled the 5,000-seat bleachers was far in excess of the 25-person limit imposed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, whose antics are preventing the Republican Convention from meeting in Charlotte in late August.
A sign outside the speedway advertised: “This Event is held in Peaceful Protest of Injustice and Inequality Everywhere.” The Alamance County Sheriff refused to issue a citation because, he said, “my citizens have basically been singled out for the same alleged violations that are occurring all over the State of North Carolina.”
One after another, so-called experts on public health have been proven wrong and forced to revise their earlier statements. The latest about-face comes from the discredited World Health Organization (WHO) which admitted on Monday that it is actually “very rare” to catch COVID-19 from an asymptomatic carrier -- someone who is not coughing or sneezing droplets into the air.
“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” the WHO spokesman explained. “They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward.”
That contradicts the main reason that was given to justify the nationwide shutdown of our economy: fear of infection from people who do not appear to be sick. In the immortal words of Gilda Radner, who was a regular on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, “Never mind!”
The two most distinguished medical journals in the world are The Lancet, which is based in England, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Last week both journals were forced to retract studies purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine, the same drug that President Trump took (in combination with zinc) to prevent COVID-19, was not only useless but harmful, and even resulted in death.
Both studies claimed to rely on data from many countries around the world, but when suspicious researchers asked to see the raw data, the authors refused to reveal it. These leading medical journals rushed into print with articles that were obviously intended to embarrass President Trump.
Although hydroxychloroquine is approved for off-label use to treat and prevent COVID-19, a number of federal and state restrictions have made it hard to get, even with a doctor’s prescription. Over 35 states have limited its availability, and five states have rules that prohibit doctors from prescribing the drug as a preventive measure.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Whatever Happened to Social Distancing?
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 2, 2020
For 10 weeks, law-abiding Americans submitted to the demands of so-called experts to maintain a 6-foot distance from our friends, relatives, and fellow human beings. That meant familiar gathering places such as restaurants, bars, hotels, and sports arenas had to close and remain closed indefinitely, causing economic hardship to millions.
When a few hundred law-abiding citizens, some lawfully carrying their personal weapons, marched in front of the Michigan state capitol to protest the nation’s most extreme stay-at-home order, liberals feigned outrage.
The “mask police” demanded that all Americans don intrusive face-coverings in public, supposedly to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The House of Representatives has switched to proxy voting despite its unconstitutionality, and Republicans have sued to stop this erosion of safeguards against improper procedures in Congress.
With citizens who respect the law stuck at home under lockdown orders by Democratic governors, the lawless seized the streets. Mobs of thousands of militants, many armed with crowbars, fire starters and other dangerous weapons, rampaged the darkened streets in search of soft targets to loot, burn and pillage in a senseless orgy of destruction.
The violent chaos is the tragedy that results from the absence of an armed citizenry, by which merchants defend their shops with their own lawful firearms. When a black professional basketball player saw his truck being vandalized by a protester in his residential neighborhood, the 6-foot, 6-inch, 225-pound athlete rushed out and beat up the vandal.
But we are not all as strong as giants who play in the NBA, and many of us rely on local police, sheriffs and mayors to protect our private property against lawlessness. The state governor, state police, and the national guard are there to be called in as needed to restore order.
Yet in city after city, all led by weak Democratic mayors, the police stood by while the life savings (and in some cases, the lives) of ordinary citizens went up in smoke. A police station was burned to the ground in Minneapolis and a federal law enforcement officer was shot and killed in Oakland.
The insurrection that has spread to more than 30 cities is fueled by socialists and anarchists who oppose President Trump and the Republican Party. This rebellion is built on three-and-a-half years during which elites in the liberal media and Democrats in Congress, who refuse to condemn the violence, ranted against our president.
The handful of giant companies that control our channels of communication have found profit in fomenting strife and division among the various groups that make up our body politic. Only last week the opulent high tech industry, which evades the brunt of the protests, used its monopoly power to essentially censor the president’s words on Twitter.
Twitter’s disparagement of President Trump by labeling his tweets would be comical if it were not so dangerous as politically motivated censorship. As a monopoly service provider, Twitter should not be allowed to regulate the statements of a political candidate to the advantage of his opponent in a contested election.
Decades ago, when the broadcast networks dominated politics, Congress passed a law to forbid network television from rejecting political ads based on their content. Another law established the Fairness Doctrine which required broadcast television and radio to present both sides of controversial issues of public importance.
Twitter, Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook (which owns Instagram), and other Big Tech companies enjoy monopoly power and immense wealth due to regulatory advantages conferred on them by government. They do not pay the real costs of the traffic that they attract, from which they profit, and they should not be picking sides in political discourse by placing derogatory labels on postings by political candidates.
Twitter gets its internet traffic without paying a dime for it. This free-riding by Twitter, Google and Facebook enable them to punish viewpoints they disfavor, in demeaning and sometimes secretive ways.
If Twitter had to pay its costs as radio stations do, it would be begging for a content-provider such as President Trump to post on its service and thereby attract other users and customers. Twitter would become more like talk radio, where robust competition to attract listeners results in less censorship, not more.
Google, meanwhile, uses secret algorithms that provide greater visibility to liberal websites and YouTube videos, while suppressing conservative views. According to a lawsuit in England, this is one way that Google uses its market power to choke off competition.
A court there has told Google either to produce its search engine algorithm by which it ranks websites in response to searches, or drop its defense to a lawsuit. The Trump Administration need not wait for a British court to compel transparency by the American behemoth, and the Federal Communications Commission should order Big Tech to disclose more than it has.
The Folly of Vote-by-Mail for All by John and Andy Schlafly
The extended national lockdown caused by the coronavirus has led to many ideas for changing familiar patterns of the American way of life. But COVID-19 is no excuse for undermining the integrity of our presidential elections by switching from in-person to mail-in voting.
Until a few years ago, Election Day was a special event in which our sprawling nation came together on the same day to select our next president. Some states honor it with a holiday, and many employers give workers time off to vote.
Barely five months before the most important presidential election of our lifetime, with the Supreme Court on the line, is no time to convert the election machinery of more than 100,000 election precincts to an unprecedented, untested system of any kind. Yet Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer seeks to send absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people on an error-ridden list of potential voters.
As President Trump rightly tweeted in response, “This was done illegally and without authorization. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
California Governor Gavin Newsom is taking Michigan’s mistake one step further. He issued an executive order to mail not just an application, but the actual ballot to the state’s entire voter registration list riddled with inaccuracies.
No state has ever done that before, including the five states that conduct mail elections, because it invites voting by people who are not eligible to vote. Voter intimidation, coercion, fraud, and other forms of illegitimate voting would be possible under blanket mail-in voting.
A new federal lawsuit has been filed to block Governor Newsom’s scheme. “Fraudulent and invalid votes dilute the votes of honest citizens and deprive them of their right to vote in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” it says.
Until now, only five states mail unrequested ballots to registered voters, but those states take additional precautions such as requiring verification of voter registrations. None of the five is a swing or battleground state whose electoral vote for president is in doubt.
All other states allow some form of absentee voting, and most of those permit limited mail-in voting for those who request it. States can more easily manage the integrity of a small number of mail-in ballots compared with being overwhelmed by everyone, even illegal aliens, voting by mail.
The costs are staggering, and states ask Congress to force taxpayers to foot the bill for this folly. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi already allocated $400 million in the CARES Act as handouts to states for mail-in voting, but that is not nearly enough.
The last presidential election had more than 128 million votes cast, and tens of dollars per mail-in ballot in new costs would be needed for sending and processing them. Democrats want $4 billion in new federal funding to pay for mail-in voting now.
Democrats even want unions to be allowed to collect ballots, but that would add unwanted intimidation of voters to the process. Unionized workers should be free from union coercion when they mark their ballots.
Allowing votes to be mailed until Election Day means that counting ballots and declaring a winner may not occur until weeks later. The post office can take up to ten days to deliver a letter, particularly amid high volume, and in a close election the outcome could change when ballots are lost in the mail.
Our political prosperity depends on the smooth transition of power. It is essential that there be a prompt, legitimate presidential winner, but close elections awash in mailed ballots would frustrate that essential goal.
In the key swing state of Pennsylvania, mail-in voting is being adopted for the first time this year, with restrictions. Ballots must be received, not merely mailed, by Election Day, because many letters are not postmarked anymore.
Ballot harvesting is not allowed in Pennsylvania, which is the pernicious practice of paid workers mailing a bundle of ballots supposedly cast by others. Millions of demented nursing home patients can have their “votes” harvested in this manner for the unfair advantage of a candidate funding the harvesting.
Democrats pretend that voter fraud would be small for mail-in voting, but they do not consider ballot harvesting and other chicanery to be fraud. A generation ago, they did not consider the corrupt Democratic political machine in Chicago to be fraudulent, either.
Supporters of mail-in voting rely on polling which seems to indicate public support for it. But those polling questions avoid mention of the immense additional costs and the susceptibility of mail-in voting to manipulation and corruption.
President Trump is right to oppose this attempt by Democrats to change our election system. Federal funds should be withheld from states that undermine our elections as Democrats are trying to do.
Contact Tracing? No Thanks.
By John and Andy Schlafly
May 19, 2020
First a Dallas hair salon owner was imprisoned for opening her store to earn a living. Next Texas has signed a $295 million contract for “contact tracing,” by which law-abiding citizens will have to submit to monitoring about when, where, and with whom they have been.
While this sounds like a dark episode in the history of the communist Soviet Union or China, it is being promoted by Democratic governors today on a massive scale never accepted in the United States. It even extends into liberty-conscious conservative Texas.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the Chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, pointed out on the floor of the House that contact tracing would “allow big tech companies to surveil” citizens and “then turn that accumulated information over to the government.” Republican state legislators and Rudy Giuliani have likewise criticized the proposals for vast contact tracing.
Yet Republican Governor Greg Abbott, ambitious to run for president in 2024, is imposing government tracking and monitoring of Texans under the pretense of combating coronavirus. He could conquer the virus by lifting unjustified restrictions on access to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), but instead wants to find out who and where lawful Texans privately visited.
Far from helping society return to normal activities, contact tracing would terrify everyone into staying at home even more than they have already been. Everyone would have to think twice about whether a visit to someone might end up in a government database, or result in a mandatory unwanted 14-day quarantine.
This would also encourage more people to snitch on their neighbors, reporting on their daily movements. The society of narcs sought by liberals would grow worse under widespread contact tracing, even if promoted as merely being voluntary.
Lying to government agents is a crime in many jurisdictions, so those who are accosted by a contact tracer but do not disclose every person they visited in the last week could be prosecuted. Then citizens would face conviction for protecting people whom they do not want to be harassed by a visit from a contact tracer, who might himself be spreading the virus.
Contact tracing is an approach supported by George Soros, the billionaire Leftist who has been funding numerous liberal causes. He has donated heavily for open borders, which exacerbates the spread of unwanted viruses in the United States.
The real goal of the contact tracing is to use COVID-19 as a pretext to monitor the whereabouts of every American, perhaps through our smartphones, and take away our liberties. Republican political candidates will be tracked and leaks of their private information to the media would be inevitable under this scheme, while Democrats such as Joe Biden are given a pass on their far greater misconduct.
Child Protective Services bullies will be authorized to take children away from parents who have COVID-19, or who have been in contact with anyone who might have the virus. Contact tracing means that a visit to your home by a neighbor who later tests positive for the virus could result in the forced quarantining of you for merely having opened your front door to him.
Texas Gov. Abbott’s contract is with a federally funded contact tracing firm, MTX Group, about which he failed to consult the conservative Texas legislature before obligating the state. MTX Group will soon have a staff of 4,000 employees in Texas, including case investigators, epidemiologists, and contact tracers.
Meanwhile, regulators in Texas and other states continue to block access by residents to HCQ, the same medication which President Trump has successfully taken for more than a week to protect against COVID-19. In most states, including Texas, Trump would not have been able to fill his doctor’s prescription for this medication due to liberal interference.
The FDA, as misled by the pro-vaccine bureaucrat Rick Bright, Ph.D., continues to prohibit any use of the federal stockpile of 100 million doses of HCQ unless the patient is first hospitalized and a clinical trial is unavailable. President Trump’s successful use of this medication would not be permitted from the stockpile maintained under these senseless FDA regulations imposed by anti-Trump bureaucrats.
The conservative, can-do approach is to conquer a virus by treating it early and in a preventive manner, while the defeatist liberal approach is to ration resources while asserting government control over law-abiding residents. Gov. Abbott could follow the successful example of Republican Gov. DeSantis in Florida, who made HCQ available and kept businesses and beaches largely open.
Gov. Abbott has instead sharply restricted access to HCQ and closed businesses for prolonged periods, resulting in the imprisonment of a salon owner. The $295 million that Abbott is spending on contact tracing could have purchased HCQ treatments for half of the entire State of Texas, to reopen the state without the need for oppressive monitoring.
Restart Sports Without Gambling
By John and Andy Schlafly
May 12, 2020
The shutdown of professional sports due to the Wuhan virus has exposed the increasing billions of dollars being wagered on these games, and the heightened dependency of state governments on revenue from this formerly illicit activity. When the NCAA cancelled March Madness, the annual college basketball tournament, states addicted to sports gambling lost millions of dollars in revenue from taxes on the betting.
Many were astounded when 15.6 million recently watched the first day of the NFL draft, a tedious event previously interesting only to diehard fans. But the audience this year was boosted by famished gamblers who wagered on which college students would be picked, and when.
That is a pathetic way to spend the family nest egg, or waste one’s time. Yet sports betting has mushroomed to tens of billions of dollars, particularly since the Murphy v. NCAA ruling by the Supreme Court in 2018 allowed states to ramp up sports gambling.
Legalized sports gambling then quickly spread to a total of 18 states, and just as quickly they are becoming hostage to the tax revenue it generates. With professional sports shut down due to COVID-19, state governments have lost this revenue while their residents save money.
There has been no local or state tax revenue from casinos since they were shut down nationwide, to the dismay of their owners including Indian tribes. Their losses benefit casino victims, including many American Indians and every other demographic group.
Democratic politicians complain about how the rich get richer even now, but sports and casino gambling constitute one of the biggest drivers of wealth inequality. Billionaire owner Mark Cuban estimated that the Supreme Court ruling authorizing sports gambling immediately doubled the value of franchises in the top four professional sports leagues.
Sports competitions should restart, as athletes are most able to overcome the Wuhan virus. But we can do without the smoke-filled casinos infecting the less healthy and the integrity of the games.
Democrat-controlled Las Vegas announced that it will reopen its casinos, despite how Democrats criticize Trump for seeking to reopen ordinary businesses. Apparently the concept of which businesses are essential is in the eye of the beholder.
Belarusian soccer and Ukrainian ping-pong are nearly the only professional sports which have carried on. This has left millions of Americans with little to bet on in sports. This fall Las Vegas is set to be the new home for the Oakland Raiders as the NFL and other leagues embrace gambling and fantasy sports betting like never before. “Gaming management” seeks credibility by holding conferences at prestigious universities and offering accredited college degrees.
Sports bettors attended in March the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is a fancy name to legitimize the combination of two addictions: gambling and watching professional sports. Conference attendees enjoyed the cigar bar for a little rest and relaxation after a day of panel presentations.
But it turns out that COVID-19 was being spread at that cigar bar during the conference. According to Sports Illustrated, everyone who frequented the bar at that time contracted the virus.
Most recovered from the disease, but the shutdown of professional sports may have caused even worse symptoms for sports gambling addicts and states increasingly dependent on them. Desperate states may soon attempt to expand sports gambling as a way to try to make up for their lost revenue from legitimate businesses.
Democrat-controlled Colorado has now done just that. After heavy spending by gambling interests pushed through a referendum by a narrow 51-49% margin, regulators in that formerly conservative state made sports betting legal as of May 1st.
This was just in time for gambling interests to get “apps” into the state for the college and professional football seasons expected to begin in August, if the coronavirus crisis is over by then. Some NFL owners want to play without fans if necessary, and several taxpayer-supported stadiums had already been poorly attended even before the virus arrived.
The hypocrisy of owners of professional sports teams includes how they have harshly punished players who may have occasionally bet on games, while the owners themselves seek to profit from it. Baseball great "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, whom Babe Ruth imitated as the finest natural hitter he ever saw, was accused of gambling on the 1919 World Series but was acquitted in a court of law, and yet remains banished.
Some of the new state laws authorizing sports wagering allow owners to gamble in ways that players cannot. Meanwhile, states like Pennsylvania are imposing whopping taxes of 36% on revenue from sports gambling.
Professional sports should be reopened without the gambling, which most states recently allowed or seek to permit. The Department of Justice should fully enforce the Wire Act and other federal laws to end nationwide this exploitation of fans when seasons restart.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Government Unions Should Bear Their Share
By John and Andy Schlafly
April 28, 2020
Government unions should not be shifting the costs of the shutdowns to the laid-off employees of private businesses. Yet that is the approach sought by Democratic governors of large states as they demand massive bailouts of their government workers who have sat idly by.
Public schools are closed throughout the country, and their bloated bureaucrats have enjoyed an extended vacation at home. They should not receive paychecks, at public expense, which are being denied to waitresses, manicurists, and hair stylists.
The sooner everyone is allowed to get back to work, the better. But in the meantime it is terribly unfair to shift the burden of being out of work from government workers’ unions onto the backs of those who toil for less money and pensions in the private sector.
Yet that is what liberal Democratic governors seek by demanding massive federal bailouts for their state and local governments. Public school teachers and other government workers should be bearing an equal amount of loss from the work stoppage, rather than being propped up by extraordinary handouts.
While businesses have laid off or furloughed millions of workers, Democrat-controlled “blue” states have not. We should be hearing less news about private businesses having to let go of their workers, and more news about blue state governors needing to trim their oversized bureaucracies.
“Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states … and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” Trump aptly tweeted on Monday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested that the poorly run states be allowed to file for bankruptcy, but that is not the answer either. That approach would reward those in control and a pile of attorneys, while leaving creditors holding the bag on defaulted loans and diminishing the ability of other states to obtain favorable credit.
Instead, liberals should cut state and local spending, which is something they have never been willing to do. The belt-tightening should include scaling back the luxurious pensions for state workers at taxpayer expense.
McConnell is right to take the position that “there’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.” Government employees have no greater entitlement to paychecks for not working.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is suggesting an income guarantee for every American. But instead of trying to put everyone on the government payroll, Pelosi and other Democrats should be downsizing the government workforce.
The United States Bankruptcy Code has long prohibited states from filing for bankruptcy to avoid their obligations for the same reasons that many other debts are not dischargeable in personal bankruptcies. Meanwhile new money, such as bailouts, should only be for new services and not for old debt like pensions.
Many of the same states seeking a federal bailout now have repeatedly defied efforts by the Trump Administration to rein in the runaway costs of illegal immigration, for example. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has repudiated federal policy against illegal immigration by issuing drivers’ licenses to attract more illegals.
Now Cuomo declares that McConnell is somehow being “vicious” by opposing handouts to his and similar states. Cuomo epitomizes the entitlement mentality that snaps at whoever objects to sending them more money.
Cuomo failed to protect health care workers in his state, who toiled on behalf of coronavirus patients without the benefits of proper masks or access to prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine. Cuomo insisted on placing people infected with COVID-19 in nursing homes where it quickly spread and unnecessarily killed many thousands of elderly residents.
Meanwhile Cuomo has failed to take fiscally responsible measures in trimming expenses of state government, even though millions of workers for small businesses have been laid off. Families of laid-off workers should not be required to pay for Cuomo’s state employees to do little at home.
Nor should liberal governors be allowed to stiff lenders who have supported their states with loans, which would result from giving states a right to file for bankruptcy. Rather, governors should realize that their wells are going to run dry if they continue to pay illegal aliens and others full entitlements and salaries as though nothing has happened.
McConnell kept funding for state governments out of the most recent bailout bill, which Trump signed into law last Friday. Resistance to these bills is growing, and congressmen are recognizing that their constituents do not want an endless stream of trillion-dollar “stimulus” packages.
Biden, whose mind seems as quarantined as his body, scoffs at the $2 trillion spending bill by saying it is not nearly enough. His promises to spend far more in exploitation of this crisis must be rejected.
Don’t Bail Out the Shutdown States
By John and Andy Schlafly
April 21, 2020
A proposal by two senators to send $500 billion to state governments, due to the coronavirus, would be a horrible incentive. It would encourage governors to keep their economies closed despite their losses in tax revenues from the lack of business activity.
Some Republican-led states have courageously reopened or remained open for business, and their money should not be taken and sent to mostly Democrat-controlled states who ordered people to stop working. States should have an incentive to reopen, as the Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia is doing, rather than receiving bailouts to remain closed.
Yet Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) want to appropriate a half-trillion dollars to state governments in addition to the $150 billion which the last bailout bill sent to them. These handouts to state governments would remove the fiscal pressure to reopen their economies.
Under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, New Jersey has impeded access to early and prophylactic treatment for COVID-19 in non-hospitalized patients, resulting in avoidable deaths from the virus. Gov. Murphy has also infringed on the rights of protesters who demand that the overly broad shutdown end.
New Jerseyan Kim Pagan faces up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for merely organizing a protest, which is a constitutional right, against the suffocating stay-at-home order by Gov. Murphy. State governments should bear their own losses as their own governors fail to protect constitutional rights while continuing these oppressive shutdowns.
Availability of early and preventive use of medication to guard against harm by the coronavirus would enable all states to safely open. Yet Democratic governors continue to block access to life-saving medication such as hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and deny its use until a coronavirus victim is hospitalized near death and cannot be saved by any treatment.
Democratic Gov. Murphy has prohibited early access by requiring a positive test result on all prescriptions for HCQ, which many credit for helping them recover from COVID-19 if used early. A new study of 973 patients in France showed remarkably better results for patients who were given HCQ as an early treatment along with azithromycin.
The researchers conclude that HCQ medication “is a safe and efficient treatment for COVID-19,” yet it remains blocked for millions of Americans exposed to or infected by the virus. Nursing home residents are sitting ducks for this virus as they are denied this medication until they get too sick for any medication to help them.
Growing protests at state capitols illustrate how badly governors, mostly Democrats, have handled this crisis. President Trump himself has expressed support for the protesters, and has voiced his own objections to the ongoing interference with our economy by Democratic governors.
Meanwhile, non-coronavirus patients are being denied medical procedures and treatments which they need. Health care workers are being laid off throughout the country because ordinary medical care has been prohibited by the shutdown orders.
Massive bailouts to hospitals send them money for not being available to the public. These create the wrong incentive of perpetuating the shutdowns rather than allowing healthy economic pressure to force reopening.
President Trump could invoke his emergency powers to override state governors who interfere with our economy and block access to needed medical treatments. If we were in a conventional war, the president would prohibit interference by state officials with war-related efforts.
Yet some Democratic governors seem to be driven by ego rather than doing what is best for their residents. New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is in a nasty spat with the Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City over who gets to decide if public schools there will remain closed for the rest of the school year.
In 1992, Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida blocked efforts by President George H.W. Bush to help victims of Hurricane Andrew, which ravaged that state shortly before the presidential election. President Bush then stood down and was predictably blamed by the media for not doing more, when instead he should have overridden the politically motivated interference.
Today Democratic governors are determined to impede President Trump’s helpful new guidelines for Opening Up America Again. Trump recommends reopening our Nation in three stages, depending on local conditions, and urges all 50 states to begin implementing Phase One immediately.
Trump’s guidelines are merely recommendations, so Democrats have an election-year political incentive to undermine them as much as they can. Trump has repeatedly warned that the cure would be worse than the disease if “the greatest economy in the history of our country” is damaged beyond repair, but Democrats seem unconcerned.
Trump is working daily to restore the old normal, where Americans had no fear of crowding together in restaurants, bars, and sports stadiums. Federal funds should not be sent to Democratic governors who resist reopening.
Leftist Tyrants Exploit Shutdowns
By John and Andy Schlafly
April 14, 2020
It did not take long for leftist tyrants to exploit shutdown orders in mostly Democratic states. From Michigan to Kentucky to California and even to Texas, public officials are abusing their authority to infringe on fundamental rights of Americans.
The Democratic Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, was promoted into office by the liberal media as a kinder, gentler alternative to his conservative predecessor, Matt Bevin. But as many on the right anticipated, Beshear is a tyrant in sheep’s clothing as he bullies the large evangelical community there.
Beshear declared that churchgoers on Easter Sunday would have their license plates recorded and be required to quarantine for daring to attend a service on that special day. This First Amendment-infringer then tweeted out a picture of his family enjoying the sunny day outside, illustrating his hypocrisy.
On Fire Christian Church sought and obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the City of Louisville to prohibit it from interfering with drive-in church services on Easter. The federal judge who issued this order in favor of religious liberty, Justin Walker, has been nominated by President Trump to the influential D.C. Circuit.
Another Democratic governor, whom the President calls “Half” Whitmer, has become a tyrant in Michigan. There, however, an intense backlash has initiated a recall petition drive which has already attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen “Half” Whitmer has gone so far as to order people to stay in their “main” home, which prohibits them from traveling to and taking care of their many cabins and cottages which line the Great Lakes of Michigan, Huron, and Superior. A state fond of boating and fishing has become a totalitarian society more like North Korea or Cuba.
In California, seven young people not expected to be vulnerable to the virus got together for some harmless drinks Saturday night in Santa Cruz and were slapped with tickets totaling $7,000 in fines. Further south, off Malibu, a man was arrested merely for using his paddle board far from anyone else.
Contrast all this with Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and her highly effective way of handling the Wuhan virus, which causes COVID-19. Governor Noem, like eight other Republican governors, has kept her state open throughout this crisis, relying on freedom and responsibility to combat the virus.
Last night she announced that she has obtained one million doses of hydroxychloroquine for use by her residents, the medication that has been so effective in other countries and in certain locations in the United States in minimizing harm from the disease.
The media have pounced on governors like Noem who have kept their economies running, by printing stories that such policies result in “hot spots” like one supposedly breaking out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Washington Post said that this “experience has been harrowing” because a total of 57 new COVID-19 cases recently arose there in one day among workers at a production plant.
But what is “harrowing” is the interference by Democrats with early medication by hydroxychloroquine, an inexpensive, generic drug. Nearly all of the 25,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19 were not allowed access to this medication for early treatment.
A nursing home in Democrat-controlled Washington State suffered 37 fatalities from COVID-19 without using the medication early to combat the disease. In contrast, a nursing home in Republican Texas which suffered a similar outbreak has welcomed and applied the medication, and has suffered only one fatality as reported by NPR.
Even the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has been pandering to the liberal media by imposing an overly broad shutdown of that warm-weather state, which has interfered with necessary medical care such as fixing broken bones or receiving hormonal treatments. Abbott hopes to run for president in 2024 but it is difficult to see why he thinks that shutting down Texas is good for anyone.
Some point out that “flattening the curve” of infections by the virus has the effect of prolonging the pandemic and exposing the public to an inevitable resurgence. Instead, early treatment and the development of herd immunity might be a better way to address this.
But there is little money to be made in early treatment by generic medication or in herd immunity, and no political power to be gained by it. Democratic governors are emboldened by their newfound attention, and they are wrongly attempting to tell President Trump when to reopen the economy, not vice-versa.
Meanwhile, many hospitals are empty and workers have been furloughed due to the blocking of beneficial operations and treatment. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s shutdown order has caused the Lehigh Valley Health Network to furlough more than 900 staffers, resulting in the irony of empty hospitals due to overreaching by Democrats in dealing with a pandemic.
Deadly Delay by Dr. Fauci
By John and Andy Schlafly
April 7, 2020
“You go to war with the army you have,” said President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Leftist Tyrants Exploit Shutdowns
Rumsfeld’s profound words have never been more important, as our nation has been called to war against an unseen enemy, the Chinese coronavirus. It’s time to summon and employ the resources we have today, not wait months or years for more studies, more data, and more proof that a promising medication is safe and effective.
President Trump, our commander-in-chief in the war against the virus, is a man of prompt and decisive action, and he takes pride in signing a “right to try” law in 2018. But he is being hamstrung by a Hillary Clinton-supporting federal bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci whose advice has stymied early, widespread use of hydroxychloroquine against the Wuhan virus.
Dr. Fauci is the George McClellan of the war on the coronavirus. General McClellan, the first commander of Union forces in the Civil War, had to be removed by President Lincoln when he persistently failed to engage the enemy.
Imagine if Fauci had been in charge of the decision to use the atom bomb in 1945. Atomic energy is an unproven technology, he might have exclaimed, while the Japanese continued to slaughter our soldiers, sailors and Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II.
Or think if Fauci had been General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp during the Korean War, when MacArthur proposed the daring Inchon landing maneuver which conquered the North Korean Army. We need more studies, Fauci might have said, before supporting the amphibious assault behind enemy lines.
Or what if Fauci had been advising General Washington about crossing the Delaware on December 25, 1776. The snow, the waves, the rickety boats, the shortage of proper clothes and shoes, the lack of good intelligence about the enemy camped on the other side -- all these factors needed more study before Fauci could be 100% sure that Washington would succeed.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in his newly published pamphlet that Washington had read aloud to his troops before they boarded the boats on Christmas night. When the survival of your country is at risk and your soldiers are dying on the battlefield, there’s no more time for studies.
No medications have been thoroughly studied in time-consuming clinical trials for any new virus, including COVID-19. But we have solid evidence that a 65-year-old drug called hydroxychloroquine has helped many COVID-19 patients recover, and that it has also prevented many other people from getting the disease.
This medication is already being taken regularly by hundreds of thousands of Americans who suffer from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. As far as anyone knows, no one has ever died from taking a recommended dose of the drug.
As America’s deaths from the virus exceeded 1,000 in a single day, there is no time for methodical studies to help another thousand COVID-19 patients who may die tomorrow. They should immediately be given the best medication available, whether exhaustively tested to Fauci’s satisfaction or not.
Karen Whitsett, a Michigan state representative, is one survivor who powerfully validates the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, which Dr. Fauci continues to disparage as unproven. A Democrat, she represents a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Detroit which has been ravaged by COVID-19.
“I thank God the president of the United States mentioned that drug because it did save me,” Whitsett said. “If President Trump had not talked about this it wouldn’t have been something that would be accessible for anyone to be able to get right now,” the lawmaker said.
When Whitsett arrived at the hospital with symptoms of the virus, she found that her own governor, a fellow Democrat named Gretchen Whitmer, had issued an order prohibiting the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients. Michigan was one of a number of states that have limited the use of the drug because so-called experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci claim it is unproven.
“I did have a difficult time, even that day, obtaining the medication because of an order that was put down in my state,” said Whitsett. “And it was on that day so you can imagine how terrified I was that I had to beg and plead and go through a whole lot to try to get the medication.”
Within hours of taking her first dose of hydroxychloroquine, Representative Whitsett was already feeling much better. “It has a lot to do with the president,” the lawmaker told The Detroit Free Press. “He is the only person who has the power to make it a priority.”
As Bob Dylan wrote, “how many deaths will it take ’till he knows that too many people have died?” Dr. Fauci should stop blowin’ in the wind.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Dems Push Socialized Medicine to Exploit Crisis
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 31, 2020
Filling hospital beds and then rationing care is the approach of socialized medicine, which has been a disaster in Italy. A far better approach is to allow physicians and pharmacists to provide early treatment for patients at home to address the Wuhan virus known as COVID-19.
If you are a television or Hollywood actor, then you receive the better treatment at home and no one will interfere with prescriptions by your physician. Daniel Dae Kim, an actor on “Lost” and “Hawaii Five-0,” credits receiving hydroxychloroquine for his recovery from COVID-19, while he avoided being hospitalized for it.
But Democratic governors from New York to Nevada are interfering with this potentially life-saving treatment for ordinary folk not yet hospitalized. Even in red-state Georgia, nursing home patients vulnerable to coronavirus are not able to receive this as a preventive measure, despite how it enabled South Korea to overcome the virus and how India encourages its use for at-risk health care workers.
The goal should be to keep people out of hospitals, and not wait until patients fill hospital beds before treating them. By the time a patient’s immune system is overwhelmed and he is hospitalized, it can be too late and he becomes a mechanism for diseases to spread to and from him.
But politics distorts, and we are merely months before voting begins in the presidential election. For Democrats, whatever Trump endorses is bad, and a prolonged crisis could boost the Democratic Party as the Great Depression did 90 years ago.
When Trump announced that hydroxychloroquine was a promising treatment for the Wuhan virus, he echoed what French researchers report and South Korean, Chinese and other authorities have recommended. But Democrats can never allow Trump to be proven right.
A board-certified physician who practices in New York’s Rockland and Orange counties, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, has treated 699 coronavirus patients with a treatment regimen using the same hydroxychloroquine tweeted by Trump. By giving this inexpensive medication early enough, Dr. Zelenko has successfully kept 695 of his patients out of the hospital, and none of them has died.
But this means that Trump was right. Yet Democrats do the opposite, and the grandstanding Democratic New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, takes the hospitalize-and-ration approach of socialized medicine.
Cuomo has hoarded so much of the medication hydroxychloroquine that not even Dr. Zelenko’s patients can easily obtain it in New York anymore. Cuomo and other Democratic governors impede treatment for coronavirus patients until they get into a hospital, and then ration it.
Spending the last moments of one’s life in a warehouse of hospital beds is not what any patient wants. It brings us closer to the failed experiment of socialized medicine which caused such a high mortality rate in Italy, and has Canada panicked if the coronavirus becomes pervasive there.
The real crisis is one of politics, not medicine, as the effective treatment protocol is available and affordable. But due to politics Democrats are interfering with early medication of those who have been exposed to the sometimes deadly virus.
The Democratic Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, issued an order interfering with physicians’ early treatment of patients with hydroxychloroquine. Then she tried to blame Trump for not sending her enough equipment and supplies for Michigan’s hospitals.
Republican legislators including Annette Glenn pushed back on that tyranny, forcing Gov. Whitmer to issue a retraction. One patient in a Michigan hospital felt like he was near death before a physician finally prescribed the medication for him, and he then recovered quickly while criticizing his governor.
A hospital executive in New York was recently fired for suggesting that Trump supporters should infect each other with coronavirus. Yet physicians who are employed by hospitals are under the control of such administrators, and may not be allowed to prescribe the best medication.
While blaming Trump, New York Gov. Cuomo demanded a massive stockpile of hydroxychloroquine but has since been hoarding it rather than allowing New Yorkers to obtain this medication to stay out of a hospital. The strategy of Democrats is not to cure people before they are hospitalized, but to fill hospital beds and then ration care.
Dr. Zelenko’s own patients are having trouble now filling their prescriptions in New York because Cuomo refuses to make it available to COVID-19 victims prior to hospitalization. The model of socialized medicine is to withhold care and then earn political support by appearing to be generous with what the public should have access to all along.
Meanwhile, Democrat governors have ordered a shutdown of activities they disfavor, while allowing daily activities frequented by their political allies. Abortion is improperly deemed “essential” while other elective surgery is curtailed, and “non-essential” services such as churches and gun stores are put on indefinite lockdown with pastors even being arrested.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
End the Economic Shutdown
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 24, 2020
Statewide lockdowns are not the way to fight the Chinese coronavirus. The vast majority of the counties, small towns and medium-sized cities across America are not at significant risk for COVID-19, and the millions of Americans who live there are needlessly suffering the consequences of an induced economic coma.
“Our people want to return to work,” Trump tweeted this morning. “The cure cannot be worse (by far) than the problem!”
Widespread unemployment lasting more than a few weeks would be a social catastrophe far greater than even a worst-case scenario that might result from the coronavirus pandemic. Civil society breaks down quickly when ordinary people are prevented from earning a living, supporting their families, and paying their bills.
Yet a handful of big-city-dwelling governors have implemented a “one size fits all” approach by shutting down places of business which are not responsible for spreading the virus. In several states, regulators have even interfered with the use of hydroxychloroquine, the drug which shows great promise to prevent and treat this new disease.
New York Governor Cuomo could have focused his lockdown on the densely populated urban area where the coronavirus was actually spreading. Instead, he imposed a complete shutdown on every farm, village, township and county across the Empire State, in regions where residents are at low risk.
Illinois Governor Pritzker shut down his entire state to address an issue that primarily affects Chicago, even though 80 of the state’s 102 counties have yet to report a single case of the virus and most other counties are in the single digits. California Governor Newsom closed the vast interior of his state based on an outbreak in its coastal cities.
Pennsylvania is mostly open space, farms, forests, mountains and two big cities, yet its Democratic Governor Wolf closed all “non-life-sustaining businesses” across the entire state. He then ruled that stores selling guns and ammunition were “non-life-sustaining businesses,” although their thousands of customers obviously disagree.
On Monday a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the forced closing of a gun store, handing gun-grabbers a victory they could not have otherwise obtained. The court provided no explanation for upholding Pennsylvania’s sweeping shutdown of nearly every business there.
This misguided one-size-fits-all approach crippled our economy and torpedoed our stock market. Not even the largest federal stimulus in history can replace the private economies of our largest states.
Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exploited the crisis with a bill to impose a nationwide mandate for 15 days of early voting, which favors Democratic ballot harvesting by a political machine. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who was instrumental in making Joe Biden the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, declared that the virus crisis is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer delayed passage of the Republican stimulus bill in the Senate to give time for Pelosi to present her House version, which could alter elections for years to come. She introduced the 1,400-page Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act, filled with pork including a multi-billion-dollar down payment on the Green New Deal.
Ironically, studies suggest that the oncoming warm weather may cause the coronavirus to subside, just as it has not spread so much in our warmer southern states or the southern hemisphere. Along with effective medical treatments, warmer weather could bring the crisis under control sooner, as President Trump predicts.
Anthony Fauci, a career bureaucrat who gushed in an email released by Wikileaks that a speech by Hillary Clinton once brought him to “tears” in support, misleadingly disparaged successful uses of the anti-malaria treatment as merely “anecdotal.” In fact, a French study supports use of that medication, and innovation with other safe medications should be encouraged.
Another leaked email reveals that Dr. Fauci was an enthusiastic admirer of Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she was running against Trump for president. It’s time to show Fauci the door and stop deferring to him.
At a cost of merely $6 billion, every American could be given the anti-malaria medication to protect against contracting the disease. This pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars in damage being inflicted against our economy.
In India, where U.S. drug makers have offshored much of their production, the government is arranging for its health care workers to receive the anti-malaria medication as a precaution. But in our country, pharmacy regulators in four states have mysteriously prohibited that salutary use.
Meanwhile, Pelosi’s bill seizes the crisis to try to tilt future elections in her favor by mandating early voting, mail-in voting, ballot harvesting (which is ballot collection by paid activists), online voter registration, and no-excuse absentee ballots in every state. President Trump is right to speak against Pelosi’s bill and call for a quick end to economic shutdowns by Democratic governors.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Countering Biden’s Gender Play
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 17, 2020
At CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday night, even the moderators were stunned when Joe Biden, out of the blue, pledged to pick a woman as his running mate. It was a calculated move designed to put President Trump in a box, while embarrassing Bernie Sanders for his reluctance to do likewise.
Biden is vulnerable with women voters, with videos documenting his groping of women and girls. But his female running mate will try to deflect this issue by going on the offensive, as Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar proved they are capable of doing.
Biden hopes to make gender a top issue in the presidential race this fall, even more so than last time. In addition to picking a woman for vice president, Biden also promised to appoint “the first black woman” to the Supreme Court.
Upcoming High Court rulings on three major gender-related issues no doubt influenced Biden’s strategy to play the gender card. Each case could yield a 5-4 decision that will drop like a bombshell in the presidential campaign.
In one case, the Court will decide whether states can require abortionists to comply with basic standards requiring them to be available for follow-up on their complications. Oral argument two weeks ago did not go as well as feminists hoped, and a divided ruling could inject abortion into the fall presidential debates.
In another case, the Court will decide whether the federal law that bans discrimination “on account of sex” should also prohibit discrimination on account of sexual preference. In a third case, the Court will decide if “sex” means biological sex, as everyone thought it did when Congress passed the law, or whether sex now includes gender expression or transition to the opposite sex.
No matter how the Court rules in these cases, Joe Biden will use them to invoke feminist theories about gender. But misusing the courts to change the meaning of our written law is the essence of judicial activism, which Republicans rightly oppose.
Biden may even toss in his support for the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which also contains the loaded phrase “on account of sex.” A president has no role in amending the Constitution, but ERA was the final point of contention between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter during their only debate in 1980.
Reagan was fully prepared to address this issue, and defended his opposition to ERA well. Rather than amend the Constitution, Reagan said, ERA supporters could have worked on revising any discriminatory laws.
In fact, ERA would invalidate the Violence Against Women Act which Joe Biden brags that he wrote and passed in 1994. Gender distinctions would not be allowed in any federal or state law if ERA were to become part of the Constitution, as Biden seeks.
In 2000 the Supreme Court invalidated as unconstitutional Biden’s handiwork in trying to extend federal jurisdiction, in United States v. Morrison. But ERA would vastly expand federal mischief over gender.
Biden himself was the vice president for eight years, and before that he was in the U.S. Senate for decades. While there he cast many votes which are totally out of sync with today’s progressive Democratic party, not to mention the populist coalition that elected President Trump.
Joe Biden presided over the Clarence Thomas hearings, and it was Biden himself who voted to send the nomination to the floor of the Senate without a recommendation. Justice Thomas has served with distinction for nearly three decades ever since, yet Biden has never apologized for allowing that proceeding to become a “high-tech lynching” as Thomas accurately described it.
Biden’s reputation as a moderate is undeserved, and can be easily debunked after he gets the Democratic nomination. He supports sanctuary cities and opposes President Trump’s policy of deporting criminal aliens, which would prevent many of the horrific crimes by illegal aliens against women and girls.
Among numerous other examples, Trump or his running mate could cite the brutal kidnapping, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old girl in Texas by an illegal alien, Humberto Leal Garcia. Garcia was tried and sentenced to death, but the Obama Administration, with Biden as Vice President, attempted to intervene for Garcia.
Justice was then delayed for 17 years as the Obama-Biden Administration tried to prevent the execution of the illegal alien Garcia for brutally raping and killing the young girl. Her nude body was found next to a massive rock used to smash her face to death, and a stick protruded from her dead body.
Garcia denied his guilt until he was strapped to the gurney in a Texas death chamber, after the state ultimately overcame the obstruction by the Obama-Biden Administration. The illegal alien Garcia then admitted his guilt and apologized, a minute before he was justly given the lethal injection.
Virginia Liberals Embrace Gambling and Gun Control
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 10, 2020
Boosted by pro-gun-control millions in donations by Mike Bloomberg in the last election, newly empowered liberals in Virginia extended their legislative session this past weekend. They enacted sweeping gun control and also broad expansions of gambling, which is backwards from what would help enhance prosperity and freedom.
It will soon be legal in Virginia to bet on football games and other sporting events, except for contests involving Virginia college teams. This unleashes a new, costly addiction for the millions of sports fans in the state who can soon waste their family savings in addition to their precious time.
A misguided ruling by the Supreme Court in 2018 opened the floodgates to the legalization of sports gambling by states, but many states have wisely declined the invitation. Studies have shown that the poor are most hurt by legalized gambling, and they are the least able to afford it.
A total of 15 states currently allow some form of sports gambling, and five other states plus the District of Columbia have passed laws to legalize it. There appears to be a race to the bottom as states compete with each other in facilitating the massive waste of time and money by their residents which such gambling entails.
The Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA ignored the obvious vices of legalized sports gambling, which range from corrupting the games to causing people to lose their savings. While justice is supposed to be blind, it should not be blind to the immense harm caused by decisions like this one.
The Court observed that “gambling was largely banned throughout the country” by the end of the 19th century, but then omitted the reasons why. Its corruption of politics was one reason, and gambling will surely corrupt sports too.
For this reason the NCAA, which governs college sports, has long opposed gambling on its games. “The NCAA opposes all forms of legal and illegal sports wagering, which has the potential to undermine the integrity of sports contests and jeopardizes the student-athletes and the intercollegiate athletics community.”
Families, already fed up with how Thanksgiving Day and Christmas have become rituals of senseless watching of football games, can expect financial losses now too. In California, Indian tribes are gathering signatures on petitions to put sports gambling at tribal casinos throughout the state on its ballot in November.
Professional sports leagues used to be strongly opposed to allowing gambling on their games, but greed has led them to search for more sources of revenue, and gambling has that allure. People who bet on games are more likely to watch them, and that may help stem the general decline in television ratings.
The scandal of the Houston Astros’ stealing signs to help them win the World Series a few years back should be sobering enough. Yet Major League Baseball stands now with the NFL and NBA in wanting people gambling on their games.
The Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature also authorized casinos for nearly a half-dozen cities in Virginia, including its state capital of Richmond, provided their residents approve in local referenda. With gambling interests vastly outspending the opposition, it will be difficult for pro-family groups to keep the casinos out of these Virginia towns.
No one keeps statistics about how many young men drop out of school or quit their jobs due to a gambling addiction. But enough of them apparently are for a frequent question to a professional poker player to be something like “I want to quit my job (or school) to become a pro poker player, and I seek advice how.”
Elections do have consequences, and harmful ones to the people of Virginia. The historic city of Richmond, also the seat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, will be invaded by slot machines and roulette wheels thanks to the Democrats who swept in last November.
Meanwhile, the Democrats pushed through irrational gun control, placing a limit of one handgun purchase per 30 days even by law-abiding citizens. In addition, background checks are extended to include all gun sales, except between family members.
Earlier the same legislature passed a so-called red-flag law to authorize a judge or magistrate to seize anyone’s guns based on allegations about instability of the owner. Second Amendment rights are secure in Virginia now only to the extent the judicial system allows it for an individual.
More than 100 towns in Virginia have responded to the liberal push for gun control there by announcing that they will not comply with the unconstitutional provisions. There has even been talk of rural areas breaking away from the Deep State-controlled northern Virginia, where many of the residents either work for the federal government or make big money lobbying it.
Bernie Scares Even Liberal Dems
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 3, 2020
“Crazy Bernie,” President Trump calls the 78-year-old junior senator from tiny Vermont, and the nickname does not describe a harmless oddball. Senator Sanders’ success has frightened the financial kingmakers in the Democratic party.
When Bernie refused to apologize for praising the communist dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Democratic insiders got alarmed at the prospect of losing Florida, home to thousands of refugees from those countries. Since Bernie won by a landslide in Nevada, full panic has set in.
Two high-profile Democrat contenders pulled out within hours of each other after the South Carolina primary, to endorse Bernie’s rival, Joe Biden. That was not a mere coincidence, but the result of an apparent behind-the-scenes effort to stop Bernie from obtaining the nomination.
“Quid pro quo!” Trump bellowed at a rally in North Carolina in response. Rather than investigate non-existent collusion by Russia for Trump, someone should investigate what may have been promised to the other contenders to abruptly withdraw and endorse Biden.
But millions had already voted early, prior to this sudden transformation of the Democrat primary into a two-man race between Bernie and Biden. This may be too little, too late by the Democrat Establishment to derail Bernie’s candidacy as he attracts crowds surpassed only by Trump himself.
On Sunday Bernie drew audiences totaling 25,000 in California, which is rich in delegates and young voters who are enthusiastic about Bernie’s quasi-revolutionary message. In the state having an enormous gap between rich and poor, Bernie’s attacks on billionaires play exceptionally well.
Liberal Democrats have only themselves to blame for the pickle they find themselves in. They stoked the flames of class warfare to try to bring down Trump, and instead fomented a problem within their own party.
The rejection of Sanders by older black voters is the only impediment keeping him from locking up the nomination already. Sanders has had much greater success with Hispanics than with African Americans, and no one has fully explained why.
Pundits pretend that Biden inherits support by blacks for Obama, for whom Biden served as Vice President for eight years. But that was years ago and it is unlikely that many voters care for whom Biden carried water in the White House.
Instead, illegal immigration is probably a major reason for the immense divide in support for Sanders, both racially and geographically. Black voters in South Carolina are not likely to support Sanders’ agenda to open our southern border and let hordes of low-income workers come in.
Latinos are more enthusiastic about Bernie’s demand that driver’s licenses be given nationwide to illegal aliens, and that the spigot be turned on for more entitlements to flow to them. Bernie swept Nevada after pandering to illegals in a way that does not sell so well to Democrats of any race in the South.
More difficult to explain is why liberal elites in the Northeast have turned against Bernie, hammering him with disparaging comments. Bernie’s policies are what these other Leftists have themselves advocated for years.
But Bernie really means it, and that seems to alarm those who advocated similar policies merely to attract votes against Republicans. Bernie intends to go after billionaires and Wall Street and crony capitalism, from which many liberals derive their wealth.
The inability of billionaires to make a difference in the race may be disconcerting to the power-brokers behind the curtain. Tom Steyer spent over $250 million of his own fortune on his campaign and yet did not win a single delegate.
Bernie, in contrast, raised $34.5 Million in the fourth quarter, with an average donation of only $18.53, plus $25 million in January and another $46 million in February. The have-nots are fueling his candidacy, and the Democrat Establishment is running scared from them.
Bernie is openly contemptuous of the elites in the Democrat Party, and in the Senate he is an independent rather than a Democrat.
The most common occupation of Bernie’s donors is “teacher,” and the U.S. Postal Service is one of his donors’ most common employers. Wal-Mart, which has a non-unionized workforce thought to be conservative-leaning, is another common employer of Sanders donors.
The small average donation means that Sanders can raise far more from his same supporters if necessary. He has emphasized that the Democrat Party should not deny him the nomination if he wins merely a plurality rather than a majority of delegates.
Sanders has raised much more from small donors than Joe Biden has from large ones. Meanwhile, Mike Bloomberg can use his personal wealth to vastly outspend Sanders, but that cannot translate into enough votes or delegates for Bloomberg.
The result is a delightful quandary from the perspective of Republicans, who expect that the nomination of Sanders would pave the way to a recapture of the House of Representatives by the GOP in November.
Antidotes Needed For Coronavirus
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 25, 2020
The coronavirus is throwing our economy and even our presidential election into uncertainty, as the dreadful disease spreads to Europe and South Korea. Fear of contagion is not rampant yet in the United States, but a negative impact on our economy is already being felt and could worsen quickly.
The globalism that Donald Trump was elected to confront has struck back in a big way. Now President Trump is being forced to deal with the disastrous free trade which makes our economy so dependent on the economies of other nations.
It never had to be this way. We enjoyed prosperity for centuries without being whipsawed by what happens in China, South Korea, or Italy. But those economies may nosedive due to the spread of the coronavirus. A dozen towns in Italy, some near its business capital of Milan, have been essentially quarantined due to the deadly virus, which has spread to more than six regions in that country.
The Italian stock market fell by 5% in one day, because panic and isolation are not good for business. For a virus which originated in China, its devastating impact on distant Italy is alarming indeed.
While the Italian stock market is small compared to ours, the real shock was how this deadly disease has spread so much in an unexpected place so far from China. If this pandemic has become this severe in Italy, then how can the rest of Europe and even the United States remain untouched?
There has been the lingering suspicion that the communist Chinese government has not been candid about the spread of the disease within its own borders. Communist dictators have never been known for honesty and transparency, and they have every reason to mislead the world about the harm they cause.
If free speech were allowed in China then we could all learn from the internet the full extent of the risks and challenges. Instead, we hear only what the communist Chinese want us to hear.
Some experts admit now that a worldwide spread of the disease is inevitable. While Trump deserves credit for keeping coronavirus mostly out of the United States, he deserves the most credit for warning against open borders.
Trump’s tariffs were a step in the right direction to reduce our dependence on the Chinese economy. It’s unfortunate that prior presidents did not take similar steps, which would have helped insulate us from this crisis.
Free trade advocates never warned us about how it would result in an undesired dependency by our economy on health issues in cultures unlike ours. The mingling of unclean animals in a food market in China has caused our stock market to suddenly drop by more than 1,800 points in two days.
Stephen Moore, the nominee by Trump to the Federal Reserve who was then blocked by the Establishment club which excludes any outsider, astutely calls the coronavirus the "black swan" of the presidential election. The term means an extraordinarily rare event that is unpredictable and almost impossible to assess as to its impact.
The biggest threat to the reelection of President Trump is not Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, or Mike Bloomberg. It is the impact the coronavirus will have on our economy which became too dependent on foreign trade because of the policies of Trump's predecessors.
Undecided voters shift to the Republican side when they want more security, as they did when the Ebola virus created panic shortly before the 2014 midterm elections. But if the coronavirus causes the bottom to fall out of our economy, then voters may not recognize globalism as the real culprit.
The media will wrongly blame President Trump for any downturn caused by the disease. During the reelection campaign of President George H.W. Bush in 1992, the media blamed him for a delay in relief after Hurricane Andrew, even though it was the Democrat Florida Governor who blocked the assistance.
More than 20% of our imports are from China, and some American businesses are already feeling the pinch from a reduction there due to the coronavirus. Tourism is also important to our economy and nervous travelers can be expected to cancel trips rather than risk being quarantined somewhere.
President Trump can avoid the reelection campaign mistakes of prior Republicans by getting out in front of this corona catastrophe. The political antidote is to explain how overreliance on trade and migration from China put us in this economic quandary.
Ending the over-regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which keeps beneficial medication off the market for years longer than necessary, would yield medical antidotes against deadly new viruses. The free market could then quickly meet this challenge with effective antidotes if the FDA were not impeding and delaying every innovative cure.
Early Voting Sparks Brokered Convention Nightmare
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 18, 2020
A contested or brokered convention is the worst nightmare for the Democrat or Republican Parties, because it fractures the base and alienates the supporters of candidates not picked. Neither major party has had a protracted, contested nominating convention since 1952, and neither party wants one.
The modern presidential primary system has made a brokered convention unlikely. While some candidates establish themselves as frontrunners for a nomination, other candidates drop out and voters then coalesce around a few candidates, and ultimately the nominee.
The staggering of the primaries should have a salutary winnowing effect. After a few primaries the more popular candidates become clear, and eventually one of them secures enough delegates to ride into his party’s convention as the nominee and the flagbearer for the party in the general election.
But pervasive “early voting” undermines this process, leaving a hodgepodge of too many candidates continuing to win votes after they ceased being serious contenders. By mailing thousands of ballots weeks before primary day in a particular state, its voters then choose among many candidates who will drop out prior to the primary day in that state.
California, the biggest prize of all, lists about a half-dozen people on its ballot who have already dropped out of the race. Yet California Democrats have been mailing their ballots in early, well before the primary election day in that state.
Half of the Democrat primary voters in California are expected to vote early by filling out ballots listing candidates who have or will soon lose any chance of winning. These ballots fail to guide the nomination process towards a successful conclusion.
Political commentators act as though the race among the Democrats will narrow by the time Californians cast their ballot, but early voting frustrates that helpful process of elimination. It is unclear whom the early voters would have preferred among a narrower field of candidates.
The results from California will not be known immediately, either, thanks again to this disastrous early voting. It takes time to tally mail-in votes, and in a general election the votes from California continue to be counted for weeks after Election Day.
Some Democrats, recognizing the self-inflicted harm caused by this process of early voting, are telling each other not to cast ballots early in primaries. Democrat leadership does not want a brokered convention, or a repeat of their fiasco in Iowa when results were delayed.
“Sure, I’d wait,” said Darry Sragow, an experienced California campaign manager, in explaining why he prefers not to vote early in a primary. “If one of the candidates trips up three days before the primary and I already cast my vote, I’m gonna regret it.”
Regret it indeed, particularly if the candidate for whom one voted drops out, or changes his position in an unacceptable way, or commits an unforgivable gaffe. In each of those situations the early voter who cast his ballot for that candidate is stuck.
It is cost-prohibitive to allow early voters to change their ballots prior to the election, and yet voting rights would seem to require that. After all, a juror can change his vote before a verdict is rendered, and the change will be recognized.
A traditional election, without thousands or millions of mailed-in early ballots, yields results on the night of the election. But time for delivering and opening mail causes weeks to go by before final results can be tallied and announced for early voting in a high-turnout election, causing chaos and a loss in public confidence.
Despite this, some political consultants tell people to vote early. One argument is that people should vote early in case they die before Election Day, which is not an issue for most voters and such ballots are not even counted in some states.
Proportional voting, also fashionable among Democrats, further interferes with the goal of coalescing around a winning nominee. Democrat primaries typically award delegates based on the proportion of votes received, rather than the winner-takes-all system preferred by Republicans, but proportional voting makes it harder to win a majority.
The left-leaning FiveThirtyEight blog, which does extensive statistical analysis to predict election outcomes, declared last week that the likelihood of a contested Democrat convention “is high and increasing.” The socialist Bernie Sanders is considered the most likely nominee, but he has only a 38% chance now of winning a majority of pledged delegates prior to the convention.
A floor fight at the convention would be an unmitigated disaster for Democrats, but one for which they would have only themselves to blame. By promoting early voting and insisting on proportional voting, the Democrat Party has created a system whereby it is more difficult for any candidate to win prior to its convention.
Trump Unleashed
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 11, 2020
Democrats’ dangerous game of impeaching President Trump despite lacking the votes to remove him from office has backfired on them. Trump gained political strength from his acquittal in the Senate, just in time to boost his campaign for reelection.
Trump’s first act was to remove the Deep State bureaucrats who started it all, including the subordinate Ukrainian-born Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whom Trump rightly called “very insubordinate” for going outside the chain of command on foreign policy. Trump also removed Col. Vindman’s identical twin brother Yevgeny from his powerful position on the National Security Council, and he recalled Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.
Those firings were a no-brainer, but Trump didn’t stop there. Top Trump officials are rolling out a series of actions to combat the growing epidemic of sanctuary policies by Democrat-ruled states, counties, and cities which try to shelter illegal aliens from deportation by federal authorities.
At 5 PM on February 5 -- virtually the exact moment that Trump was being acquitted by the Senate -- the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published official notice that New York residents are no longer eligible to participate in the trusted traveler programs known as Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI and FAST. These federal programs depend on state driver’s license data.
A shocking new law passed by the Democrat state legislature and signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo prohibits the state motor vehicle bureau from sharing driver’s license data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known simply as ICE.
As a result of this interference by New York with Trump's policy, he ordered DHS to deny permits to about 86,000 New Yorkers who have applications pending, and to return their $100 fee. Another 800,000 New Yorkers who are already enrolled won’t be able to renew when their five-year permits expire.
Driver’s license databases are the primary source of data for federal agencies to check DUIs or other serious traffic offenses, which disqualify anyone from becoming a trusted traveler. Trump’s new policy does not yet apply to the Transportation Security Administration, which runs the popular airport Pre-Check program, because TSA still has access to state driver’s license data.
DHS acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli warned that in the future New Yorkers might be excluded from Pre-Check, too. If Trump were to shut off TSA privileges for frequent New York travelers, then liberal officials would quickly back down in their defiance.
New York’s radical state AG promptly filed a lawsuit against DHS, but it's becoming less likely that a holdover Obama judge will be able to stop Trump policies from taking effect. With nearly 200 judges appointed by Trump to the federal courts, including 50 to the all-important Courts of Appeals, actions by the Trump Administration are no longer repeatedly slapped down as they were before.
Even if Trump’s new policy falls into the hostile hands of an Obama judge, there’s still the Supreme Court, which has already stayed at least three nationwide injunctions against Trump after lower federal courts refused to do so. The Supreme Court allowed Trump’s policies on DACA, transgenders in the military, and the public charge rule for immigrants to go into immediate effect while courts consider liberal lawsuits against them.
New York is the 13th state to grant driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, a horrible policy that helps illegals evade law enforcement. But New York went even further by banning the sharing of information about DUIs, based on the stereotype that Hispanic immigrants, and illegal aliens in particular, are disproportionately convicted of that serious offense.
In her first run for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton tried to take a moderate position on this highly inflammatory issue of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. By her 2016 campaign Hillary had shifted to the more radical position espoused by the open-borders lobby.
By 2020, no leading Democrat is allowed to say what Hillary said in 2008. Every Democrat presidential candidate today insists that anyone who enters the country illegally has a right to stay here permanently and become a voting citizen, protected by state and local government against federal law enforcement and deportation.
Trump, meanwhile, has long spoken out against the harboring of criminal aliens in sanctuary cities. He has often appeared with the victims or their survivors such as Jamiel Shaw, Mary Ann Mendoza, and Ronil Singh.
On Monday, Attorney General William Barr promised a “significant escalation” of the government’s war against sanctuary cities, counties, and states that have openly defied federal immigration laws in their jurisdictions. Barr announced new lawsuits against New Jersey and King County, Washington.
Now the Democrats’ worst fears are being realized, as their own failed impeachment has “unleashed" Trump. The President puts pedal to the metal to execute the agenda that he ran on in 2016.
Impeachment Discredits Dems, not Trump
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 4, 2020
There are many silver linings in the crashing of the Democrats’ unsuccessful attempt to impeach and remove President Trump. His approval rating surpasses Obama’s corresponding rating at this time, with Trump attaining a 49% approval rating in the latest Gallup poll.
The impeachment failure has a long-term benefit too. Impeachment should never again be a viable option for one political party merely to retaliate against the president of another political party.
The lack of bipartisan support in the House for the impeachment of Trump set off alarm bells which Democrats failed to heed. In our two-party system, no president can be impeached and removed without significant support by members of his own political party, which the impeachment of Trump never had.
Instead, Democratic leaders with delusions of grandeur thought they could make this another Watergate, when President Nixon was forced to resign amid threats of impeachment. Our society no longer takes as gospel truth the liberal television news and other media the way we did in the early 1970s.
Public approval of Congress has been abysmal in recent years, but it was not much higher during the Watergate era. What has dramatically changed between then and now is the lack of public confidence in the media which spins the news during an impeachment proceeding.
Public confidence that the media will report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” dropped to 41% last September prior to impeachment, and only 15% among Republicans, according to the non-partisan Gallup. Two decades ago, a whopping 55% of Americans had confidence in the fairness of the media.
It was the media that drove President Nixon from office, using congressional Watergate hearings as fodder for accomplishing that goal. Democrats were hoping for a repeat this time, but the liberal media’s high level of influence is gone now, thanks in large part to Trump himself.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings generated far more public interest and protests than the impeachment of President Trump did. Missing from impeachment were confrontations by protesters with senators in the elevator, like the one with then-Senator Jeff Flake which caused a one-week delay of the Kavanaugh confirmation vote.
Is the confirmation of one new justice for the 9-member U.S. Supreme Court really more important than an impeachment and attempted removal of the President of the United States? Many apparently think so, perhaps because the Supreme Court has wielded so much power over domestic issues like abortion, border security, LGBTQ, and the Second Amendment.
The lack of interest in the impeachment of a president may be due to how there was never any chance of it making any difference. Without bipartisan support there could never be the 67 votes required in the Senate in order to remove a president from office, and thus the impeachment is merely an exercise in futility.
Most working Americans have no interest in a parade of legal eggheads pontificating about whether an action by a president is an “impeachable offense.” If anything, the tiresome rants against President Trump demonstrated how broken Washington, D.C. is, and another election sweep by President Trump is necessary so he can complete the job he was sent there to do.
Some Republicans are suggesting that what is good for the goose will be good for the gander. Now that Democrats have lowered the standard of an impeachable offense to something as trivial as a delay in sending American taxpayer funds to a corrupt foreign country which had no entitlement to the money, Republicans could easily impeach a Democratic President at the next opportunity.
Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), up for reelection in Iowa, has already pointed out that Joe Biden could be impeached using the new low standard adopted by Democrats who tried to get Trump. A future Republican House and Senate could return the favor of routine impeachment in spades, if they wanted to stoop as low as the House Democrats have.
Senator Ernst’s observation should cause Democrats to think twice before voting to remove President Trump. While it is unlikely that future Republicans would ever start this kind of impeachment drivel against a Democratic president, if Democrats persist against Trump then it is comforting to know that it could boomerang on them.
The historical significance of this impeachment fiasco is its death as a purely political weapon. The impeachment antics have struck out with the public, with television, and with protesters.
Never again should an impeachment be based on secret hearings, refusals to charge a crime, or reliance on Deep State bureaucrats with gripes over policy differences. When a presidential election is less than a year away, the people should be ones who decide whether to reelect a president, not inside-the-Beltway career politicians who are too biased to be credible.
Coronavirus Spreads Through Globalism
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 28, 2020
The rapid spread of the coronavirus to the United States from an open-air meat market in China confirms again the deadliness of globalism. The international elite should acknowledge how difficult it is to contain and eradicate a virus in a world of open borders.
“Everyone is in a state of panic,” Scott Liu said from a self-imposed quarantine at his home in Queens, New York. “The coronavirus is the No. 1 threat to financial markets currently as global investors are becoming jittery on the uncertainty,” the New York Times quoted investor Nigel Green as observing.
But while this deadly virus was quickly infecting people at the speed of air travel, globalists were enjoying wine and caviar at their annual confab in Davos, Switzerland. Politico.com even featured a recent article headlined “Globalists Gone Wild,” citing the energetic participation of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush in globalist celebrations.
The globalists were clueless about how fast a fatal, highly contagious virus can sweep across a world of open borders, free trade, and unchecked migration. Far from the standards of Western Civilization, an outdoor market in Wuhan, China, allowed numerous animals considered unclean by the Bible to become part of human consumption.
The deadly coronavirus thereby jumped from animals which are not eaten here, such as cats, bats, and snakes. Without globalism, the virus could have been easily contained and eradicated by China, with its immense resources. On Tuesday China admitted that more than 100 people have already died from this virus, which has no known cure or treatment. The communist Chinese dictators are not known for their transparency, so the death toll there could be much higher.
Thanks to globalism, the virus is sweeping across the world like a wildfire. People who have been exposed to the virus may already be in 22 states here, while Japan and Germany have also been afflicted. It is globalism which makes the unclean eating practices of distant Chinese a threat to the health and safety of Americans. This is not the first time that an outbreak of a disease far away from our shores has caused panic and death within our borders, as the Ebola virus from Africa did in October 2014.
This latest tragedy is ironic in its timing. It comes just as a new trade deal with China was reached amid much fanfare, without anyone pointing out that expanding global trade means bringing deadly viruses from other countries to the United States.
An article just published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, describes a shocking 15% fatality rate among those who contract this coronavirus. Others estimate the infection rate to be as high as 83%, and people may be contagious before they show any symptoms.
These rates suggest that if one person has coronavirus on an airplane carrying 150 people, then 18 other passengers could contract the disease and die from it. This is hardly comforting information and could deliver a mortal blow not only to people, but to our economy too.
The potential for harm from biological agents has long been considered higher than all other types of threats to human safety. A strain of the flu killed more people at the end of World War I than armed warfare did. Perhaps coincidentally, Wuhan is also the site of a top secret biological weapons development lab. One can only wonder if something so deadly might have come from the warfare lab itself.
Closing our borders and ending our permissive visa policy which brings so many foreigners into our country is the only effective way to protect our citizens against this invasion of a deadly virus. Quarantines within the United States are only effective if the disease does not continue to enter from other countries.
Already experts are saying that it is too late to contain the virus within China, so the only meaningful approach is to keep the virus out of the United States. This requires tightening our border security and visa policy. “Despite the enormous and admirable efforts in China and around the world, we need to plan for the possibility containment of this epidemic isn’t possible,” declared infectious disease expert Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. He estimated that as many as 100,000 people may already be infected in China.
Most of the cases in the United States until now have been on the West Coast, and in Arizona. But once inside our borders, there is little to stop it from spreading immediately to others through airports, train stations, and commuter lines.
It is infeasible to provide a medical exam to every person who wants to travel to the United States. Instead, what should be done is to limit the vast amount of migration here, particularly from regions which do not share Western standards of cleanliness.
Gun Advocates Rock Richmond
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 21, 2020
As liberal politicians take control of the Commonwealth of Virginia, they are getting a healthy dose of grassroots resistance by legally armed citizens. A massive crowd of 22,000 descended on its state capitol in Richmond, and the Democratic governor overreacted by declaring an inappropriate state of emergency.
Unlike the women’s march which left trash all over D.C. after Trump’s inauguration three years ago, this peaceful protest by Second Amendment advocates even picked up the garbage afterwards. The gun groups are motivated, in contrast with media-created protests that quickly fade as the women’s rights march has.
Many armed participants at yesterday’s rally said they are just getting started. And they have President Trump enthusiastically on their side.
Trump tweeted on Monday that "The Democrat Party in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia are working hard to take away your 2nd Amendment rights. This is just the beginning. Don't let it happen, VOTE REPUBLICAN in 2020!” This issue separates Republicans and Democrats more clearly than almost any other issue. Two recent votes in the Virginia Senate for gun control were along party lines, with all Democrats voting in favor of sweeping new restrictions on guns while all Republicans voted against them.
Virginia Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam has vowed to sign into law strict gun control legislation. This would include senseless rationing by limiting handgun purchases to only one per month.
Rationing the number of gun purchases by law-abiding citizens would seem to be a violation of the Second Amendment, just as limiting the amount that someone can say or hear would violate the First Amendment. How about limiting the number of bills that a legislature can pass?
Ignoring the Constitution, last week the Democrat-controlled Virginia Senate approved this one-handgun-per-month limit on gun purchases on an entirely party-line vote. The Democrats also pushed through additional gun control that requires new background checks for private exchanges of firearms.
The gun control legislation encourages and authorizes outright bans on firearms at public events. Guns can be most helpful at those events to protect against a mass shooting, as recently occurred in Texas when an alert worshiper stopped a massacre by shooting the killer during a church service.
The type of tyranny imposed by Gov. Northam against the peaceful protesters is a sign of what is to come if there is no push-back on gun control legislation. He panicked against the peaceful grassroots gathering by banning the carrying of weapons on the grounds of the state capitol.
Liberals in the media had hysterically predicted violence, which never occurred. The liberal marches after President Trump’s inauguration resulted in vandalism of stores, but nothing similar was caused by the Second Amendment supporters.
The gun control agenda supported by Virginia Democrats includes broad “red flag” provisions which would authorize law enforcement to seize guns lawfully owned by citizens based on a mere suspicion of a possible safety threat. The right to bear arms would not mean much if it can be arbitrarily taken away under the guise of suspicion.
Some Virginia sheriffs announced that they will not enforce the gun control legislation if it becomes law. Towns throughout Virginia could become a new type of sanctuary where the Second Amendment is respected.
How did gun control zealots get elected in a commonwealth which voted Republican in every presidential election from 1952 through 2004 (except 1964)? Virginia was home to four of our first five presidents, and once held the largest percentage of Electoral College votes ever: 15.9% in 1792.
A combination of election spending by an out-of-state billionaire, a flood of immigration, and liberal federal employees have turned Virginia from red to blue politically. In this backyard of the NRA, pro-gun control Democrats took control of the statehouse for the first time in a quarter century in the last election.
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg vastly outspent the NRA in Virginia, which was able to contribute only $350,000 to the Second Amendment side. Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety spent $2.5 million, including efforts by Moms Demand Action.
Gun control zealots have set their sights on other Republican states too. They plan to take control of Texas within a few election cycles, and gained ground in the elections there in 2018.
Texas has a whopping 38 Electoral College votes in presidential elections, and will pick up more in the new census. Two of those Electors were “faithless” in 2016 by refusing to vote for Trump despite how he carried the state.
The Supreme Court just accepted a case to decide if Electors can vote contrary to the vote of the people in presidential elections. With the vast sums of money in politics pushing gun control, it is frightening to imagine what might happen in a close presidential election if switching sides were allowed in the Electoral College.
ERA R.I.P., Saving Girls Sports
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 14, 2020
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is officially dead, declares the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. Its announcement is just in time to save girls’ sports from ruination by testosterone-advantaged boys. We are four decades past the moment when ERA went lifeless under its own deadline for ratification. That is long past any chance at resuscitation, the OLC explained in its detailed legal analysis.
“Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired,” the OLC concluded. “Should Congress wish to propose the amendment anew, it may do so through the same procedures required to propose an amendment in the first instance,” for which there is not the two-thirds supermajority in Congress to pass.
The Archivist of the United States immediately stated that he would comply with this legal ruling, as he should. He will not add to the Constitution any belated attempt by a state to ratify posthumously this amendment. This good news comes not a moment too soon. Liberals who have taken over the statehouse in Richmond had planned to make Virginia the 38th state which, if the 5 rescissions are not counted, would ostensibly satisfy the three-fourths requirement to put ERA in the Constitution.
A reenactment of those who supported ERA in the 1970s can be seen in a trailer for a new miniseries about Phyllis Schlafly called “Mrs. America,” to be aired on the Hulu streaming service beginning April 15. Two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett is portraying Phyllis, but the script is sympathetic to the ideology of radical feminists.
ERA supporters are generally not athletes, and either don’t know or don’t care about the havoc that ERA is causing for girls’ sports in states which have passed it. In Massachusetts its state ERA has required that boys be allowed to compete in girls’ sports, to break their records and potentially break their bones in contact sports like field hockey.
Without ERA in the U.S. Constitution, neighboring New Hampshire is able to hold a hearing this week on good legislation to protect girls against unfair competition by boys in girls’ sports. Boys have overpowering advantages of muscular size, thanks to testosterone, and there is nothing fair about allowing them to go into girls’ sports to win prizes and shatter records.
Sponsored by ten women, New Hampshire HB 1251 would prohibit allowing boys to invade girls’ sports, as is happening in other states under the guise of ERA or transgender rights. This legislation would limit competition in girls’ sports based on the athlete’s chromosomes, reproductive organs, and testosterone levels.
“Interscholastic or intramural athletic teams or sports that are sponsored by a primary or secondary school or institution of higher education and designated for ‘females,’ ‘women,’ or ‘girls’ shall only be open to students of the female sex,” states HB 1251. This fairness would not be possible if ERA were ratified.
“Biological males are already starting to dominate women’s competitive sports” and females “deserve a level playing field,” says Save Women’s Sports and Cornerstone, which supports the New Hampshire legislation. “They should not have to compete against biological males for a spot on the podium, even if those males claim a female gender identity.”
Hollywood could be presenting, in its heart-wrenching style, true stories about girls who trained hard for competitions which they won against other girls, but were then denied the awards grabbed by transgendered biological boys instead. This has happened in Connecticut, where there is no limit on transgenders crossing over to win races in girls’ sports.
ERA, indeed, would have mandated this unfairness by prohibiting sensible distinctions based on sex. If ERA had become part of the Constitution, there would have been nothing any state or Congress could do to protect girls against the unfair ruination of their sports by boys.
So while Hollywood has promoted ERA since the 1970s, top women athletes are speaking out on the conservative side of this issue. Transgender athletes could ruin women’s tennis and many other sports, and some women champions have spoken out against this trend.
Yet non-athlete Elizabeth Warren clings to the mindless-equality approach of ERA, and even wants to put male convicts into women’s prisons. Phyllis Schlafly warned that ERA would have required prisons to be co-ed, and that women would be ordered to guard dangerous male prisoners.
Warren and Hollywood supporters of ERA should pay more attention to girls who work hard to win scholarships in their high school sports. ERA has the effect of denying these girls the honors they earned, which boys took away from them.
Rather than endorsing ERA postmortem, the Virginia legislature should help girls by considering the New Hampshire bill to protect them against unfair competition. ERA died long ago, and should rest in peace.
Liberal Takeover of Methodists Despite Losing Vote
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 7, 2020
At their annual conference last February, conservative Methodists won the vote to keep the 3rd largest Christian denomination in America traditional on the subjects of marriage and the clergy. They decided that, like the Catholic Church and many other denominations, the United Methodist Church would continue with a one-man, one-woman approach to matrimony, and not have openly LGBTQ clergy.
As the largest Christian denomination in the United States other than the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists, both of which prohibit same-sex marriage, the United Methodist Church has roots going back to the fiery Anglican preacher John Wesley. The American Revolution made it no longer practical for colonists to remain members of the Anglican Church run by the King of England.
Methodist Presidents of the United States have included George W. Bush, William McKinley, Rutherford Hayes, General Ulysses S. Grant, and James K. Polk. Today there are nearly 7 million Americans who are members of the United Methodist Church, and more than 5 million mostly conservative foreign members, with an estimated 32,000 congregations worldwide.
A marriage by a Catholic in a Methodist Church is typically recognized by the Catholic Church if approval is sought beforehand. About a hundred American colleges and a small number of secondary schools have Methodist roots.
The university elites demanded that doctrine be changed to authorize same-sex marriage ceremonies in Methodist churches. But after a full debate of the issue, Methodists rejected changing their doctrine by a healthy 53-47% margin in at their conference held in St. Louis last February.
The conservative voters even prevailed in strengthening the traditional doctrine on marriage. So why are they losing anyway, despite winning the vote?
Two days after New Year’s, a group of Methodists announced a brokered settlement by which the United Methodist Church would adopt same-sex marriage and ordain openly LGBTQ clergy. If approved at its upcoming international conference in May, conservatives would have to accept this doctrinal change or get out.
A supermajority vote would be required before a conservative congregation could split off and continue with the traditional doctrine. The settlement offers them $25 million in church funds to leave, which is a clever way for the liberal side to try to buy off just enough opponents to take control of the entire church for themselves.
By why aren’t the liberals who lost the election by 6 percentage points the ones who are leaving instead? Rather, in a deceptive takeover strategy, they are using church funds to buy themselves a majority.
History buffs might notice that in the Russian Revolution of 1917 the victorious minority called themselves Bolsheviks (which means majority) and unfairly labeled their opponents as Mensheviks (which means minority). When Leftists are in a minority, then they look for other ways to win.
The settlement includes a $39 million payment (from church funds) on the issue of race, which is irrelevant to the marriage dispute. Perhaps it is an attempt to win over African congregations which oppose same-sex marriage.
Another portion of the settlement allows the clergy of conservative congregations to hold onto their pensions which they have earned. But they have a legal right to their pensions without the settlement. Christianity Today, the same liberal newspaper which called for President Trump to resign, quickly blessed the settlement. It declares that the deal to allow the liberal faction to take over the United Methodist Church is somehow “an answer to prayer,” even for conservatives.
The leadership of the single largest Methodist congregation, the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, immediately announced its support for the settlement. But it had already been pushing to change the Methodist doctrine about marriage.
It is ironic that a similar approach by Democrats is taken about President Trump. They lost the 2016 election, but instead of accepting the election outcome they maneuver to try to nullify it.
As with the impeachment of Trump, the relentless attempt to take control of the Methodist church is coming from university elites. They are akin to the wealthy financial and media supporters who have made Pete Buttigieg a contender in the Democratic presidential race for its nomination, despite being merely a former mayor who lost in a landslide in his attempt to be elected to statewide office.
A total of 93 college and university presidents demanded that the Methodist church change its centuries-old doctrine about marriage. But as in the recent defeat of the British Labour Party, working class Americans reject the ivory tower agenda.
The proposed settlement is not really a “split” or a “schism” as it is being promoted. Rather, it is an attempt to pay conservatives to abandon and leave their own church in which they have a majority, in order to allow the liberal minority to take it over.
Top Conservatives of 2019
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 30, 2019
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) was the conservative of the year in the Senate, despite being its youngest member in his rookie year. His landslide defeat of the entrenched liberal favorite Claire McCaskill was the biggest victory of the midterm elections, and Sen. Hawley then exceeded all expectations.
He earned a coveted seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and quickly became its strongest member. Rather than rubber-stamp nominations as his colleagues had been doing, Sen. Hawley went to work.
He blocked the confirmation of a liberal nominated to the federal bench, despite intense pressure to stand down. Michael Bogren, who compared religious liberty by a Catholic farmer to views of the KKK, had been nominated for a lifetime position in the Western District of Michigan.
Other Senate Republicans seemed just fine with this nomination, even after Bogren aggressively defended his extreme view under questioning by Senator Hawley during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. But once Hawley led on this, other Republicans felt compelled to follow.
Bogren ultimately withdrew, enabling Hawley to set the precedent that similar future nominees will not be confirmed. Too many nominees by Presidents Reagan and the two Bushes sailed through the U.S. Senate despite being closet liberals.
Democratic candidates for president should take note also. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated for the Supreme Court despite a track record of supporting abortion and even opposing laws against statutory rape of underage girls, Republicans failed to ask her a single meaningful question and voted almost unanimously for her.
Hawley also took on Big Tech, while other senators were afraid to. He sponsored legislation against censorship by internet giants, which exclude or marginalize conservative speech.
Hawley promoted the America First agenda of Donald Trump, while other Republican senators waste their time and ours by talking about impeachment. In one of the finest speeches of the year, Hawley declared that we should adopt pro-America policies and reject the failed globalism approach of the past.
Many others also deserve recognition for standing strong for conservative principles in 2019. President Donald Trump himself, of course, has taken an inhuman amount of abuse by the Left and yet finishes 2019 with numerous impressive achievements, from the economy to the courts.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and other House Republicans were so vigorous in their defense of President Trump that liberals could merely obtain impeachment articles which are not worth the paper they are written on. The only history that was made by Nancy Pelosi and her crew was in withholding their bogus impeachment from the Senate.
Attorney General Bill Barr did a splendid job in cutting off the gravy train that Robert Mueller and his political hacks rode for two years. Barr published reports that thoroughly discredited the false allegations by liberals against President Trump concerning the 2016 presidential election.
Barr delivered a speech at Notre Dame in October in which he criticized the mandatory LGBT curriculum which is being imposed on New Jersey public schools. He lamented “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.”
Barr is fighting that erosion in a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, on appeal from a liberal decision by the Montana Supreme Court. That state court prohibited allowing state scholarships to go to students who are attending religiously affiliated schools, a ban that undermines religious liberty.
A “shout-out” also belongs to those who stood against the Never-Trumpers in the Republican Party while they continued to nitpick and betray our president. Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, exposed a scheme in the White House to go around him, which she rejected.
And let’s not forget the ordinary people who deserve recognition for their conservative actions this past year. Special thanks are warranted to the lifelong British Labour Party voters who repudiated their own political party as it lurched leftward, thereby burying it in a landslide loss not seen since before World War II.
On the other side of the world, there were the courageous protesters in Hong Kong who successfully stood against tyrannical demands by Communist China. They forced China to withdraw its extradition legislation which would have snuffed out remaining freedoms in Hong Kong by enabling China to punish Hong Kong residents through the use of the corrupt Chinese justice system.
Finally, there were liberals who also made 2019 a special year. Jeffrey Epstein did everything liberals like Bill Clinton could have asked for, including protecting him in the end.
Hunter Biden was a gift to conservatives in 2019 who keeps on giving. His dad Joe wants to defy any subpoena by the Senate to avoid explaining how the notorious Hunter ended up living in a multimillion-dollar mansion in posh Hollywood Hills.
Dems Exploit Digital Advantage
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 23, 2019
Republicans continue to be right on the issues, but Democrats are leveraging their digital advantage to win elections. With Big Tech in their corner, they expect to run over the GOP in 2020. Consider the fortune that Mike Bloomberg has reportedly spent on social media ads, through a secretive firm called Hawkfish and other organizations. His gun control group spent more on the Virginia election than the NRA did, and Democrats scored landslides there in its recent elections.
“In God we trust. Everyone else bring data,” is a slogan used by Bloomberg, who became one of the wealthiest in the world by selling terminals to process stock market data.
He announced that he would spend more than $100 million on digital ads against President Trump. Already Bloomberg’s campaign has spent $13 million on Facebook and Google ads.
Swing voters who decide elections are more likely to be using the internet than watching television. Young voters, who were credited with electing Obama in 2008 and 2012 but then did not turn out to vote as much for Hillary Clinton, obtain their information almost exclusively online.
The viewers of cable television are senior citizens who grew up watching the tube, rather than YouTube. Relatively few elderly voters are undecided about the upcoming election, or any election, and outcomes are determined instead by the voter turnout of young people who don’t watch cable news.
Obama used digital media to turn out young voters in record numbers to elect and reelect him. Hillary Clinton, though flush with more campaign dollars than she could spend, was much less effective with this group. President Trump knows the significance of digital communications and uses it daily through his Twitter account. He gave a boost to Republican candidates in 2019 and the outcomes would have been better if other Republicans tried as hard online as Trump does.
Bloomberg’s Hawkfish has no public website but is the “primary digital agency and technology services provider for the campaign” of Bloomberg for president, its campaign spokeswoman Julie Wood said to CNBC. It will also assist races by other Democrats in the future.
So far, the results of this digital push have been extraordinary. Dems racked up victories in conservative strongholds of Kentucky and Louisiana, winning the governorships in both in 2019, and rolled up a sweep of the statehouse in Virginia.
They have made gun control their top priority, and the Equal Rights Amendment #2, in their legislative agenda in Virginia starting on January 8th. Gun control in particular has long been the defining issue for Bloomberg since he was mayor of New York City for three terms, from 2002 to 2013, where he overcame his term limit.
He’s running for the Democratic nomination for president now, which few give him any chance of winning. But he is pouring some of his unfathomable wealth into this digital push for other Democratic candidates, and this could have a terrible impact on the 2020 elections.
His news outlet, Bloomberg News, gives all the Democratic candidates an additional advantage. Bloomberg News has promised not to cover its founder’s campaign for president, but will continue to bash President Trump for the benefit of all the Democrats.
It does not help that Big Tech is also on the side of the liberal candidates, and has nearly monopolized key parts of the internet such that conservatives are impeded from getting their message out. The ineffectiveness of the GOP in responding to Big Tech is partly due to disagreements about how to react.
Some advocate that Republicans form their own digital platforms to rival the liberal Silicon Valley leviathans. At a minimum, a GOP rival to Hawkfish should be formed, and before it is too late. Bloomberg is hiring from the ranks of predominantly liberal high-tech companies. Former Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs has become the digital director of Mike Bloomberg 2020, and the former Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck has joined Hawkfish.
The Hawkfish employees are working hard, as Bloomberg expects for all his companies. Glueck posted on Twitter that “this is a seven-day-a-week workplace through Super Tuesday and beyond.” There is plenty of cash and enthusiasm on the Republican side to compete with the Left for the support of young people online. But it is less clear if GOP party officials will focus on young voters as necessary to win.
In the past, party consultants have soaked up millions of dollars for themselves by placing ineffective ads on television while pocketing enormous commissions for themselves. A GOP rival to Hawkfish would be better. Many young voters do not agree with the extreme positions on abortion, the Second Amendment, and transgenderism taken by the Democratic candidates for president. But will Republicans ensure that this key voting bloc sees the GOP message online?
Not Just Brexit
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 17, 2019
The political earthquake in the election across the Atlantic, where conservatives won in a landslide, has sent shock waves to the Democratic candidates for president here. The media reports that Great Britain voters embraced Brexit and rejected socialism in handing the British Labour Party its worst defeat since before World War II.
But it is dubious that Brexit, which stands for Britain exiting the European Union, caused lifelong Labour Party voters to abandon the party of their ancestors for the first time. Rather, it is more likely that social issues are what drove the working class voters to send their elected officials to an early retirement.
Like the Democratic Party here, the Labour Party has become controlled by the university elite and by big cities. Neither party represents the working class anymore, and by abandoning these voters the politically beneficial realignment became possible.
As in the presidential election in 2016, the new ideological split is based on level of education and the starkly different social views which come from that. University professors supported Jeremy Corbyn with enthusiasm, just as they have supported the unjustified impeachment of President Trump.
Corbyn’s platform called for six years of free education for every adult, plus paid time in order to take courses. His pandering to universities and to students enrolled in them sounded similar to what leading Democratic presidential candidates have proposed here.
But this and other proposals come at the expense of the working class, and they punished Corbyn for it. He lost the election in rural England and Wales, away from the university towns.
Adopting positions popular among the over-educated, Corbyn decried what he perceived as a lack of progress on LGBT+ issues. At the so-called PinkNews Awards ceremony, he thrilled the audience by emphasizing the pronouns by which he would like to be referred, and making that seem as important as his name itself.
A candidate’s serious announcement of which pronouns to use in referring to him or her could have been a joke a few years ago in a Saturday Night Live skit. But Corbyn was completely serious, as was Elizabeth Warren in doing the same thing here.
All the Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed the Equality Act, which would render it illegal to use the wrong pronoun in the workplace. This has support among higher education, but not in rural areas where Corbyn lost his election and where Trump wins big over here.
Corbyn went on to say at the PinkNews event that “the cuts since austerity came in have disproportionately affected LGBT communities, especially sexual and mental health services. That has to change,” he declared.
While Jeremy Corbyn is often compared to Bernie Sanders, the more accurate comparison may be with progressives like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, who also announced “my pronouns” on Twitter. Rhodes Scholar “Mayor Pete,” son of a leftwing university professor, recently attended a lavish fundraiser in billionaire-rich Napa Valley from which leaked photos have outraged working class voters.
Issues of transgenderism and abortion can cause a voter to abandon the party of his parents and grandparents. Churchgoing voters, of whom there are still many in Britain outside of the big cities, heard from their clergy that Corbyn was going too far in his calls for abortion-on-demand.
Even the Church of England, which has historically been reluctant to wade into the abortion issue, pushed back on the extremism demanded by the Labour Party leaders running in this election. The Catholic Church in England also spoke out against the consequences if voters were to cast their ballots for the Labour Party.
A public letter on behalf of the Church of England Bishops promised that they would “vigorously challenge any attempt to extend abortion provision beyond the current 24-week limit.” Catholic bishops in Wales told voters to make respect for human life their top priority, after Labour Party leaders pledged to repeal current laws and replace them with unlimited access to abortion.
In Wales alone, the Welsh Conservative Party took six seats in Parliament which had been held by the Labour Party. Gender politics played so often by Democrats in the United States was disproven in Wales, where three of the victorious conservative challengers were women.
A 14-year-long leftwing incumbent in Wales, Madeleine Moon, was less than gracious about her defeat by another woman who is a political newcomer. She decried that her parliament district "Bridgend now has an MP with no political experience, other than three years on a parish council. We’re in a huge mess in Bridgend.”
The Democratic presidential candidates here who parrot the social stances of Corbyn may feel the same angst amid their rejection by voters. The real “mess” is in liberal political parties which have allowed themselves to be taken over by university elites.
Cert Denied!
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 10, 2019
In a stunning reversal of fortune for the abortion industry, the Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Kentucky law that requires abortion clinics to provide ultrasounds to women seeking an abortion. This may be the first time in 50 years that the Supreme Court has refused to review a significant lower court decision against the interests of abortion providers.
The pattern since Roe v. Wade is that abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood are nearly always successful in getting their petitions granted by the Supreme Court, even though only about 1% of other petitions are granted. There have always been at least four votes on the Court to rule in favor of abortion, and only four votes are needed to grant certiorari, or “cert.”
Kentucky passed the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act, known as “H.B. 2,” which requires an abortionist to display an ultrasound and amplify the heartbeat of the unborn child for the patient prior to performing an abortion. An abortion clinic challenged this law as somehow being a violation of the First Amendment, even though no one can dispute that every required disclosure is factual and true.
As nearly always happens in these cases, the abortion clinic obtained an injunction in 2017 by a federal district court to block the law from going into effect. From there it went on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which presides over Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Michigan.
President Trump has appointed six judges to that appellate court, in a shining example of how important his presidency has been. A random assignment of a three-judge panel then heard this case.
One of the panelists was Judge John K. Bush, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed by a narrow party-line vote of 51-47 in the summer of 2017. He made the difference, as he wrote the decision for a panel that was evenly divided between the other two judges.
He ruled that the Kentucky law “requires the disclosure of truthful, non-misleading, and relevant information about an abortion.” Therefore “it does not violate a doctor's right to free speech under the First Amendment.”
But H.B. 2 “should be subjected to heightened scrutiny and deemed unconstitutional, lest our constitution dissolve, and tyranny be erected on its ruins. I dissent!” declared the Obama-appointed panelist, using even an exclamation point to punctuate her outvoted objection.
The new Democrat governor of Kentucky, Andrew Beshear, has his name on this case but he was unhelpful and the court found that he was not a proper party, in EMW Women’s Surgical Center v. Beshear. The pro-life governor Matt Bevin, who recently lost narrowly to Beshear, was the one who fought for this victory, and the continuing GOP majority in the legislature will prevent its repeal.
The abortion clinic filed unsuccessfully for a rehearing en banc, where the six new Trump judges held strong in defense of the decision. From there the abortion clinic filed a petition for cert with the Supreme Court, where petitions have been granted virtually every time that the pro-abortion side wants them.
Then the big surprise: cert denied. Multiple justices on the High Court surely disagree with the Sixth Circuit decision upholding the ultrasound law, but decided not to take this case and risk a 5-4 affirmance of the law.
The Fourth Circuit, which sits in Richmond, had invalidated another ultrasound law nearly identical to the one that the Sixth Circuit upheld. That means there was a clear split among the circuits, which ordinarily compels the Supreme Court to take a case by granting cert.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of state laws requiring an ultrasound before performing an abortion. So this case would be a perfect vehicle for the Court to bring clarity to the issue.
But ironically the circuit split might have caused the four justices who vote with abortion clinics to deny their petition this time. Had cert been granted and the Court then upheld the Kentucky law by a 5-4 vote, then that would have overturned the Fourth Circuit decision and opened the door to North and South Carolina requiring ultrasounds.
No one knows better than the Supreme Court Justices themselves where they stand on the contentious abortion issue. This denial of cert suggests that there is a 5-4 majority to uphold ultrasound laws, and other pro-life laws.
Many women who see an ultrasound then decline to have an abortion which they had previously planned to have. A picture tells a thousand words, which abortion clinics do not want their victims to see or hear.
This bodes well for another case which the Court will decide in 2020, concerning the constitutionality of a Louisiana law prohibiting abortion unless the physician has nearby hospital privileges, which are necessary for handling complications.
Medicare for All Illegal Aliens?
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 3, 2019
The rush to the Left by Democratic presidential candidates in an attempt to win its nomination has resulted in a call for Medicare for All. Nearly every Democratic candidate has endorsed the inclusion of illegal aliens in this or similar government-run healthcare programs.
Medicare for All would be a fiscal disaster, whether it includes illegal aliens or not. Elizabeth Warren first drove this train past her rivals in the polls, but it has become a train wreck as her liberal rivals question it.
Warren rose to the status of the presumptive nominee in early October as she surged to a tie with Joe Biden nationwide, and surpassed him in early states like Iowa. Then came the presidential debate on October 15, where Biden and Pete Buttigieg criticized her on stage for the lack of details in her proposal.
Since then Warren’s national support has dropped in half, down to only 14% among Democratic voters. Her support in Iowa has plummeted too, falling by 6% to only 16%.
Warren’s unexpected decline correlates with her full-throttled endorsement of Medicare for All, for which she has released details after being criticized. At a town hall on November 8, Warren confirmed that her proposal would include Medicare for all illegal aliens, too.
“Medicare for All, as I put this together, covers everyone, regardless of immigration status, and that’s it,” Warren declared there in response to a question. The local audience applauded her, but the reception nationwide to her plan has been chilly, even among likely Democrat primary voters.
Her plan would cost $52 trillion, not just billion, over ten years. She is competing with Bernie Sanders, who also supports free medical care for illegal aliens and even a moratorium on deportations.
The reality is that anyone, whether lawfully in the United States or not, can already show up at any emergency room in a hospital and receive free medical care. This has been true ever since Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA), which has contributed to hospital bankruptcies ever since.
Many illegal aliens have crossed our borders in order to show up at emergency rooms and give birth here in the United States, so that their child could claim American citizenship and thereby provide a basis for relatives to migrate here also. Known as “anchor babies,” they lack a constitutional right to citizenship but their relatives then demand entitlements.
The Democrats’ approach is the opposite of President Trump’s, who continues to work hard to reduce the enormous drag on the budget caused by people who are in the United States illegally. On August 12, Trump announced his new rule that green cards will not be issued to immigrants who are likely to become dependent on government aid.
Since 1882, federal law has prohibited the admission of anyone who is likely to become a “public charge,” or dependent on government programs at taxpayer expense. But, prior to Trump, many government programs were not even considered in evaluating whether someone crossing the border may become a public charge.
For example, government health care and housing have not been criteria for excluding an illegal alien because he is likely to become a public charge, and a drain on our budget. This omission meant that illegals and green card applicants could be milking Medicaid and free housing without scrutiny by an immigration official considering whether to allow them to stay.
New York, despite benefiting from a booming stock market on Wall Street, just announced that it expects a massive operating deficit of $6.1 billion, its largest since the Great Recession more than a decade ago. The cause is the hemorrhaging of dollars in its Medicaid program, a state program intended to pay health care costs for the poor.
New York is a magnet for illegal immigration whom its Democratic leadership has welcomed. It sends to Congress politicians who endorse Bernie Sanders, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), better known as “AOC.”
Despite Trump’s valiant effort to reduce the issuance of green cards if the recipients are likely to become a public charge, in early October Democrat-appointed judges in three different blue states each independently blocked enforcement of Trump’s new rule. Two of these judges were appointed by Clinton, and a third by Obama.
Trump also properly attempted to suspend the entry into our country of immigrants who are likely to burden the healthcare system. Entitled Proclamation 9945, this would help preserve our scarce medical care dollars for Americans rather than foreigners.
But on November 26, an Obama-appointed judge overturned Trump Proclamation 9945. Judicial supremacy continues to block sensible orders by Trump which would protect our nation against the suffocating financial burdens caused by illegal immigration.
Respect Needed for Trump’s Pardons
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 26, 2019
The Constitution expressly grants the authority to the president to issue pardons, and this power has been repeatedly invoked by presidents beginning with George Washington. The lack of respect given to President Trump in connection with his relatively small number of presidential pardons is a disgrace.
This presidential prerogative is particularly important when the President, as Commander-in-Chief, pardons a military officer under his direct chain of command. Presidential pardons of servicemen who put their own lives on the line in defense of our freedoms should receive heightened respect by all.
Reports are that Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher’s platoon mutinied against him and prompted the overzealous prosecution of him for crimes he did not commit. He was nearly fully acquitted by a military jury in a system that rarely sides with an accused soldier or sailor.
A blizzard of allegations were made against Gallagher in an apparent attempt by some of his subordinates to destroy him. When it came to testifying in a court of law, however, the allegations virtually disappeared and the prosecutors should have dropped their case.
Gallagher’s acquittal at trial on all of the serious allegations against him vindicated the sailor, and embarrassed the prosecutors. But instead of backing off from their mistake, the Deep State doubled down against Gallagher.
The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, is a former Wall Street banker lacking in combat experience. His skills are not in hand-to-hand fighting against the enemy, but in navigating the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.
Spencer resisted the order by his Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, to restore Gallagher to his full rank, and to move on to more important issues. But in a textbook example of intransigence by the Swamp, Secretary Richard Spencer persisted in defying Trump’s commands concerning the Gallagher case.
Underlings, particularly in the military, should not be trying to negotiate around their superiors. Trump did not command the Navy to do anything immoral or contrary to the Constitution, and Spencer should have complied with his duty to obey orders.
After he was fired, Spencer appeared on television to criticize our President. When asked the obvious question on CBS to explain “what’s wrong with following a lawful order from the commander in chief?”, Spencer admitted, “Nothing.”
But then Spencer added that “I could not, in my conscience, do this.” His “conscience” somehow prevented him from honoring the equivalent of a presidential pardon?
Spencer and other Trump critics need to take a close look, perhaps for their first time, at Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution: “The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
President Trump’s first pardon as a president was issued to Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who fought for years on the front lines against illegal immigration. Yet the ACLU persuaded a Clinton-appointed federal judge to ignore the pardon, and the Ninth Circuit is now considering Sheriff Joe’s appeal.
It is a bit mystifying that liberals would be so resistant to presidential pardons when they were used so often by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton famously pardoned a long list of his friends during his last evening in the White House, and his supporters did not protest.
The soldiers whom Trump has pardoned are not his buddies or donors, as some of the recipients of Clinton’s pardons were. In addition to restoring Navy SEAL Chief Gallagher to his rank, Trump issued pardons to two Army officers, 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Major Mathew Golsteyn.
Maj. Golsteyn had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism that included enduring enemy fire and assisting a wounded Afghan soldier, but was charged with murder of a suspected bombmaker based primarily on an interview Golsteyn gave on Fox News.
The notion that armchair lawyers should be prosecuting our servicemen for being supposedly too tough on the enemy lacks the support of the American people.
Yet the knee-jerk resistance by the Deep State to Trump began with his very first days in office. Sally Yates, an Obama-appointed holdover in the Justice Department, was fired for defying another policy set by the President because she disagreed with it.
Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher served in combat with valor, fighting hard against some of the fiercest terrorists in the world. The allegations made against Gallagher of violent wrongdoing were evidently false and never proven in court.
Trump tweeted, “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”
The disrespect for Trump’s pardons smokes the Never-Trumpers out. Let’s hope they at least refrain from criticizing another long-standing presidential tradition, the ceremonial pardon of a live turkey for Thanksgiving.
Impeachment Hearings Are a Bust
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 19, 2019
Television ratings for the impeachment hearings have been a bust, far less than the viewership during Watergate or Clinton-Lewinsky. Even the testimony of ex-FBI director James Comey and future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh drew higher ratings than the Democrats' latest show trial.
Less than 13 million people watched the first day of impeachment hearings, which is only a tiny fraction of the audience for big football games. Polling shows that Independent voters, who will decide the next presidential election, are unplugging this in large numbers.
It does not help the Democrats that their star witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, has been discredited by his own supervisor, Tim Morrison. According to Morrison, Vindman is not reliable and his boss Morrison even doubts his judgment.
Morrison, the far more credible witness, found nothing improper on the telephone call held between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In contrast Vindman appears politically biased by his own disagreement with President Trump's foreign policy, which further undermines Vindman's objectivity.
The opinionated views of Vindman and other anti-Trump witnesses hopelessly distort the hearings. Democrats have delayed testimony by those who are willing to stick to the facts, which vindicate our president. Morrison listened in on the July 25th call and has first-hand knowledge which several of the other informants, including the so-called whistleblower, lack. Morrison and other witnesses who support Trump’s statements have not yet been allowed by the Democrats to testify publicly.
The Democrats’ game plan is to try to turn the public against President Trump before the most knowledgeable witnesses testify in his defense. On Friday Democrats relied heavily on their witness Marie Yovanovitch, the Former Ambassador to Ukraine who was replaced by President Trump and who has a history of foreign policy failures.
But Yovanovitch had an underpublicized zinger against the Democratic frontrunner for president, Joe Biden. She testified that it was improper for Hunter Biden to take a large salary from a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father Joe Biden was vice president.
Committee member Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) astutely followed up by asking Yovanovitch if she ever raised this potential conflict-of-interest by the Bidens with officials at the State Department, such as George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs who testified two days earlier. “I don’t believe so,” Yovanovitch replied.
“No one did anything? You see why the president was a little concerned about what happened in Ukraine?” Ratcliffe quickly pointed out rhetorically.
Yovanovitch did not admit the obvious, but it was unnecessary at that point. The failure by her and other anti-Trump diplomats to flag the Bidens’ improper conduct is reason enough for Trump to raise the issue earlier this year.
Impeachment hack Adam Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, strained to portray Yovanovitch as a victim of bullying by Trump. Schiff even interrupted the hearing to read a tweet by President Trump critical of Yovanovitch, and Schiff pretended that it was a crime for Trump to tweet against a witness.
But it was Schiff, not Trump, who interjected the tweet into the hearing and potentially influenced the witness by reading it to her. Schiff was playing to the media, rather than attempting to ferret out the truth in a fair way.
Schiff further distorted the hearing for the purpose of the television cameras by refusing to allow Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) to release his time for questioning the witness to a female colleague, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Schiff apparently thought the optics would be better for his side if a Republican male rather than a female questioned the anti-Trump female witness.
But the staged impeachment hearings are failing to hold the attention of a television audience. Even former Trump attorney Michael Cohen attracted higher television ratings when he testified before a congressional hearing earlier this year.
How long the Democrats pursue impeachment amid pitiful television ratings remains to be seen. Most of the public thinks we should not be sending millions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign country with a history of rampant corruption.
There is no precedent for this bizarre inquisition into foreign policy decisions which are properly for a president to make. Another poll shows that 90% of evangelicals, the voting bloc pivotal to the election of President Trump in 2016, view the impeachment hearings as a witch hunt.
The proverbial national spotlight that Democrats hoped to shine on their impeachment show trial is dim and ineffective. Its greatest achievement may be to force the Democratic senators who are running for president to be in D.C. during the month of January, to sift through the non-evidence rather than campaign against Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In less than a year these impeachment proceedings will be rendered moot by the real jury: American voters.
Misguided Politics Drives Impeachment
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 12, 2019
The phony impeachment campaign by Democrats is boosted by an underlying hostility harbored within the Deep State against President Trump’s foreign policy. Long gone are the days when Democrats were the anti-war party, as their own presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) laments.
Democrats and entrenched D.C. bureaucrats are united in wanting to send more aid to foreign countries and to perpetually station our troops in distant lands. The push to impeach President Trump gained steam after he brought our soldiers home from Syria.
“The senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified” in wanting President Trump to send military aid to Ukraine, declared impeachment witness Deputy Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper. When the money stopped flowing for the globalists, they falsely alleged wrongdoing by President Trump.
“It’s in our interest to deter Russian aggression elsewhere around the world,” Deputy Secretary Cooper opined. But that is an opinion for the President, not the Deep State. The American people elected Donald Trump to repudiate the globalist mindset that has dominated nearly every president since Woodrow Wilson. It is not an impeachable offense to stop sending money to foreign countries.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, is a rising conservative star who echoes the America First positions of President Trump. In a speech on Tuesday, Senator Hawley provided compelling arguments against the globalist agenda of the Deep Staters.
“The American public is rightly skeptical of open-ended commitments and rightly tired of endless wars,” Sen. Hawley declared. “We find ourselves embroiled in the longest war in our nation’s history, with no discernible end in sight.”
Our “commitments have been paid for in the dearly earned dollars of the American working class, and in the dearly precious lives of American soldiers. … We cannot remake every nation in our image.” But there are many enemies of Trump’s America First policy. A high concentration of those enemies are in the Deep State, the bureaucracy in D.C.
The Democrats’ central witness against Trump could be Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, but his deposition was more opinion than fact. Vindman has become the new front man for the Democrats as they decided not to rely further on the secret whistleblower who did not have any firsthand knowledge of any relevant facts either.
An accused person has a due process right to call witnesses. The President should have rights at least as great as those guaranteed to criminals in our courts of law.
Yet Democrats are refusing to allow Republicans to call as witnesses the whistleblower or Hunter Biden, the son of presidential contender Joe Biden. What are Democrats afraid of? Democrats want to avoid full display of their political motivation behind the impeachment proceedings. The common denominator among the Deep State witnesses against Trump is their disagreement with his America First policy and their disdain for Trump as our Commander-in-Chief.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, earlier rebuffed a scheme by John Kelly and Rex Tillerson to work against Trump from within his administration. She sets an example for others to defend our president.
“There’s no insistence on that call, there are no demands on that call, it is a conversation between two presidents that’s casual in nature,” Haley stated on the Today show in reference to the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president which is at the center of the planned impeachment.
Democrats allege that Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to a request that it investigate corruption concerning Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden. On July 25, Trump merely asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a favor, but there was no quid pro quo.
Haley observes that it was proper for Trump to ask the Ukrainian President to probe corruption. If the Bidens were not involved in any wrongdoing, then they should have nothing to fear from such an inquiry by the distant Ukraine.
When Joe Biden was vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it fired Viktor Shokin, its top prosecutor. Shokin had been investigating wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company which paid Biden’s son Hunter at least $50,000 a month to serve on its Board of Directors despite his lack of experience.
Nikki Haley points out that “an American should want to know the answer of, ‘Did Biden pressure the prosecutor to, you know, to do what he did?’ And I think there’s a real question there.” Haley added that “you can question the president, but you also have to question what Biden did.” Yet Democrats refuse to allow Republicans to call Hunter Biden or the whistleblower to testify, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says this failure would render any impeachment “dead on arrival.”
Manly Sports Carry Trump in Battleground States
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 5, 2019
President Trump’s high-profile support of manly sports is scoring points for him in the battleground states. While Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic contenders are absent from marquee athletic competitions, Trump is being seen by millions of Americans as an ordinary guy cheering alongside the rest of us.
On Monday, Trump welcomed the world champion Washington Nationals to the White House, after having attended Game 5 of the World Series. Its catcher, Kurt Suzuki, donned a Make America Great Again hat to the consternation of the liberal media.
First baseman Ryan Zimmerman presented a “TRUMP 45” baseball jersey to the 45th President. The Nationals’ principal owner and 18 of its 25 players attended, despite liberal pressure to boycott the event.
The handful of players who skipped this ceremony mostly did not say why, but potential liberal retaliation against Trump supporters is tainting even our national pastime. Newspaper reporters dole out MVP awards and Hall of Fame inductions, and a player who skipped the Trump event is contending for an MVP award for which votes have been cast.
On Saturday, Trump is expected to attend a college football game between the top two teams in the nation, LSU and Alabama. Dubbed the “game of the century,” this is being played deep in conservative Alabama where Trump will be running up the score on Election Day next fall.
As at any large public event, Trump receives a smattering of cheers and some organized boos, but millions of voters in the heartland appreciate his willingness to attend what Democratic candidates avoid. Trump’s appearance ringside at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) at Madison Square Garden last Saturday was a knock-out punch with voters.
All three of these sports – baseball, football, and ultimate fighting – are manly traditions which have become politically incorrect at the liberal universities where Professor Warren comes from. Millions of women are huge fans of the same competitions which Trump attends, but liberal feminists are not.
A bikini-clad woman, known as a “ring girl,” adorns the ring for ultimate fighting. But feminists do not like that, and have succeeded in eliminating the swimsuit portion of the Miss America contest.
UFC founder Dana White welcomed Trump at Madison Square Garden, a short cab ride from his Trump Tower in New York City. During the Republican National Convention which nominated Trump, White predicted correctly that Trump’s “sense of loyalty and commitment will translate into how he will run this country.”
“We need somebody who believes in this country, we need somebody who is proud of this country, and who will fight for this country. Donald Trump is a fighter, and I know he will fight for this country.”
Trump has been doing exactly that, fighting for our country, while congressmen Nancy Pelosi and “Shifty” Adam Schiff do the opposite by concocting a scheme of secret impeachment hearings against Trump. Rather than cower in political fear in the White House as Richard Nixon did, Trump has come out swinging, to a standing ovation by the American public.
His trip to the small town of Tupelo, Mississippi, attracted a full house at the 10,000-seat BancorpSouth Arena, with many thousands more gathered outside. “I love him 100 percent,” gushed Mary Ann Gannon there. “He’s the greatest president we’ve ever had.”
On Monday night, amid the backbiting by the swampy Democrats in D.C., Trump held a rally at the 23,500-seat Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, home of the Wildcats college basketball team. “This is better than the Final Four," Trump said, to a raucous ovation inside and by thousands outside.
Even those who were not really Trump supporters are getting in on the fun. A racehorse named “Covfefe,” after a famous tweet by Trump, recently won the $1 million Breeders Cup at Santa Anita, California.
Voters are siding with Trump in the key battleground states which will decide the upcoming presidential election: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan. Despite all the Democratic maneuvering about impeachment, Trump leads in these states.
National polls for the presidential election have been almost meaningless, as they should be. California has the most voters but has made itself politically irrelevant by turning so far leftward.
It hurts the Democratic contenders to continue to pander to voters in California, which moved its primary earlier in order to impact the nomination. Hillary Clinton racked up millions of extra votes there, but those votes were wasted as Trump won all the battleground states.
“New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World,” screams the latest headline from the left-leaning New York magazine. The Democratic candidates are preaching to their own irrelevant choir, rather than reaching out to independent-minded Democrats in the battleground states where Trump is heading toward a second victory.
No More Sanctuary Cities
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 29, 2019
“The most dangerous and shameful attacks on the rule of law come from and in the form of sanctuary cities,” President Trump declared on Monday to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago. Applause then erupted when he said that criminal aliens should be turned over to federal immigration authorities and sent home.
Sanctuary cities interfere with that process by ordering local law enforcement not to comply with federal laws against illegal immigration. Illegal aliens are protected in sanctuary cities against being asked about their lack of citizenship, and if arrested for a crime they are not handed to federal officials for deportation.
On the ballot next week in Tucson is Proposition 205, which would make this large metropolis near the Mexican border the first sanctuary city in Arizona. It would bar local police from checking the immigration status of people they stop or arrest.
California has many sanctuary cities, but also has a wall along its border between San Diego and Mexico. Arizona, which does not have a wall and is victim to a substantial percentage of the illegal immigration flowing into our country, does not yet have any sanctuary cities.
Even some progressives are opposing the ACLU-endorsed Prop. 205 to make Tucson a sanctuary city. The costs would be staggering, and already state lawmakers are planning to assess those expenses against the city if it approves this bad idea.
Tucson Councilwoman Regina Romero, a Democrat who is expected to be elected mayor next week, is against making it a sanctuary city by Prop. 205. She points out how it would interfere with Tucson police in working with federal officials on drug crimes, human trafficking, and missing children cases.
Arizona state lawmakers are threatening to withhold $130 million annually from Tucson if its voters approve this bill to harbor illegal aliens, who cost far more than that in crimes, social services, and other entitlements. It would make sense for Tucson to foot that bill rather than burdening the rest of the state with those increased costs from illegal immigration.
Prop. 205 conflicts with a key part of an Arizona law that the Supreme Court left in place after a legal challenge. Its Senate Bill 1070 continues to require local police to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a suspect when there is reasonable suspicion about it.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s splendid Solicitor General has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn California Senate Bill 54, which requires officials there to obstruct deportations. The Ninth Circuit upheld the California pro-sanctuary city law despite admitting that it “makes the jobs of federal immigration authorities more difficult,” and even discriminates against federal officials performing their duties.
The often-reversed Ninth Circuit upheld SB 54 on the theory that California “retains the right” to obstruct federal law and hinder federal law enforcement. The Ninth Circuit invoked the Tenth Amendment, which can be helpful in other contexts, as having an “anticommandeering” rule against federal interference with state laws.
But this peculiar interpretation of the Tenth Amendment has already wreaked havoc beyond the issue of illegal immigration. Last year the Supreme Court misused this "anticommandeering" theory to open the door to sports gambling in all 50 states, despite the immense harm it causes.
It is a distortion of the salutary principle of states’ power to use the Tenth Amendment to uphold state laws which flout federal law enforcement against illegal immigration. These state laws, and in particular California SB 54, impose expenses on other states by attracting more illegal border crossings.
“Aliens are present and may remain in the United States only as provided for under the auspices of federal immigration law,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco explains to the Supreme Court in his petition for cert. “It therefore is the United States, not California, that ‘retains the right’ to set the conditions under which aliens in this country may be detained, released, and removed.”
Only Congress and the President can define who is here lawfully. The federal government, without interference by states, must be able to remove those who are here illegally.
Democrats in California, however, see many future voters for their party among the swarms of illegal immigrants flowing over our southern border. That state has lurched leftward as it attracts more illegal aliens with its sanctuary cities.
But as Trump’s Solicitor General elaborates, “When officers are unable to arrest aliens – often criminal aliens – who are in removal proceedings or have been ordered removed from the United States, those aliens ... are disproportionately likely to commit crimes.”
The result, the Trump Administration’s top attorney observes, is that this “undermines public safety, immigration enforcement, and the rule of law.” Both voters and the Supreme Court should reject sanctuary city laws.
Free Trade Means No Free Speech in the NBA
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 15, 2019
Once upon a time, professional sports were popular entertainment free of political correctness, where fans and players could be themselves and say whatever they liked. Colorful basketball stars like Dennis Rodman spoke their mind on and off the court, and fans loved it.
But then Nike, a liberal corporation based in Oregon, essentially took over the National Basketball Association (NBA). The $8 billion business of the NBA became beholden to the $40 billion business of Nike, as sports journalist Jason Whitlock astutely observes.
Nike makes sports shoes but it is so well connected that it became one of 30 companies invited to join the prestigious Dow Jones average on the stock market. Nike heavily promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and got Barack Obama and Joe Biden to line up in support.
Then Donald Trump won the presidential election by campaigning against the TPP and phony free trade.
But Nike continues to pander to China anyway, and that is what drives the NBA’s censorship of anyone standing up for democracy in Hong Kong. Even a CNN reporter was muzzled when she merely tried to ask two basketball players how they felt about this lack of free speech in the NBA.
“The NBA has always been a league that prides itself on its players and its coaches being able to speak out openly about political and societal affairs,” CNN journalist Christina Macfarlane began.
She next asked whether this was still true. An NBA official immediately cut her off and insisted on taking her microphone away. Nike is behind this censorship, yet almost no one will admit it. Fortunately at least Jason Whitlock, the African American host of Speak for Yourself, is speaking out against Nike’s manipulation of the NBA.
"This is about a President that won't cooperate with what Nike wants done," Whitlock explained. "Nike is using the NBA and its leverage over the NBA to go after this guy because they disagree with him about his policies as it relates to trade in China. It's very simple."
LeBron James, who has an estimated $1 billion contract with Nike, said a Houston Rockets executive “wasn’t educated” when he tweeted out in support of democracy in Hong Kong. LeBron’s comment was baffling until one realizes it echoes the view of Nike, his lucrative sponsor.
NBA teams are now playing exhibition games in China, but players are prohibited by the NBA from speaking to the press at any time during the tour. Far from sports bringing two nations together, instead it is inflaming the tensions.
Free trade has resulted in censorship and less freedom. The justification of free trade with China was that it would make China more like us, but instead it has infringed on our rights of free speech which have been a cornerstone of our freedom.
Nike is the same company that funded ads featuring Colin Kaepernick and touting the importance of his right to express himself. Yet Nike insists that no one in the NBA express himself by criticizing China as millions of protesters in Hong Kong are doing.
In other words, it is OK in the view of Nike to criticize the American Flag and our President, but intolerable for anyone to criticize China.
Television ratings for NBA games are not even half of what they were in the 1990s, and perhaps executives see China as a market where the league might expand. The Brooklyn Nets were acquired by a Chinese billionaire and suddenly it appears that the entire league has to cater to the Communist state.
The expectation of the British when they agreed to give Hong Kong back to China was that, by now, China would be more like the free world. But the massive crowds of Hong Kong residents who are demonstrating against China show that it has not changed, at least not for the better.
Fifty years ago, “ping-pong diplomacy” was supposed to soften the communist dictators who have run the mainland since their violent revolution. After a half-century of no progress, now we have “basketball diplomacy” pushed with the same false hope.
Diplomacy is merely a charade if one side is not allowed to speak up for its values. With the immense income that the NBA players, owners, and league executives enjoy, one would think they could at least speak their mind a bit.
And yet Nike does not let them. This big promoter of free trade is an even bigger opponent of free speech, thereby siding with China against freedom in Hong Kong and censoring others who are beholden to Nike.
Nike protected its sale of shoes in China, but cannot appease the resultant anger against LeBron James in Hong Kong. His jersey is being burned in response to his, or Nike’s, siding with the Chinese tyrants.
Dems Try to Censor Trump
Democratic presidential candidates are trying to censor President Trump and his spokesman, Rudy Giuliani, to prevent Trump from communicating with the American people. Kamala Harris is demanding that Trump’s Twitter account be suspended.
A half-century ago liberals pretended to be supporters of free speech, but now they are its biggest enemy. “His Twitter account should be suspended,” Democratic presidential wannabe Kamala Harris told CNN on Monday.
“I think there is plenty of new evidence to suggest that he is irresponsible with his words in a way that could result in harm to other people. And so the privilege of using those words in that way should probably be taken from him,” she added.
Censorship is central to the liberal playbook to try to regain power, and then reshape America as the Far Left wants. Harris is echoing the views of Big Tech in California, which already censors ordinary Americans expressing conservative views.
Joe Biden just took that liberal censorship a step further by demanding that television networks refuse to allow Rudy Giuliani to speak in favor of Trump anymore. Even the leftwing Daily Beast admits that “rarely, if ever, has one campaign made an affirmative demand that a top aide to a rival candidate no longer be given a platform," as Biden desperately insists.
Giuliani tweeted in response, “Think of the Biden arrogance and entitlement to protection. They believe they own the media and they are demanding that they silence me.”
“They know I have incriminating facts, not hearsay, because they know what they did in selling Joe’s office to a Ukrainian crook,” he added in reference to Biden, who has the most to lose in this brouhaha.
President Trump released the transcript of his phone call with the President of Ukraine, and yet Joe Biden continues to hide behind the concealment of transcripts of his conversations with Ukraine officials during which he may have improperly intervened on behalf of his son Hunter.
The Republican National Committee has called on Biden to release his call transcripts, so that the public can decide for itself how Biden misused his position of power for financial gain for his family. But there is no transparency by the Left while it demands answers by others.
Ukraine, which has been independent for more than a quarter century, should no longer be referred to as “the Ukraine” as though it were still a vassal state of the communist Soviet Union. Ukraine’s president has fully exonerated President Trump amid the false accusations by House Democrats.
But Trump is receiving less due process and constitutional rights here at home. “Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called ‘Whistleblower,’ represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way,” he tweeted.
The Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees the basic right of an accused to confront someone who makes accusations against him. Yet Trump is being denied this fundamental right while the Deep State circles its wagons to attain its goal of bringing down the president.
It does not matter to the Trump haters that a nothing-burger is at the center of this phony scandal. In this power struggle, Trump’s enemies care little about what the facts are, and instead try to use the process to swing public opinion in their direction.
But Trump’s political base remains rock solid, and smears from the Left are not going to alienate his longtime supporters. Trump himself shows no signs of backing down, and he is often at his best when under political attack.
The liberal Democrats have given Trump the means by which he can galvanize the American people, who are already fed up with the inside-the-Beltway mentality that prevails in the halls of Congress. Trump tweeted out a map of American counties which voted for him in 2016, and it is a massive sea of red showing his broad support.
Yet little can stop the insatiable desire of a lynch mob, which is what House Democrats have become. Ironically the biggest victim of their renewed witch hunt may be the only person thought to have a chance to defeat Trump next year: Joe Biden.
Biden’s political fortunes are being badly sullied by the mud that splatters backward onto him. It is a sign of desperation that his campaign feels the need to censor Rudy Giuliani on television, lest he embarrass Biden further with revelations about Biden’s misconduct in connection with Ukraine.
Giuliani is making up for all his prior missteps in fending off the same sharks who previously circled Trump for prior non-issues. Censorship of one’s political opponents is not something Trump would ever do, but his Democratic rivals think that censorship is the only way they can win.
Indoctrination Runs Aground in California
By John and Andy Schlafly
September 3, 2019
As millions go back to school, students across the nation (and their parents) hope to acquire the knowledge and skills they need for a successful life. Many teachers enter the profession with a mission to inspire young people toward excellence and personal growth.
But for thousands of school administrators and other non-teaching personnel who draw big salaries in our public schools, the new academic year has a different meaning. In the education establishment, known as the Blob, the new school year is a time to indoctrinate young people with notions of diversity, oppression, social justice, and the canons of political correctness.
Nowhere was this better illustrated that a firestorm that blazed in California just before school started last week. A new statewide curriculum for Ethnic Studies was posted for public comment, and the deafening uproar from parents and even politicians was enough to cause a postponement of its implementation.
California has continued to lurch leftward politically while most of the country has been growing increasingly conservative. Trump won the presidency by a majority of the popular vote in the 49 states other than California, while Hillary won by millions of votes there.
In 2016, California passed a law requiring the development of an ethnic studies curriculum, as though that were a legitimate academic subject. The curriculum is required to “include information on the ethnic studies movement, specifically the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), and its significance in the establishment of ethnic studies as a discipline and work in promoting diversity and inclusion within higher education.”
The curriculum is supposed to “promote critical thinking and rigorous analysis of history, systems of oppression, and the status quo in an effort to generate discussions on futurity, and imagine new possibilities.” But the “futurity” to discuss is not one of capitalism, freedom, and prosperity.
The proposed new curriculum is loaded with liberal jargon and describes capitalism as a “form of power and oppression.” Capitalism has brought higher standards of living to people of all ethnicities, but students in California would be taught the opposite.
Governor Jerry Brown, who is no conservative, actually vetoed a prior version of the bill mandating new ethnic studies standards. His objection was that the bill would have made the curriculum a requirement for graduating from high school in California.
Governor Brown then signed a modified version of the bill, and his successor, Gavin Newsom, is more liberal than even Brown was. The objections now are not being led by the governor, but primarily by the public.
A torrent of opposition to this new curriculum has caused its supporters to delay it. Some look to private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools as a way to escape this new indoctrination.
Jewish critics complain that the curriculum condemns some forms of ethnic animosity, but not anti-Semitism. A lead supporter of this new curriculum, Democratic Assemblyman Jose Medina, then delayed by a year a bill making this mandatory.
The bizarre jargon used in the draft curriculum opens a window into how far out of the mainstream advocates of this approach have gone. Terms unfamiliar to most people have been developed for this, and scrutiny of these terms which you will probably not find in your dictionary is enlightening.
“Misogynoir” is a term invented to mean hatred against black women in particular, as though that exists. It is not the often-imagined hatred of women, or even hatred of blacks, but hatred of black women that is the problem described by this term.
A glossary released with the draft curriculum explains its many bizarre terms. “Hxrstory” is another term it uses, and it is not a typo as most people would infer.
Instead, it is a deliberate misspelling of “history” in order to “x” out the “his” in “history”. “Throughout this model curriculum, language is used that deliberately offers an alternative to traditional wording that could have a particular context within the dominant culture.”
So the curriculum deliberately misspells certain words in order to advance its ideology of contorted logic. “As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respelling of terms,” the draft brazenly declares.
The curriculum is not kinder to parents than it is to history. Rather than try to engage parents in education, parents are disparaged by California curriculum as part of the problem.
“Here are some dynamics an Ethnic Studies educator might consider,” the curriculum counsels. “Is the course being taught in a district where parents or community members are hostile to the field?”
A generation ago, what started in California then spread to the rest of the country, such as no-fault divorce, hippies, the drug culture, and Hollywood values. But perhaps a humorous slogan from nearby Las Vegas should apply to the Left Coast: what happens in California should stay in California.
Finally, a President Stands Up to China!
By John and Andy Schlafly
August 27, 2019
President Trump is the first to stand up to Communist China in almost 50 years. Beginning with President Nixon, who was then under the spell of Henry Kissinger, presidents of both parties have appeased China.
Once known as “Red China” to distinguish the mainland regime from the anti-communist Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1949, the communist dictators have stolen our intellectual property for decades. This is the same tyrannical China against which millions of people in Hong Kong are protesting now.
Starting with George H.W. Bush, who began his rise to the presidency by acting as Ford’s liaison to China, politicians in both political parties embraced a phony “free trade” with China. Millions of American manufacturing jobs were lost, and China used its growing trade surplus to build a massive arsenal against which we must defend.
China exported a staggering amount of goods to the United States in 2018, totaling $539.5 billion, while allowing only $120.3 billion of American goods to be sold there. That created a record trade deficit of more than $400 billion.
Despite our massive patronage of Chinese companies, in 2018 the communist Chinese government cut back on the small amount of American goods allowed to be sold there. There was a nearly 10% drop in its purchases of American farm products, particularly corn and soybeans.
Like the weather in Mark Twain’s famous quip, everyone complains about China’s abusive trade practices but nobody does anything about them. No one, that is, until Donald J. Trump became president.
Trump adviser Peter Navarro explains that tariffs against China are needed to end its “cyber intrusion into our business networks, forced technology transfer in exchange for market access, intellectual property theft, dumping into our markets state-owned enterprises which are heavily subsidized, currency manipulation and killing Americans with fentanyl.” Fentanyl is a drug imported from China which causes half of all American deaths from overdoses.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both promised to take action against China’s exploitation of us in trade, but neither did. Both ex-presidents are now enjoying a comfortable retirement, with Obama having just purchased a $15 million beach house on Martha’s Vineyard as merely a summer vacation home.
But American workers have continued to lose ground in the global economy, and China is a big reason why wages have not improved in decades. The average American family is worse off as a result, due to the loss of better-paying middle class jobs.
China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, over the opposition of Phyllis Schlafly and others who defended American sovereignty against that international tribunal. The WTO has repeatedly ruled against the United States, and China has used the WTO to advance its anti-American goals.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is releasing his new film exposing the treachery of China, called “Claws of the Red Dragon.” It describes how Huawei, the communist-funded technology leader, is poised to dominate world telecommunications for “5G” and “6G,” which are the next-generation internet connectivity services.
The Trump Administration has prohibited federal agencies from doing business with Huawei, which Trump recognizes to be a national security threat to the United States. This Chinese company has so infiltrated the American economy that an additional 90 days had to be allowed to wind down business arrangements with Huawei.
Trump tweeted: “The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP.” When China announced last Friday that it is imposing $75 billion in new tariffs on American goods, Trump responded by tweeting, “This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States.”
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, complained to Trump that Apple’s exporting of iPhones will be hurt by a so-called tariff war, because Apple’s Korean competitor Samsung will not have to pay the tariffs. But Apple employs relatively few American employees compared with other large corporations, so it is difficult to see why Apple should be dictating our trade policy.
Apple has been making an estimated 50% of its iPhones in China, and earlier it announced moving a portion of this manufacturing to India instead. These are not American jobs that are at stake, but Asian ones.
Indeed, Silicon Valley where Apple is headquartered has enriched a few billionaires but largely failed to hold onto American technology secrets. Now China can manufacture smartphones using technology stolen from the West, probably using some engineers who returned to Asia after working in Silicon Valley on H-1B visas.
Liberals ridiculed Trump for saying he is “the chosen one,” but the American people did choose him to stand up to China. To make America great again requires, at a minimum, ending how China takes advantage of our massive consumer market while stealing our secrets.
“Soulless” Gamer Shot Up El Paso
By John and Andy Schlafly
August 6, 2019
The 21-year-old who shot up the El Paso Walmart was a “soulless” video game player. He cooperated with authorities during his interrogation afterward, and officials should release to the public his answers to many important questions.
It is unlikely that the killer’s motives fit the narrative of “white nationalism” that is being pushed by the national media. For starters, the accused shooter, Patrick Crusius, is a registered Democrat who was critical of Republicans.
The British press is often the best source of information when these tragedies occur, because the American media try to spin and suppress the news to fit their political narrative. The shooting was not domestic terrorism, but was the product of a loner who grew up on video games rather than healthy relationships.
In a manifesto he apparently posted shortly before opening fire on a crowd of back-to-school shoppers, Crusius refers to “Call of Duty,” which trains boys to kill and kill again. People who knew him in high school described him as a “gamer” for his devotion to playing video games.
One of his few friends was of Egyptian descent, and it is implausible that the killer was a “white nationalist.” Another student who knew him in school said “he never spoke of anything political or talked about guns or had any hatred toward minorities,” as reported by the Daily Mail.
Instead, the real problem is that he is “soulless,” as another high-school acquaintance characterized him. His crime might be described as one of nihilism, which is an ideology of despair that has motivated rootless young men toward violent crimes throughout human history.
He had no girlfriends and participated in no extracurricular activities in high school, recalled one classmate who knew him there. He apparently did not have any genetic psychiatric disorder, as his twin sister was considered to be well-adjusted.
Nearly four times as many young men are avid video game players compared with young women, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study. The average gamer spends more than 7 hours each week playing video games, and many boys spend more than 40 per week consumed by the impersonal games which impede their social development.
Crusius became unemployed and it is not yet known how he passed his time each day. Politically, he was not “right wing” or pro-Trump by any stretch of the imagination.
On the same weekend as the El Paso and Dayton shootings, 55 people were shot in Chicago, of whom 7 died. The grim total included two mass shootings: one in which 8 people were shot by the same gunman, and another in which 7 were shot by the same gunman.
Liberals do not want to talk about the massacre in Dayton because it was by a supporter of Elizabeth Warren. Connor Betts, who was killed by police near the outset of his rampage, had posted that he did not think socialism was being adopted quickly enough.
Betts does not fit the “white supremacist” narrative either. Betts described himself as a “leftist,” and is seen in a photograph wearing the patch “Against all Gods.”
He killed 9 people and injured 27 in a mere 30 seconds, which suggests that he got his training on violent video games, too. It is unfathomable that someone could inflict such rapid, deadly harm so quickly without practicing to kill.
Liberals predictably call for gun control after every mass shooting, but they are silent about how these young killers became desensitized to murdering people. It is dangerous to addict unemployed young men on games similar to what the Army uses to desensitize soldiers to killing.
Democrat frontrunner Joe Biden acknowledged the video game problem, to the dismay of Anderson Cooper during a CNN interview on Monday. “It is not healthy to have these games teaching kids this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just sort of blow their brains out,” Biden observed.
Studies show that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior. This is found to be true across ages and cultures, which is hardly surprising.
The Supreme Court would not likely strike down new bipartisan legislation to protect minors against addiction to violent video games, as it did in 2011 when five Justices said the “publishers” of such games have a First Amendment right to sell their products to children. Since then one Justice in the majority (Kagan) has expressed regret for her decision, and two others have been replaced.
Just 10 days before the weekend shootings, a U.S. House committee conducted a hearing into what was called the “youth vaping epidemic” in which the founder of Juul was harshly condemned for making his products so attractive to teens. It is time for a similar spotlight to be cast on the dangerous video game industry.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Questions to Ask Mueller
By John and Andy Schlafly
July 23, 2019
“Just the facts, ma’am,” Detective Joe Friday was known for telling witnesses in the 1960s television series Dragnet. Trivia buffs point out that actor Jack Webb’s character never used those precise words, but he did focus like a laser beam on getting the facts when interrogating witnesses.
So should the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees when they question Robert Mueller on Wednesday. There should be no softball, open-ended questions by Democrats designed to invite baseless speculation by Mueller against President Trump.
Mueller reportedly requested that the Department of Justice send him a cautionary letter of instructions to limit the scope of testimony. The letter emphasized the longstanding policy of the Justice Department not to discuss behavior by persons who have not been charged with a crime.
That means Mueller should not be discussing President Donald Trump, who has not been charged with any crime. Mueller would be violating the Justice Department policy if he disparages President Trump.
The Justice Department told Mueller that it “generally does not permit prosecutors such as you to appear and testify before Congress regarding their investigative and prosecutorial activity.”
This does not mean that Mueller cannot answer any questions. There are multiple mysteries about his fruitless boondoggle which Mueller should address, and about which congressmen should thoroughly interrogate him.
The first question Mueller should answer is how much taxpayer money he wasted on his multiyear investigation into non-existent crimes. Then he should be required to estimate how much collateral damage he imposed on others in the course of his rampage.
A recent report says that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who spent decades serving our Nation in the Army, incurred at least $4.6 million in legal fees due to Mueller’s investigation. Gen. Flynn was the victim of an unusual sting operation whereby the since-discredited Peter Strzok oversaw the interrogation of Flynn about the contents of a phone call about which Strzok had access to a secret recording of what was said.
Next, Mueller should be asked about a report that his liberal deputy, the overzealous Andrew Weissmann, attempted to cut a deal with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, if the Ukrainian would provide some dirt about Trump. If Mueller pretends not to know the details about that, then there should be vigorous follow-up questioning because surely he knew what his deputy was doing.
Mueller should also be asked about reports that his immediate supervisor, Rod Rosenstein, considered an attempt to remove Trump from power based on the 25th Amendment. That amendment, which provides for a scenario in which the president loses his mental capacity, obviously has no relevance to the current administration.
Then questions should be asked about why Mueller, with much fanfare, indicted foreigners outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. Why did Mueller waste time and money making accusations against defendants who would never receive due process to exonerate themselves here?
Attorney General William Barr, in a letter he publicly released on March 24, observed (on behalf of himself and Rod Rosenstein) that Mueller “identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct” by the president. Democrats have falsely called this statement misleading even though it is exactly correct.
Mueller himself should be asked repeatedly about Barr’s letter. Why did Mueller allow the media to push for weeks the false narrative that he was preparing a collusion or obstruction case against Trump?
Next there is the unexplained delay in Mueller waiting until after the 2018 midterm elections to exonerate Trump. Mueller should be asked why he did not wrap up his investigation in an expeditious manner.
Mueller has accused Russians of manipulating the 2016 presidential election, but why did Mueller himself manipulate the 2018 midterm elections by allowing false media reports about Trump to persist? Why didn’t he release his findings earlier to prevent voters from being misled by the false accusations against Trump?
Mueller should be asked about his bizarre statement on May 29 that “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Mueller should explain why he acted contrary to the Department of Justice policy not to comment about people who are not charged with crimes.
Mueller stated publicly that the Russians who were indicted should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and there will be no trial to establish any guilt. Isn’t the president also worth the same presumption of innocence until proven guilty?
In Dragnet, one of the most popular law enforcement television dramas ever, Sergeant Joe Friday was solving violent crimes that happened, rather than searching for non-existent crimes. If it was so important to stick to the facts in Hollywood, it is even more important to stick to the facts when Democrats want to smear our president over fictitious crimes.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Liberal Phobia against Tanks in the Parade
By John and Andy Schlafly
July 2, 2019
Independence Day this week will feature fireworks, barbecues, and Nathan’s annual hot-dog eating contest on Coney Island. Spectacular flying performances, including the Blue Angels, will adorn the skies.
Yet a strange phobia by liberals against including tanks in the festivities erupts again. President Trump would like to have a few tanks in his upcoming “Salute to America” parade on July 4th, but his opponents have gone hysterical in blocking it.
Why the shrieking protest against tanks in particular, while ceremonial use of military aircraft seems just fine to the Left? After all, it was the Democrats’ own nominee for president in 1988, Michael Dukakis, who famously posed for a photo-op while riding in a tank during his unsuccessful campaign.
President Trump has long wanted to have a military parade in D.C., proposing it for Veterans’ Day, but he was stymied by exaggerated cost estimates. This time the phony argument against including tanks is that they might somehow cause harm to our infrastructure, a fancy word for roads.
In Michigan, trucks can weigh as much as 164,000 pounds, which is tens of thousands of pounds heavier than the Abrams tank that Trump wants to include in the parade. Funny how the Democrats have not been howling about the weight of big trucks on our roads, but instead stridently object to Trump displaying tanks without any evidence of harm by them.
The tanks are being delivered to D.C. by the Army’s own railroad system, which is a legacy of the Civil War when the Union took control of all the railroad tracks and bridges in the South. Any interference with that transportation system was a crime punished by execution, as featured in the classic American short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” later made into a television drama by Alfred Hitchcock.
Last spring in Europe a massive deployment of tanks and other military vehicles traveled hundreds of miles on ordinary roads without difficulty, in an important test of readiness. France and other countries regularly feature tanks in their military parades, again without untoward consequences.
But liberals stridently oppose the powerful image of tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue while Trump is president, lest American voters become enthralled by the show of force. The tank symbolizes military might, and the entire world should see the military hardware that is under President Trump’s command lest anyone think of challenging us.
Nuclear weapons are within the president’s control too, but they do not seem to deter wrongdoing by two-bit dictators around the world. Military aircraft can be shot down by our enemies, as Iran just did to one of our drones.
In 2017, Trump observed tanks being used in a parade in Paris as part of its celebration of Bastille Day, which is the French equivalent of our Independence Day. The tanks did not seem to cause any problems for the roads there, so all the fuss by anti-Trumpers here is merely political.
The Abrams tank is manufactured by the Army Tank Plant in Lima, Ohio, which Trump visited in March. If the treads on this tank somehow damage ordinary roads, which seems unlikely, the manufacturer could surely put softer treads on a few for occasional use in military parades.
Our high-tech aircraft, such as the stealth bomber, are fun to watch and learn about. But air power alone cannot deter all aggression, as we continue to see countries around the world from North Korea to Iran repeatedly defy us.
The millions of children of World War II veterans do not forget how instrumental the American tank was in winning back Europe from the grip of the Nazis and their “blitzkrieg” style of warfare. The unforgettable symbolism of the tank, under the direction of President Trump, is the real reason that liberals are doing everything they can to prevent Trump from invoking that image under his leadership.
The tools of Trump’s opponents are fake news, endless lawsuits, and gender politics. But none of that will seem significant if tanks roll down a wide boulevard adjoining the Mall in D.C, to a salute by President Trump and millions watching on television.
A parade of American tanks might have a sobering effect on rogue nations who want to shoot down our planes or harm our soldiers. A stealth bomber may not scare a communist tyrant, but the sight of massive tanks driving quickly down a familiar city street is something he would immediately understand.
But Anti-Trumpers have prevailed in blocking tanks from being part of any parade this Independence Day, and may appear only stationary as if they were relics of a bygone era. The American public should be allowed to see our powerful Abrams tank surging at highway-like speeds, and the rest of the world should see it too.
Why Is Africa Moving to Maine?
For months, the crisis on America’s southern border has been dominated by families with children from the so-called northern triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador). Arriving at the rate of 100,000 a month since January, Central Americans swamped the facilities, resources, and ability of officials to cope with the influx.
“Please do not make yourselves too comfortable,” Trump tweeted last month about this influx of migrants, because “you will be leaving soon!”
He followed up last week with another tweet, announcing that “ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.”
But to the surprise of border agents, many hundreds of migrants from Africa are pouring over our border also. They do not speak Spanish, adding a new headache to our border patrol trained in that language.
No one is quite sure who is paying for the African migrants to traverse the ocean, and then typically hop a free ride to get close to our border. They hail from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the second-largest nation by area in all of Africa.
Congo has been in a never-ending civil war for decades. It is divided between Christians and Muslims, and various indigenous languages and French.
Congo has a massive a population of 81 million which is comparable to that of Germany, and more than that of Great Britain or France. The people of war-torn Congo have many reasons to flee for a more peaceful land, but why to our country that is many thousands of miles and an ocean away from them?
Maine is their destination, because its Democratic politicians have been aggressively attracting asylum seekers from Congo. Maine’s cold climate and diet of lobster is not exactly a perfect fit for refugees from the mostly landlocked, distant country of Congo.
Yet this is the insanity that goes on as Democrats, who control Maine, want to prop up their census count and enhance their political strength. Maine once had eight congressional districts, but that has dwindled to merely two amid smaller population growth than southern states, and Democrats see illegal immigration as a way to boost their numbers.
In just one week, the number of migrants from Africa crossing the Rio Grande into Texas was more than double the total number of Africans caught crossing our entire southern border during all of last year. Border patrol agents are baffled at how or why these migrants, who are mostly from the Republic of the Congo, are flooding across our southern border with Mexico.
The “why” is easy: like six billion other people around the globe, they seek the peace, freedom, security, and prosperity of the United States. The “how” is less clear, because it requires secret donors to fund flying them first to a country in Central America, from where they are directed to ride or walk toward the United States and enter here illegally.
Even though some of these African migrants may have legitimate claims for asylum, they still have no right to be here. Under international law they should seek asylum in the first safe country in which they arrive, which is not the United States.
Unfortunately our open southern border has become so famous now worldwide that migrants from every far-flung continent consider coming here illegally. With liberal cities rolling out the welcome mat, why not take advantage of a free plane ride and then wade across the Rio Grande?
These newly arrived African immigrants raise the question of whether they would be eligible for the reparations being promised by Democratic presidential candidates. At least 10 percent of our African-American population are descended from immigrants who came here after the Civil War ended slavery, so the claims of these migrants would be like those of other post-slavery immigrants.
Reparations or not, entitlement programs flow to illegal immigrants like a fire hose, at tremendous taxpayer expense. There may be liberal billionaires who are funding the expenses to relocate these migrants to Maine, but once here American taxpayers are footing their immense bills.
So many of these African migrants have arrived in Portland, Maine, that it has converted its Expo Center into a shelter for them on an emergency basis. Taxpayers are already paying for police protection, interpreters, medical services, three full meals a day, and sleeping accommodations.
It is more than 6,000 miles from Africa to Ecuador, more than 2,000 miles from Ecuador to Texas, and more than 2,000 miles from Texas to Maine, one of the coldest states in our country for migrants coming from a nation on the equator. Is this the American dream, or a recipe for a nightmare?
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
War as a Political Temptation of Trump
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 18, 2019
The media attention on Middle East violence had the effect of goading President Trump to send American soldiers to the region. But he should resist this temptation to become the world’s policeman.
The U.S. must not be drawn into another conflict in the Persian Gulf – regardless of any overhyped provocation. President Reagan stood patiently by as Iraq and Iran had an all-out war against each other from 1980 to 1988.
These conflicts halfway around the globe are never-ending. Henry Kissinger famously said about the war between Iraq and Iran, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
We should protect our own soldiers by standing aside while Saudi Arabia and Iran fight each other, if they wish. We have been staying out of an ongoing conflict in Yemen, and we should continue that successful approach.
Thanks to tremendous American inventiveness, capital investment, risk taking, and a lot of hard work, the U.S. has achieved virtual energy independence. We do not need Persian Gulf oil anymore.
If European countries and Japan depend on oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, let those nations police that dangerous waterway. They are wealthy nations which can defend their own interests against Iran.
The pressure on Trump to support a sharp increase in the federal gas tax could be compared to the first temptation of Christ, when Satan challenged Jesus to turn stones into bread. Trump has properly resisted that first political temptation, which is a gimmick that would cause long-term harm.
Luring President Trump into a war with Iran is the second temptation. It is akin to Satan challenging Jesus to jump off a lofty temple, and rely on angels to bear him up.
In other words, a leap of faith. A leap into the unknown.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. government launched a rocket carrying three men to the moon and returned them safely to the earth. That was not a leap of faith; it was precisely calculated by natural laws which guaranteed a predetermined successful outcome.
War is not rocket science. Its consequences, political and otherwise, are not predictable.
A military maxim observes that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. Every war has unpredictable consequences.
World War II, which we recently honored on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, entailed enormous losses in American lives as commemorated every Memorial Day. The invasion that General Eisenhower defined as a Great Crusade for “the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe” resulted in 45 years of Soviet tyranny over the oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain.
Winston Churchill, heralded in England for standing strong and prevailing for freedom, became a hero of the war. But then he lost his next election in a landslide.
Yes, we have grievances with the revolutionary government of Iran. As we have with many other countries in the world, from Mexico to China.
Illegal aliens are pouring over our southern border, enticed by free medical care which California just enacted for them and by drivers licenses which New York State just gave them. These problems deserve President Trump’s undivided attention.
On November 4, 1979, Iran seized 52 American hostages and held them for 444 days until January 20, 1981. That was an act of war under international law, but the Reagan administration wisely chose not to go to war over it.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump strongly condemned the nuclear deal with Iran that John Kerry negotiated and Barack Obama implemented without the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. As president, Trump has continued to criticize the deal, officially known as the JCPOA, and has refused to certify Iran’s compliance with it.
Trump justifiably complains about how the Obama administration allowed $1.7 billion dollars in actual cash to be flown to Iran on a cargo plane, supposedly to settle a debt that had been pending since the Shah was overthrown in 1979. But that money is gone now, and there’s nothing Trump can do to get it back.
Running for president in 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump excoriated previous Republican presidents for intervening in the Middle East. He has called the decision to invade Iraq “the single worst decision ever made.”
Some Republicans were unsettled by Trump’s scathing remarks about George Bush and John McCain, but most came around to support the man who promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Now the swamp, also known as the Deep State, is making a determined effort to tempt Trump into fighting a new world war against Iran.
For his final temptation, Satan took Jesus to the mountaintop and promised the whole world if Jesus would bow down and worship him.
President Trump should heed Jesus’ terse response: “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Brits Should Listen to Trump and John Cleese
By John and Andy Schlafly
June 4, 2019
President Donald Trump’s visit to royal England is captivating the British as much as Americans, as Queen Elizabeth extends official state honors to him and his family. This is only the third time during her 67-year reign that Queen Elizabeth has welcomed an American president with such honors.
More than 150 participated in the royal feast with the Queen and the American president on Monday night. Despite all the overheated rhetoric against Trump, very few dignitaries declined to attend this fete epitomizing the Anglo-American tradition.
Dinner guests were seated precisely 18 inches from each other, and the royal family were adorned with their finest jewelry. Princess Diana’s son Harry, caught in an awkward spot between his anti-Trump American wife Meghan and the British tradition of cordiality, participated earlier that day.
The underlying politics marks a turning point for Great Britain, which is in the throes of division about its future. A majority want independence, as reflected by their vote in 2016 for Britain to exit Europe (“Brexit”), while a vocal minority want to be citizens of Europe.
This conflict is on display as one of Britain’s most famous entertainers of the last half-century, the Monty Python comedian John Cleese, criticized the loss in English identity. He tweeted last week that “some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more.”
Cleese continued, “Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it.”
For that, the internet erupted among those who demand political correctness, falsely accusing Cleese of being racist. But Cleese stood his ground, observing that “it’s legitimate to prefer one culture to another.”
Cleese is an international icon of British humor, perhaps best known for his Monty Python skit “The Ministry of Silly Walks.” In it he portrays a government worker in charge of approving grants to develop silly walks, and Cleese’s own hilarious way of walking to his job caused fans to urge him to reprise his silly walk throughout his career.
But his criticism of the wrong turn taken by London is not silly at all, and is proven by many statistics. For example, last year the murder rate in London increased to its highest level in a decade, often by gruesome stabbings and including at least one shocking murder by machete.
Cleese, though not known to be generally conservative, explained what London has become. “I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.”
The anti-Trump mayor of London who skipped the gala for Trump at Buckingham Palace, Sadiq Khan, predictably criticized Cleese’s comments. “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.”
But the London Mayor Khan went further in his personal attacks on Trump on the eve of his visit at the invitation of the Queen. Khan’s harsh rhetoric seemed contrary to the British tradition of genteel hospitality.
Mayor Khan published a strident newspaper article two days before Trump arrived, under the headline “It’s un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump.” Khan even insisted that Trump somehow “flies in the face of the ideals America was founded upon.”
Not content with those attacks on our American President, London Mayor Khan next did a video in which he insisted that Trump’s policies would somehow make women second-class citizens. Khan apparently supports legalized abortion, and asserted that Trump would cause women to have back-alley abortions.
Confronted with these potshots by the unleashed London mayor, Trump returned the favor by tweeting against Khan as Trump arrived in England. Trump compared Khan to the disastrous mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, and a greater insult is difficult to imagine.
Trump invites Britain to complete its exit from Europe without cutting any deals with the mainland, and instead look for future trade agreements with its longest ally, the United States. Trump-supporting Boris Johnson, who is the presumptive replacement of Theresa May as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, agrees with Trump that a “no deal Brexit” is the best approach.
“We will leave the [European Union] on 31 October, deal or no deal,” Johnson has declared. “The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal.”
Europe’s loss can be America’s gain. A Great Britain under the conservative, Trump-like leadership of Boris Johnson can help revive that country and enable them to afford more of their share for military defense.
Trump properly embraces English culture rather than apologizing for it. So should British royalty and all of England.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Elizabeth Warren’s Daffy Tax Proposal
By John and Andy Schlafly
May 28, 2019
Trailing in the polls, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tries to boost her presidential candidacy by proposing an unprecedented new tax. Dubbed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, Warren would force wealthy households to hand over 2% of their net worth above $50 million, plus an extra 1% on their assets above $1 billion — and not just once, but annually.
Consider how Warren’s UMT would affect a billionaire whose wealth consists of buildings like Trump Tower, the president’s 58-story landmark. The government would confiscate initially two floors per year, and would eventually own most of the building, which is what socialists want.
You might think that a wealth tax should be spent on developing infrastructure or paying down the national debt, but that is not what Warren has in mind. Her idea is to spend the extra money on undesirable programs of no lasting value, such as universal child care in government daycare centers even though most parents prefer to care for their own children at home.
Like other proposals to soak the rich with higher taxes, revenue from a wealth tax would fall far short of projections, as the rich inevitably find ways to conceal their property and shelter their income. Tax hikes result in lower economic growth, which reduces tax receipts for the government, and could actually decrease tax revenue as economist Arthur Laffer famously showed Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
A wealth tax might begin with the super-rich, but it surely won’t stay there. The same sort of trickery was used to slip through the federal income tax, which ultimately soaked the middle class more than the rich.
Opponents of the income tax in 1913 argued that the initially small tax, once it was allowed, would increase to become a massive burden on workers. They were ridiculed for predicting what did occur, as the marginal income tax rates for average Americans rose far above what most expected.
What began in 1913 as a modest 1% income tax, on people making less than today’s equivalent of a half-million dollars a year, inevitably increased through withholding to become a massive burden on working Americans. Is that a mistake anyone wants to repeat by allowing a federal tax on property?
The Framers of our Constitution included safeguards against abusive taxation by the newly created United States government. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and the other Framers supported a strong federal government, but they limited its taxing power.
The Framers gave us a Constitution that prevents Congress from directly taxing property, such as real estate. The Constitution allows such taxation only if it is apportioned based on population, which means it cannot be based solely on wealth.
Thanks to the genius of our founding fathers, the United States grew in wealth and prosperity faster than any country in the history of the world. For more than two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated attempts to tax people based on their wealth, and the Sixteenth Amendment had to be ratified before Congress could tax personal income without apportionment.
In the 2012 Obamacare case, NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts and the entire liberal wing of the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Constitution’s limitation on direct taxation of property. The Supreme Court has “continued to consider taxes on personal property to be direct taxes” which must be apportioned by population, Roberts wrote for the Court.
The Obamacare ruling confirmed that the Constitution remains a bulwark against the fundamental tenet of socialism, which is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Even the famous French economist Thomas Piketty, who endorsed Warren’s tax plan, admitted: “I realize that this is unconstitutional, but constitutions have been changed throughout history.”
A President Warren may not be able to change the written Constitution, so she has another plan to get her socialist tax implemented if she is elected. Along with other Democratic presidential candidates, Warren has endorsed a plan to pack the Supreme Court with progressive justices who share her political views.
The Democrats’ plan to expand the Supreme Court would be the same kind of politicized court-packing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought in 1937. It would end adherence to the Constitution as written by our Founders and would deprive Americans of the constitutional protection against direct taxation by the federal government.
Warren had no difficulty in finding some law professors, including her former colleague Laurence Tribe, to pretend that her socialist scheme is constitutional. But many of those same law professors also wrongly insist that there is a constitutional right to abortion, yet no constitutional right to carry a gun for self-defense.
Warren is pandering to the left-wing of the Democratic Party with her daffy tax proposal. It is socialism in disguise, and voters should not be fooled.
The Battle for Pennsylvania Begins
President Trump and Joe Biden just held dueling rallies in Pennsylvania, but the difference in enthusiasm was striking. After Biden’s campaign kickoff on Saturday drew a respectable crowd to a cordoned-off thoroughfare in downtown Philadelphia, Trump attracted thousands more to a raucous rally on Monday inside a hangar at the Williamsport Regional Airport.
Sandwiched symbolically between the two presidential front-runners was Sunday morning’s planned destruction of Bethlehem Steel’s empty former headquarters, which for 50 years was the largest building in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Trump wants to rebuild America’s manufacturing might in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, while Biden’s platform is to forget about how China has been eating America’s lunch due to bipartisan policies of globalism and free trade.
At Trump’s rally, attendees cheered as the President recognized a supporter who wore a suit designed like a red brick wall and carried a sign that said “Build me.” The elderly Biden, by contrast, was low energy and low key, oddly pleading for “unity” while denouncing Trump for “division.”
Biden’s rivals, though, are even less credible. “Beto” O’Rourke, who should be called “Beta” like an unfinished app, has dropped like a stone after launching his campaign by saying he was “born to run.”
“Born to lose” is more like it. Losing a Senate race despite having money to burn is not exactly a stepping-stone to the presidency, and “Beta” looks like a guy with zero chance of defeating the formidable Trump.
Then there is Senator Kamala Harris, a multi-racial female who has positioned herself as the most “diverse” candidate in the Democratic field. The former California attorney general, who married another California lawyer at age 50 and has no children, would be a tough sell to the ex-steelworkers and coal miners in Pennsylvania.
Kamala Harris has a radical plan to shift wages from gritty blue collar jobs typically undertaken by men, to soft, safe jobs typically filled by women. To overcome the purported pay gap between men and women, she would hit companies with fines of 1% of their profits for every 1% in the wage difference between the more dangerous male jobs and the more comfortable women’s jobs.
Her proposed interference with the jobs market includes nearly every bad idea opposed by Phyllis Schlafly, all in one package. The theory of “comparable worth” was discredited in the 1980s, but Senator Harris has renamed it “equal pay” in order to falsely imply that men and women are being paid unequally for the same work.
Harris figures that her fines would be heavy enough to generate $180 billion over 10 years, money that would be used to pay employees who take family and medical leave. Companies would be on their own to cope with the burden of hiring, training and supervising temporary replacement workers and then laying them off after the employee returns to work.
Like other socialist schemes being floated by Democratic candidates, Sen. Harris’ harmful proposal would bring the Trump jobs boom to a screeching halt. It would be particularly hurtful to men working blue-collar jobs who are rightly compensated for the higher risk and unpleasant working conditions they endure.
It is no fun working in road construction during the hot summer, as any driver can observe from the comfort of an air-conditioned car. Construction workers, who are almost entirely men, deserve to be paid more than easy jobs in plush air-conditioned facilities, which are taken mostly by women.
Equal pay for equal work has been required by federal law since 1963, and any woman who is paid less for doing the same work can hit the jackpot by suing over it. But equal pay for unequal work is unAmerican, and has been properly rejected by Congress and the federal courts.
Logging, roofing, collecting garbage, and installing power lines are difficult, unsafe jobs that result in greater compensation than secretarial jobs where the biggest risk is suffering a paper cut. Nothing prevents a woman from trying to wield a jackhammer on a hard concrete pavement, but few women want to.
Senator Harris whines that “women who work full time are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men.” But many women opt out of the workforce to raise children, so they will make less due to less job-related experience.
The steelworkers and coal miners who built Pennsylvania were mostly men. Pennsylvanians want those jobs back, but Sen. Harris’s demand that men make no more money than women will not create these jobs for men.
Billy Joel’s song “Allentown” was really about the collapse of the steel economy in nearby Bethlehem, but Allentown is easier for lyrics to rhyme with. President Trump promises to revive that Pennsylvania economy, and the immense crowds there show that he is the real music to their ears.
B-Team Dems Can Thank Hillary
The six major women candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination were supposed to be thriving by now. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar were thought to be the cream of the crop.
Instead, the Democratic "B-Team" has dominated the field: Biden, Bernie, Beto, Buttigieg and, one might add, Bezos in his role as the owner of the Democrats’ daily newspaper, The Washington Post. The weakest of them all, Joe Biden, is ostensibly running away with the nomination.
Why the domination by white men when many thought 2020 would be the year of women and minorities? The B-Team should thank Hillary for that.
Far from being a backlash against President Trump, the next election is shaping up as a backlash against Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama. Grassroots Democrats are rebelling against the relentless liberal media pressure to support a woman or diversity candidate for president.
A record-breaking 22 Democrats have announced their bids for the presidential nomination. With plenty of liberal billionaires anxious to waste their money on trying to defeat President Trump next year, there is abundant campaign cash to go around.
Trump is fine with facing off against Biden next fall, and even seems to encourage it by declaring "SleepyCreepy Joe" to be the presumptive nominee. Biden repeatedly failed miserably in his prior races for president, plagued by a habit of dishonesty and making a fool of himself.
Biden has never attained even 2% of the vote despite running twice for president, first in 1988 and then twenty years later in 2008. In 1988, he pulled out after a series of scandals involving plagiarism and dishonesty, which the media try to downplay although anyone can read about them on the internet.
Biden’s scandals were not merely that he copied the liberal British politician Neil Kinnock’s speech without giving him credit, but that Biden also misrepresented his own academic credentials on multiple occasions. In law school he once received an “F” for plagiarism, too, but was then allowed to redo the course.
The second time Biden ran for president he failed just as badly, garnering only 1% in the Iowa caucuses in 2008 before pulling out. While there are many presidents who have won after being the runner-up in prior primaries, it is difficult to find an example of someone who fared so poorly but then won later.
If elected, Biden would turn 78 before Inauguration Day, and would serve half his term while in his 80s. There is nothing youthful about his political positions either, which are a contradictory hodgepodge to which the base of the Democratic Party is mostly opposed.
Despite all this, early polling suggests that many Democrats think Biden is better than the leftist, even socialist, alternatives. The remainder of the B-Team is even less electable than Biden.
Bernie Sanders, for example, spent his honeymoon in the communist Soviet Union, which is not exactly the kind of passion that commends one to become president of the United States. But many thought Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie last time, only to disappoint Democrats in the general election against Trump.
Then there is Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who grew up as the only son of an immigrant Marxist professor. Although technically not a “red diaper baby,” which is a term for the child of a member of the Communist Party, Buttigieg is a second-generation opponent of our free market system that has brought Americans so much prosperity.
So where are the women candidates who thought they would lead this race? Elizabeth Warren is one of the women far behind the B-Team in the polling, and now she desperately tries to get attention by bashing Fox News while refusing to do a town hall sponsored by Fox as her rivals have.
Warren absurdly tweeted that “Fox News is a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists—it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life & death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class.”
Next is Kirsten Gillibrand, who blames “gender bias” for her poor performance in polling of Democrats. “I think people are generally biased against women. I think also biased against young women,” she pompously declared.
The real reason is not “gender bias,” but a backlash by Democrats against Hillary Clinton for taking them down the road to a crushing defeat in 2016. In 2018, other feminist Democrat senators also lost, in humiliating landslides, in North Dakota and Missouri.
Instead of blaming “gender bias,” the Democratic women might instead blame the well-justified fear of giving the nomination to another radical feminist in the mold of Hillary Clinton.
ERA Dresses Up with No Place to Go
Congress and a few state legislatures are holding staged hearings on the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a relic from the 1970s like disco music and long lines at gas stations. Almost no one wants to return to that era, or to resurrect the long-buried ERA.
But a few dinosaurs never got over their defeat, and a few newbies do not understand why ERA lost. The House Judiciary Committee held a one-sided hearing on Tuesday to reintroduce this amendment although it has no chance of garnering a 2/3rds supermajority in either house of Congress.
Apparently someone noticed that the original ERA lacked the word “women,” and would not have done anything for them. Instead, as Phyllis Schlafly pointed out in defeating it, ERA would have harmed women in numerous ways, including requiring them to register for military service just like men.
This time around, the newly introduced ERA begins with a specific reference to women in addition to its original phrase “on account of sex.” The new wording is silent about transgenders and sexual orientation, but pro-ERA witnesses at the House hearing declared that ERA’s language would protect them too.
Americans are more aware today of the havoc that courts can cause with judicial activism, which Phyllis Schlafly called judicial supremacy. ERA would authorize liberal judges to strike down any law or government program benefiting women or making reasonable, fact-based distinctions between the sexes.
Women’s shelters, for example, would no longer be permissible under ERA any more than a shelter could be segregated by race. Homeless men would have a constitutional right to stay in women’s shelters.
Young men could demand a right to play in women’s sports, especially those in public colleges and high schools. If girls’ swimming, basketball, field hockey, and other sports are open to boys, it would ruin the fair opportunity for girls to compete in athletics.
Taxpayer-funded abortion, a litmus test for radical feminists, fell just one vote short of becoming a constitutional right in a 1980 decision of the Supreme Court. If ERA became part of the Constitution, federal courts would impose taxpayer-funded abortion nationwide.
Some say the feminists have achieved much of their agenda without the Equal Rights Amendment. After all, Hillary Clinton nearly became president, numerous women are running for president in 2020, and there is no shortage of women in Congress and corporate boardrooms.
But feminists are still not happy, because most women still prefer to care for their children even if that reduces their career opportunities. Stay-at-home moms are respected today, and American women stay home in higher percentages than in comparable industrialized nations.
Phyllis Schlafly rightly saw ERA as a threat to young women who want to start a family with a husband as the primary breadwinner. Phyllis’s unique message about the need to protect a woman’s right to make that choice first took root in 1975, after which only one state ratified ERA before its expiration.
In that same year of 1975 the percentage of women aged 16-24 in the workforce began to level off. Since 2000, the percentage of all women participating in the workforce has fallen as more choose to stay at home.
Without ERA, the Soviet-style practice of the average woman having multiple abortions so that she can return immediately to the workforce never transpired here. We were spared another feminist goal, also borrowed from the old Soviet Union, of having children raised in government daycare centers at taxpayer expense.
Without ERA, we are still allowed to have all-girl public schools and classes, which studies show produce high-achieving women. More than a thousand girls annually attend the Philadelphia High School for Girls, which has thrived since 1848 and has produced many women judges, prominent musicians, and other standouts.
None of this would be possible if ERA were ratified. Nor would our all-male registration system for our military, from which women are excused, be lawful if ERA were part of our Constitution.
Sensing that a new ERA has no chance of being passed by a supermajority in Congress, radical feminists are also trying to push the original ERA through state legislatures even though its deadline expired more than 40 years ago. The original ERA required 38 states to pass it by March 22, 1979, to become part of the Constitution.
Many states expressly relied on that deadline in their own resolutions, which means those old ratifications have expired. Congress attempted to extend the deadline until June 30, 1982, but a federal judge declared that to be invalid.
Nearly every time that ERA was placed on the ballot, voters rejected it, including in the liberal states of Vermont, New York, and New Jersey. ERA fell out of fashion in the mid-1970s, and is even less fashionable today.
High Noon for Citizenship at High Court
By John and Andy Schlafly
April 23, 2019
It was high drama on Tuesday at the Supreme Court as the Justices heard what many consider to be the most important case of the Term. At issue is whether the upcoming 2020 census will be allowed to include the following question: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
The census includes questions about race, sex, and age; whether a resident is a U.S. citizen is just as important as other demographic details. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out during oral argument on Tuesday, other countries routinely ask their residents about citizenship in a census.
Fellow Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch indicated his support for allowing the question about citizenship. Justice Alito seemed on board too, and Justice Thomas is expected to join this conservative bloc.
But liberals have created an uproar over this issue, and questioning from the Left side of the Court was hostile and intense. Obama-appointed Justices Kagan and Sotomayor complained that the record compiled by the lower court did not support asking about citizenship.
At trial, an Obama-appointed judge named Jesse Furman impugned Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for authorizing the citizenship question. The district judge declared that Ross had somehow “violated the public trust” by including this question, even though similar questions have been asked many times in the past.
That smear of Trump Cabinet member Ross was unfair, but the litigation machine on the Left have obtained additional federal court rulings to block President Trump’s citizenship question. No one can be deported for truthfully answering the question about citizenship on the census, but we would learn how many illegal residents there really are and where.
In the case simply captioned “Department of Commerce v. New York,” the Supreme Court showed signs of a 5-4 majority to overturn the trial verdict in New York against Secretary Ross and the Trump Administration. This could deliver by the end of June Trump’s biggest court victory of his presidency to date.
“Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all important Citizenship Question,” Trump tweeted earlier this month. “Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it costs to put together!”
Meaningless indeed, and potentially even worse than that, as a census which fails to ask about citizenship inflates the bona fide populations of California and New York, to the detriment of many other states. Illegal aliens are counted in those states as though they were citizens, and New York and California soak up tax dollars this way.
Democrats brag that they won the popular vote in the last election, but they actually lost that vote in the 49 states outside of California. It is no coincidence that some of the most outspoken opponents of having a count that distinguishes between citizens and aliens include the attorney general of that vast sanctuary state.
Fewer lawful residents means less funding, and if illegals duck the census to avoid the question then this could reduce the numbers of Electoral College votes and congressmen for California and New York. Their influence would then shrink, and they would take fewer federal dollars in entitlements if the citizenship question is asked in the census.
Beneficiaries of including a citizenship question in the census would be all American citizens who are entitled to full representation without dilution of their vote or their tax dollars. That includes middle America, also known as Trump Country.
The Department of Justice pointed out that an accurate count of citizens would even be helpful to enforcing the Voting Rights Act, to the benefit of minorities who are American citizens. But the Democrat leadership cares more about preserving their own political power, which counting citizens threatens.
Despite being a magnet for immigration, Democrat control of New York has driven away many citizens over the past decade. Between July 2017 and July 2018, New York State actually lost population, and population growth in California is below the national average.
Kris Kobach has long championed the inclusion of the citizenship question in the census, along with laws requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Our nation should be governed by its citizens, not by people who reside illegally inside our borders.
Democrats fear that conservative states will use the census question to redraw their state legislative districts in proportion to who is a citizen, thereby reducing representation for urban areas boosted by the presence of illegal aliens. Justice Gorsuch alluded to this, which the Supreme Court allowed in Evenwel v. Abbott (2016).
Cities currently have an incentive, both financially and politically, to harbor illegal aliens. Better data on who is a citizen and who is not would help end that racket.
Gas Tax Hike: Dumber than Dumb
Still smarting from how President Trump crushed its phony free trade agenda, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has come up with something even dumber. Led by its anti-Trumper president Tom Donohue, the Chamber has proposed a 25-cent increase in the federal gas tax.
William Weld, who just announced his absurd challenge to Trump for the Republican nomination, presided over a gas tax increase when he was governor of Massachusetts in 1991. That state became known as Taxachusetts with a massive exodus of residents following Weld’s unhappy tenure.
Yet already some liberal Republicans are biting the bait of increasing the taxes on gas. If adopted, this would facilitate a Democratic landslide in 2020.
Gas taxes are immensely unpopular with President Trump’s middle-class supporters, many of whom drive long distances to support their families. They also tend to go on driving trips, such as family summer vacations, and a gas tax increase would disrupt their plans.
Limousine liberals and government workers would barely feel the pinch of a gas tax as they ride the taxpayer-funded D.C. Metro. They would be fine with higher gas taxes, while swing voters who decide elections are hit the hardest.
A large share of the gas tax is diverted to subways, trains and buses. Car drivers who already pay enormous state and federal taxes should not be forced to further subsidize public transportation.
The federal gas tax is currently 18.4 cents a gallon, and all the states tack on a whopping additional tax of their own. In Pennsylvania, its state gas tax is an additional 58.2 cents a gallon.
The “yellow vest” demonstrations that have turned Paris upside down were primarily a protest against high gas taxes in France. Even in liberal Washington State, its voters defeated a carbon tax by 56 to 44 percent last November, and by a wider margin in 2016.
The wasteful way that government fails to maintain roads is the real problem, and hiking gas taxes will not repair that. A familiar sight on interstate highways is the many construction sites that lack real work activity, diverting traffic longer than they should.
In this era of Uber and Lyft, electric and hybrid vehicles, as well as humongous tandem tractor trailers, the gasoline tax is no longer a fair way to pay for our highways. Roads should be funded by those who use them, with variable fees that depend on cost and time of day.
The Dulles Greenway in Virginia is an example of a successful private highway which connects Washington Dulles Airport to Leesburg, Virginia. It has an electronic system for collecting tolls from riders, who enjoy its convenient and efficient access.
In this 21st century, drivers can pay electronically with their smartphones based on their GPS-tracked travel. That efficiency would help deter the massive commuter traffic jams that currently plague our public highways.
The practice of some cities, such as Chicago, to enter into long-term leases of its roads to a foreign owner is not the right approach. A consortium of Canadian pension funds owns the Chicago Skyway toll road, which may be preferable to government ownership but raises questions as to why an American owner was not found for it.
Politicians who have suggested a national carbon tax are not popular either, and anti-Trump Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) was defeated for reelection after he endorsed that bad idea. A carbon tax is on the amount of carbon in energy sources, primarily fossil fuels.
A carbon tax would be imposed on the suppliers of the energy, particularly oil, coal, and natural gas. But this tax would then be passed on to consumers in the form of higher heating and air-conditioning costs, and higher gas prices at the pump.
The same concept of increasing the gas tax is already being pursued by liberal states such as California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Each of those states have enacted or are considering sharp increases in their own state gas tax, in addition to the federal tax.
In New Jersey, the gas tax was increased by 23 cents a gallon in 2016, and then an additional 4.3 cents last year. Yet another gas tax increase there is possible later this year, with little to show for it except angrier drivers.
In California, where prices already average an eye-popping $3.80 per gallon, a new state tax of 5.6 cents per gallon will hit this summer. Legislation in the Illinois state senate proposes doubling the gas tax there, to 38 cents a gallon.
When the price of a good goes up, demand for the good goes down and a smaller amount is sold. An increase in gas taxes means fewer car trips, less shopping, a decline in summer family vacations on the road, and millions of angry daily commuters who vote.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Gun Control Goes Stealth
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 19, 2019
The horrific massacre at the New Zealand mosque has incited demands for gun control there, but surprisingly not here in the United States. The contestants for the Democratic presidential nomination have been remarkably silent on the issue of the Second Amendment.
Cat got their tongue? They have been leapfrogging each other to go far left on other issues, ranging from climate change to immigration.
Their liberal base must be stultified at the candidates’ deafening silence on this central issue of the Democratic Party Platform, which calls for bans on “assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines.” Three weeks ago the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the most sweeping gun control legislation in 20 years.
But leading Democrats fear a repeat of 2000, when they loudly demanded gun control in the wake of the Columbine high school shooting. Then came Charlton Heston’s famous performance at the NRA convention at which he publicly warned that nominee Al Gore would grab Heston’s guns only “from my cold, dead hands!”
Heston, who had won an Academy Award for his role in Ben-Hur and also starred in The Ten Commandments, campaigned against Gore on the issue of guns. Gore then backpedaled on the issue, pretending that he would not grab people’s guns while many voters knew that he and his party would do just that.
On Election Day in 2000 Gore then lost his home state of Tennessee, where the right to bear arms is paramount. That cost him the presidency against George W. Bush.
This time the Democratic presidential candidates are lying low on the issue of gun control until after the presidential election. Democrats are looking for more stealth ways to erode the Second Amendment, to fly undetected on the radar of most American voters.
The first way is to pack the Supreme Court with Democrat nominees. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has endorsed this approach, and there is even a new group called “Pack the Court.”
Multiple Democratic presidential contenders, from Elizabeth Warren to Beto O’Rourke, are open to the idea. If one of them were to defeat President Trump while their party takes Congress, they might add new justices to the Supreme Court to erode the Second Amendment.
Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt floated a similar idea in 1937 for a different reason, and his own party resoundingly rejected it then. But in those days the Democratic Party actually represented working Americans.
The Supreme Court could soon be presented with an appeal from the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that the gun manufacturer Remington can be held liable for the Sandy Hook massacre. The Second Amendment will not mean much if gun manufacturers are driven out of business for crimes they never intended.
The second approach is to call a constitutional convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, at which delegates could support an amendment to repeal the Second Amendment entirely. Hawaii legislators attempted this approach with a resolution.
In both Australia and Great Britain, massacres enabled gun control forces to push through tight new restrictions on guns. Their entire political culture then shifted to the left as voters became less self-reliant and more dependent on government.
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic,” wrote longtime Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1833. He explained that the Second Amendment “offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Chelsea Clinton was met with criticism by students at New York University who blamed the carnage at the New Zealand mosque on her gentle criticism of the Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN). So apparently President Trump is no longer the culprit for everything in the minds of Leftists anymore.
New Zealand itself is turning its sights on Facebook, Google and Twitter for how they provided an unregulated channel for the mass-murderer to live-stream his killings. Internet users then copied and reposted the hideous videos before those companies could take them down.
As three of the most liberal corporations in America, these Silicon Valley behemoths were slow to react to the New Zealand live-streaming. One reason may be that they devote much of their resources to censoring legitimate political speech.
Facebook admitted that a high-resolution video of the attack was uploaded 1.5 million times within the first 24 hours, and that 300,000 of these were unblocked. The mass murderer used its platform to promote his heinous crime live.
Multiple prior killings were done by others who touted their evil deeds on Facebook. Yet there are no calls to ban Facebook, the way that liberals demand gun control.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
The Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 12, 2019
While Congress considers new infringements on constitutional rights for a new Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), they overlook where the most violence is occurring. The New York Times recently featured an exposé about how nearly every woman is raped during their migration from Central America to our open southern border.
Shutting the border is the only way that the United States can protect those women. That would take away the incentive for the long, dangerous journey.
Yet House Democrats want nothing of that remedy to stop violence against women. Instead, Democrats push for more infringements on the rights of Americans as part of a proposed new VAWA.
In their subcommittee hearing on March 7, House Democrats were uninterested in the terrible violence against women resulting from their insistence on an open southern border. The minority Republicans were allowed to invite only one witness, and she did not address the violence among migrants either.
An organization called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has proposed numerous sensible reforms to the now-expired VAWA law, which was causing more harm than good. For starters, the prior law lacked a clear, appropriate definition of what it even meant when it referred to violence against women.
The Obama Administration defined domestic violence very broadly to include conduct that was not violent at all, such as alleged economic, emotional, or psychological abuse. Fortunately, the Department of Justice in the Trump Administration has sensibly clarified the meaning of domestic violence to include only conduct that would be a felony or misdemeanor if charged as a crime.
Inclusion of non-violent behavior then becomes a means for grabbing guns from men, and imposing automatic sentences in prison if they are found to have any guns. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham announced last week that his committee will hold a hearing on March 26 on “red flag” laws, which give government special power to seize and confiscate guns from individuals whom someone thinks might be dangerous.
The First Amendment is at risk, too, in this planned reauthorization of VAWA. Proposed expansions to the law include authorizing federal monitoring of internet communications, under the guise of punishing cyber stalking and so-called bullying.
That could result in censorship of the internet as prosecutions are brought against communications which the federal agents might consider to be inappropriate. The freewheeling online environment that makes it so popular could be chilled by a new VAWA.
Even President Trump’s colorful tweets against the women who are vying for the Democratic nomination to run against him might be considered cyberbullying, depending on how VAWA is rewritten. Robert Mueller might need to be recalled into service to do a new investigation into tweeting by Trump and his supporters.
Liberal women attempt to make VAWA a women’s issue, but in fact intimate partner violence against men is comparable in frequency to violence against women, according to a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). More importantly, domestic violence has been decreasing for decades, prior to the billions of dollars of handouts by VAWA to feminist groups.
One’s home with a spouse has always been the safest place for both men and women, and spousal murder is very rare. Yet VAWA trained workers to separate domestic couples, and file a complaint against men which often causes them to lose their jobs and their employability.
Women, once their partner is going to lose his job that supported both of them, then try to stop the harmful VAWA process and withdraw the accusations. But laws make that impossible, such that the women are greatly harmed by the loss in the men’s jobs that VAWA causes.
The abusive “ex parte” court orders under VAWA, which are issued without the man being in court to defend himself against false accusations, would probably expand under a new VAWA. Recall how late-night comedian David Letterman discovered in 2005 that a woman in Sante Fe had obtained a restraining order against him.
The woman insisted that Letterman had used code words on his television show to communicate that he wanted to marry her, and have her become his co-host. She said Letterman had been mentally cruel to her and caused her to endure sleep deprivation for more than a decade.
A New Mexico state judge granted the woman’s demand for an ex parte restraining order, and it became a humorous topic for Letterman’s show. His attorneys were able to reverse the court order, but most men do not have the luxury of time, money, and influence that a television celebrity has.
Perhaps VAWA should be considered under a new name that more accurately describes how it infringes on First and Second Amendment rights, in addition to turning women against men. How about calling it the “Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act”?
ISIS Bride Is Not an American Citizen
The case of the ISIS bride, Hoda Muthana, could result in a landmark ruling on what it means to be an American citizen and who has rights to that precious status. After spending five years in Syria with ISIS, the terrorist group also known as the Islamic State, Ms. Muthana wants to come back to the United States.
She was born in New Jersey to parents who had come here from Yemen under diplomatic immunity. Her father had worked for Yemen’s mission to the United States.
Children born in the United States to diplomats from foreign countries are not American citizens, under a longstanding rule of law. Not even advocates of open borders dispute that.
Yet many people mistakenly assume that being born on U.S. soil is enough to become a citizen, which is simply not true. The case of the ISIS bride, who moved to Alabama and from there joined ISIS, confronts this legal issue in a high-profile case.
Raised in the United States, Hoda was 19 when she told her parents she was going on a field trip as part of a college course she was taking. Instead she withdrew from college and used her tuition refund to buy a one-way ticket to Turkey, then somehow made her way to ISIS-held territory in Syria.
While in war-torn Syria she apparently met and married an ISIS fighter, and after he was killed, she married another ISIS fighter. During this period she posted a series of blood-curdling tweets, which have since been deleted by Twitter.
“Americans wake up!” Muthana tweeted in 2015 from ISIS-held territory in Syria. “Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Kill them.”
She witnessed dead bodies lying about in Syrian streets where ISIS had murdered them. She observed heads severed by ISIS and planted on poles in order terrify opponents of ISIS.
When her second husband was killed, leaving her pregnant, Hoda married yet a third ISIS fighter. She left that husband and was captured by Kurdish forces, who placed her and her 18-month-old son in a massive refugee camp in northeast Syria with thousands of other widows and children.
Life is hard in the refugee camp, where women are punished if they step outside their tent without wearing a hijab or burqa. Not long after calling for death to Americans, Hoda has since decided that “I prefer America to anywhere else.”
To President Trump, Hoda’s recent remorse seems a little too convenient. “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Trump tweeted two weeks ago.
The same day Secretary Pompeo declared that “Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”
The following day, a 32-page, 128-paragraph lawsuit against President Trump and Secretary Pompeo was filed by the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America. Yesterday, lawyers pressed their claim before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.
Her lawyers pointed out that Hoda had been issued a U.S. passport in 2014, without which she could not have traveled to Syria. But Judge Walton said that “just because she received a U.S. passport does not mean she is a U.S. citizen,” and he denied her request to expedite her case.
“The government informed Muthana more than three years ago that she is not a citizen and canceled her erroneously issued passport,” Pompeo’s lawyers told the court. “Muthana -- who was at the time a member of ISIS -- failed to act timely in response to that notification, [and] remained in a war zone through hostilities for a period of years.”
“She was born to parents who enjoyed diplomatic-agent-level immunity at that time of her birth, so she did not and could not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth,” Pompeo explained to the court.
“The Man Without a Country” tells the story of a young American who, after renouncing his citizenship, is ordered to spend the rest of his life aboard ships at sea with no hope of ever setting foot on U.S. soil again. One of the most popular literary works of the nineteenth century, it was later adapted for a number of movies, radio and television dramas, and even an opera.
The ISIS bride is a modern version of the same story, except that she is not doomed to roam the seas with no place to go. Perhaps she could settle in her parents’ country of Yemen or remain in Syria, but she has no rights to citizenship in the United States.
Unfair Trans Competition in Girls’ Sports
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 26, 2019
Boys have clear athletic advantages over girls, both on average and among the best. The higher levels of testosterone and muscle mass in boys enable them to run faster and jump higher than girls can.
Martina Navratilova won 18 grand slam titles in women’s tennis, the fifth most ever. She has also been an outspoken supporter of gay rights, but the unfairness of men competing as transgendered women has sparked her ire.
Navratilova recently called it “cheating,” “insane,” and “it would not be fair” to allow transgender women to compete in women’s tennis. Yet the rules of the International Olympic Committee allow men who claim to be transgendered to compete in women’s sports, if their testosterone levels remain below a certain level.
A backlash from the transgender community then resulted despite how she merely stated the obvious. For that she was called “transphobic” and removed from the advisory board of Athlete Ally, which supports transgendered athletes.
Many other women and girls are also crying foul about the unfairness of transgendered athletes in women’s and girls’ sports. There was an outcry in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, when the top finishers in the indoor state championship for the 55-meter dash for high school girls were two transgendered girls, formerly boys.
The “winner” broke the girls’ record, finishing the race in 6.95 seconds. Connecticut is one of 17 states that has no restrictions on boys, who claim to be transgender, competing in girls’ sports.
The same transgendered former boys also finished first and second in the state championship for the 100-meter dash last year. Meanwhile, girls who would have won trophies – and perhaps college scholarships – were unfairly denied them.
The top six 55-yard dash finishers then qualified for the New England regional races. Selina Soule, who would have qualified for the regional races if the transgenders were not counted, lost that opportunity.
“We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing,” Miss Soule said. “They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair,” she added.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would require all 50 states to allow this unfair form of competition, if it ever became part of the Constitution. The Virginia House of Delegates defeated ERA last week, but by only one vote in a 50-50 tie.
Under ERA, no law or governmental entity can make any distinctions based on sex. That means it would become impossible for girls’ sports to keep boys out.
Led by Phyllis Schlafly, conservatives defeated ERA in the 1970s, and its deadline for ratification expired in 1979. Congress improperly attempted to extend the deadline until June 30, 1982, but no states ratified it during the extra three years.
The expiration of the deadline for ERA, however, has not stopped radical feminists from trying to ratify it now, four decades later. ERA would cause more unfairness in girls’ sports, as it has done in Massachusetts where they have a state version of ERA.
There, muscular young men routinely break girls’ records in girls’ sports. In one championship game in Massachusetts a young man caused a concussion to a girls' field hockey goalie while scoring a goal to defeat her team.
Meanwhile, an example of the havoc that ERA would require emanated from a federal court in Houston on February 22. Senior District Judge Gray H. Miller, an appointee of President George W. Bush, declared that the Selective Service system was discriminatory in not requiring women to register for a possible draft.
“Combat roles no longer uniformly require sheer size or muscle,” the Court found. With similar strange arguments the Court declared that there is no justification for Congress to draft men unless women are also drafted.
If ERA were ever ratified, then courts would be required to rule against a men-only draft. As Phyllis Schlafly often argued in the 1970s, ERA would compel drafting women just like men, or forcing women to register for the Selective Service just like men.
Without ERA, the recent federal court decision can be successfully appealed, in this case to the Fifth Circuit. President Trump has placed five conservative judges on that court, which seems almost certain to overturn this decision invalidating our all-male Selective Service system.
Without ERA, the unfair intrusion of transgenders into girls’ sports can be solved by legislation forbidding it. Notice how transgendered former girls are not breaking records in boys’ sports.
Fortunately, ERA is not merely one state away from ratification, as some fake news headlines promote. For ERA to become part of the Constitution, Congress would need to pass it by two-thirds supermajorities, and then 38 states would need to ratify it anew, which should never happen.
The Wall Versus Judicial Supremacy
“We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it’s unacceptable,” President Trump said last Friday. “It’s very simple. We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country.”
It was from the White House Rose Garden that President Trump delivered those remarks, on the eve of the 3-day weekend for Washington’s Birthday. He campaigned for president on securing the southern border of the United States, and he plans to do precisely that for the American people.
Consider just one day’s traffic at a single section of the border that lacks a physical barrier. Among those caught crossing into Texas on February 7 were a Mexican previously convicted in Georgia for child molestation, a Honduran previously convicted in North Carolina for “indecent liberties with child,” and another Honduran who was previously identified in Florida as a member of MS-13.
The federal police agency known as ICE, which stands for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” reports that some 266,000 aliens with criminal records were arrested in the past two years. This agency also arrested 1,500 aliens for human trafficking and deported 10,000 known or suspected gang members in the last fiscal year, yet many Democrats want to abolish this protective agency.
At remote sectors of the border in Arizona and New Mexico, large numbers of Central Americans, mostly from Honduras and Guatemala, are being dropped off by the busload and who then cross on foot. The Border Patrol reports that 242 people were arrested on January 24, while 375 people crossed near Yuma and another 306 entered through New Mexico.
Many of the illegal arrivals were very sick with contagious diseases, and their health problems overwhelmed the facilities available in small towns near the border. The Border Patrol reports that 2,224 migrants, mostly from Central America, had to be driven three hours to the nearest hospital for treatment that could not be provided on site.
The ongoing invasion, as Trump correctly described it, is unacceptable and cannot be allowed to continue. The president is right to declare a national emergency on the border, which permits him to reallocate some additional funds from other parts of the federal budget after the $1.375 billion approved by the Nancy Pelosi Congress runs out.
“Look, I expect to be sued,” Trump said, and within minutes of his speech, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero announced he would be filing a lawsuit this week. The ACLU lawsuit would add to lawsuits already filed by California and something called the Center for Biological Diversity.
“They will sue us in the 9th Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there,” Trump said prophetically, referring to the California-based court. “And we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling. And then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court, and we’ll win.”
The lawsuits ought to be laughed out of court, even in the Ninth Circuit. Presidents have declared 58 national emergencies since 1976, when Congress gave the president that power, and 31 of them are still in effect.
Never before has a judge tried to second-guess a president’s declaration that a national emergency exists, and no court should be allowed to enter those uncharted waters now. Congress gave that power to the president with no limit on the reasons for which an emergency can be declared.
But never before have we had a president willing to stand up to the globalists, the media, and the federal courts. The real showdown between President Trump and the federal judiciary has begun.
President Trump is right that he wants to be before the Supreme Court on this issue, and not be stuck in lower federal courts handpicked by his opponents who forum-shop by choosing where to file their lawsuit. The ordinary appeals process would not enable the Supreme Court to decide this issue until after the next presidential election.
In the meantime, Democrats would campaign against Trump by using lower court rulings that predictably take the liberal side. Trump’s legal strategy should anticipate this, and seek an expedited appeal that bypasses the liberal Second, Fourth, Ninth or D.C. Circuits, which are packed with anti-Trump judges.
To no one’s surprise, sixteen liberal states chose San Francisco as the location for their lawsuit to block Trump. Only one out of 14 active judges on that court was appointed by a Republican president, giving Democrats roughly a 93% chance of having a judge picked by Obama or Clinton decide their case.
But all litigants have the right to appeal a preliminary injunction immediately, and the Department of Justice should start preparing those papers now. The appeal should be straight to the Supreme Court to ensure a decision before the 2020 presidential election.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Liberals Censor Free Speech about Diversity
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 29, 2019
Another day, another innocent person is destroyed by the social media mob for an innocuous expression of free speech. The apostles of diversity police our speech and aggressively enforce a speech code according to “politically correct” liberal dogmas.
First it was Congressman Steve King (R-IA), who was wrongly ostracized by his colleagues for wondering when the term Western Civilization became offensive. A week later it was 15-year-old Nick Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic High School, who was confronted at the March for Life by a “tribal elder” banging a drum.
Next in the hot seat was the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father John I. Jenkins. He kowtowed to the Native American Student Association by agreeing to cover up 12 large murals that depict Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World.
The latest victim of self-appointed guardians of diversity was the 78-year-old liberal journalist Tom Brokaw, the longtime NBC anchor. Brokaw, an icon of television news, is also known for chronicling the “greatest generation” of Americans who won World War II and came home to build the greatest country in the world.
In a rare appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, Brokaw commented that “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. They ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English.”
The response to Brokaw’s good advice was fast and furious, to borrow a phrase from the Mexican gun-running operation approved by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. That improper operation, which was politically motivated to justify gun control, instead resulted in the 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Aura Bogado, who is described as an investigative immigration reporter at Reveal, said Brokaw was “arguing classic white supremacist talking points in a deeply racist rant on national television.” Julio Ricardo Varela, the founder of LatinoRebels.com, said “It really was a punch in the gut to a lot of people.”
“It was not only factually incorrect, it was also xenophobia in action,” Varela added in his criticism of Brokaw. Liberal commentator Maria Cardona called Brokaw “a little out of touch.”
Cardona also insisted, unpersuasively, that “Latinos absolutely assimilate.” If that were really true, Latinos would be speaking English, but many of them aren’t.
Brokaw’s fellow commentator on Meet the Press, PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor, said: “We need to adjust what we think of as America. The idea that Americans can only speak English, as if Spanish and other languages wasn’t always part of America, is in some ways troubling.”
People who cannot speak, understand, read and write English will never be able to advance socially, economically or politically in our country. It’s not true that “Spanish and other languages” were “always part of America,” given that none of the Founding Fathers spoke or wrote in Spanish.
Within a few hours the liberal Brokaw went on an apology tour on Twitter, tweeting that he is “truly sorry” for his remarks, which he said were “offensive to many.” “I never intended to disparage any segment of our rich, diverse society which defines who we are,” Brokaw continued.
Brokaw even apologized to fellow panelist Yamiche Alcindor, saying she’s a “wonderful colleague and an important voice,” despite the fact that Alcindor’s views were directly contradictory to Brokaw’s. Like many Hispanic activists and lobbyists, Alcindor rejected the whole idea of assimilation.
On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera took a different tack, claiming that Hispanics are actually “assimilating at a rate that’s faster than any other ethnic group in our history.” But the official numbers from the Census Bureau show otherwise.
The American Community Survey enables the Census Bureau to track the number of households who self-report that they speak a language other than English at home. The fraction of U.S. households answering yes to that question has risen steadily over the last three decades, reaching 22 percent in 2017 (the last year numbers are available), which is double the 11 percent in 1980.
Most of the non-English speaking households are concentrated in a few areas close to our southern border, plus a few of our largest northern cities. In 39 U.S. counties, a majority of residents report that they speak a language other than English at home.
Many of those who speak another language at home claim they also speak English well or very well, but further studies have shown that is not the case. Nearly half were found to speak English at a level below basic, also known as functional illiteracy.
Spanish is presumed to be the common language south of the border, but among the people who arrived most recently, many did not speak or understand Spanish. They spoke only indigenous languages such as Q’eqchi’, which meant that U.S. officials were required to find translators to provide medical care.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Never-Trumpers Harm Innocent Victims
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 22, 2019
As Democrats announce their plans to run against President Trump next year, the partisan hysteria against the president grows more intense. Opposition to Trump now justifies, in the eyes of some, a vicious drive-by smearing of innocent high-school boys wearing MAGA hats.
The students were attending the 46th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., after riding the bus all night from Covington, Kentucky. Despite the grueling 36-hour trip to D.C. and back, the boys were in high spirits, and their faces were ruddy from a day outside in the winter cold.
As they waited patiently at their designated pick-up location for the overnight bus back to Kentucky, the boys were rudely accosted by a group that even the leftwing Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned as “racist” and “black supremacist.”
The aggressive protesters, who call themselves Black Hebrew Israelites, taunted the boys for nearly an hour with vile insults against them and their Catholic religion. The boys were singled out because they were white, Christian, and wearing President Trump’s favorite hat.
Anti-Catholic taunts peppered the inhumane heckling, which has been underreported but can be found online. Had those same insults been lobbed against any other ethnic or religious group, liberals would have defended the students.
The boys “turned the other cheek” throughout the unexpected encounter. Eventually, they asked their adult chaperones for permission to sing their school cheers as a break from the protesters’ profanity.
Despite the vile insults hurled at them, the young men admirably remained polite and peaceful in response. Then an Indian “elder” invaded their space and began beating his war drum right in the face of one of the high school students, who held the Indian’s gaze with a pleasant, peaceful smile.
To describe the behavior of the drum-beater as impolite would be an understatement. If he was merely trying to defuse the situation, as he claimed later, why didn’t he beat his drum in the face of one of the anti-Trump instigators?
The ultimate injustice was then inflicted by the liberal media, which excoriated the boys nationwide. Anti-Trumpers savaged the boys and their families on social media, to the detriment of the entire Covington Catholic High School including students who were not even there.
Kentucky Republican congressman Tom Massie heroically defended his young constituents from the onslaught, but Democrats and some Republicans were too quick to unjustly criticize the students. Massie’s Democratic colleague John Yarmuth tweeted, “I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of teenagers wearing MAGA hats. They seem to be poisoning young minds.”
Criticized for his call for unconstitutional censorship, Rep. Yarmuth then claimed it was merely a joke. But he continued to pile on against the students from his own state of Kentucky, saying that “I believe these kids acted inappropriately, whether they were provoked or not.”
The full video revealed that the young men had acted properly throughout the afternoon. But if the additional videos had not fortuitously emerged, the lives of these students could have been destroyed by the rush to judgment in the fake news media.
In a since-deleted tweet, Never-Trumper Bill Kristol decried “the behavior of #MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism.” Other Republicans, such as those running the once-conservative National Review, were also incredibly harsh in their criticism of the young men in posts that were later removed.
President Trump was not fooled by the fake news that smeared the young men. He tweeted that “Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be.”
In a refreshing rejection of the guilty-if-the-media-says-so mindset of his critics, President Trump observed that the students “have captivated the attention of the world, and I know they will use it for the good.” He added that this unfair treatment of the students may help “even to bring people together.”
The March for Life leadership disgracefully abandoned these volunteers who attended at significant hardship. The event organizers should have been the first to stand up for their own participants, but instead initially sided against the students.
The Covington high school closed on Tuesday due to a torrent of threats. Meanwhile, the Catholic diocese there fanned the flames of injustice by initially posting a statement threatening expulsion of the boys and even apologizing to the Native American activist who beat his drum relentlessly in a student’s face.
The Mayor of Covington should have stood up for the students from his own area. Instead, he referred to the conduct by the students as somehow being “appalling.”
The contrast is stark between President Trump and the Never-Trumpers. Unlike his critics, President Trump defends those who are unjustly smeared by the media.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Making the Census Great Again
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 15, 2019
“Is this person a citizen of the United States?” This 2020 census question, or something similar, was asked on the decennial census from 1820 through 1950, and afterward on the long-form census through 2000.
Even now, and ever since 2005, a citizenship question has been included in the annual American Community Survey (ACS) by the federal government. Not even President Obama stopped that.
So why all the fuss about this citizenship question now? Apparently opposition to President Trump means opposition to virtually everything he does, and resorting to judicial activism to stymie Trump in every way possible.
The census is used to apportion the Electoral College and representation in Congress, so there is political significance to puffing up the population count for California and other sanctuary states by including illegal aliens as legal residents. Dollars are also at stake because more people in a state mean more federal dollars flowing to it.
The census must count every person living in the United States, but citizens and aliens should be counted separately in every state and electoral district. President Trump, through his Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, restored this question about citizenship to the 2020 census, and a barrage of lawsuits ensued to stop it.
There is nothing racist in asking about citizenship. It may be racist, or at least anti-American, to oppose a citizenship question so that illegal aliens are counted as citizens and sanctuary states unfairly obtain more congressmen and Electoral College votes than they deserve.
It is fictional to pretend that American Hispanics are less likely to respond to a census question about citizenship. Citizenship is something nearly all Americans are proud of, and there is no right of privacy at stake.
There is no reason to expect any American citizen to be hesitant to respond if he is a citizen. Employers and schools ask about citizenship, as does the federal government on application forms.
Yet in a textbook example of legislating from the bench, an Obama-appointed judge held a trial in Manhattan federal court to take this issue away from President Trump and Congress. There are two sets of plaintiffs: 18 States, D.C., 15 cities and counties, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors form one set, and liberal advocacy groups form the other.
Plaintiffs asserted a headline-grabbing claim that asking about American citizenship is invidious racial discrimination in violation of the Constitution. They demanded a right to depose the Commerce Secretary to ask him if he is a racist.
The allegation was absurd, but falsely claiming that Republicans are racists is how the Left advances its agenda. The Supreme Court shut down an unprecedented attempt to depose the Trump Cabinet member Secretary Ross in this case, after it had been ordered by the trial judge.
Plaintiffs also sought to block the citizenship question based on the mundane Administrative Procedure Act. Plaintiffs insisted that it is somehow arbitrary to ask if someone is an American citizen, even though many companies and institutions ask this regularly of new applicants.
On Tuesday, federal Judge Jesse Furman issued a 277-page opinion to prohibit the inclusion of this 9-word citizenship question in the upcoming census. He did not expressly hold that the question was racist, but implied without any support in the record that it might be.
He stated his mission as one to “smoke out” racism, in order to uncover hidden forms of discrimination. He implied his disagreement with the Supreme Court, which prevented Judge Furman from requiring Commerce Secretary Ross to testify about his allegedly hidden motives.
But no such racism could ever be found. Unable to latch onto any testimony by Ross, Judge Furman instead thrashed those who worked for him.
Earl Comstock, who was just doing his job as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy under Ross, became a punching bag for the court’s complaints about a policy change it does not like. Other Trump officials took a beating from the court based on snippets from routine email communications, patched together in the decision as though there was something wrong with them.
This ruling was based on mere procedure, not substance. In 277 pages there is nothing to justify branding President Trump, Secretary Ross, or anyone else as a racist.
The court admitted that the Framers of the Constitution “had a strong constitutional interest in the accuracy of the census.” President Trump and Commerce Secretary Ross fully agree, which is why the traditional question about whether someone is an American citizen is an essential part of the census.
Fortunately, the census case is already scheduled for oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in February. So Tuesday’s ruling against asking about citizenship is not going to be the last word on the issue.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Shutdown Blues Will Grip Democrats
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 31, 2018
Government shutdowns are supposed to favor Democrats, according to conventional wisdom. All they need do, pundits pompously declare, is wait patiently until the Republican President caves into their demands.
That is the mindset that brought us the current shutdown. Senate Democrats dug in and refused to approve the modest $5.7 billion in funding for the border wall as approved by the House of Representatives.
But President Trump’s approval rating has remained steady during the shutdown, according to the respected Hill-HarrisX survey. This is in contrast with how President Clinton’s approval rating plummeted 10 points during the 1995-96 shutdown.
This leaves Democrats in a quandary they did not expect. President Trump, unlike past Republican presidents, may stand his ground and refuse to buckle.
The shutdown disarms the Democrats of their most powerful weapon against Trump: investigations by the House of Representatives, soon to be controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With committee majorities starting in 2019, Democrats could serve subpoenas on anyone they choose, from Trump’s children to his biggest supporters.
Pelosi is lawyering-up with attorneys who want to impeach the president. Fourteen of the nation’s most aggressive and partisan lawyers are already working for Robert Mueller, but there is no shortage of liberal hacks anxious to take on the assignment of trying to bring down a conservative president.
The House Democrats plan to launch many investigations and hold numerous committee hearings against conservatives other than Trump. If someone turns on the lights, heats the buildings, pays the congressional staff, and serves the subpoenas, that is.
The shutdown postpones some of these bad things from happening. Liberals are not interested in working for free in a cold building, and investigations go nowhere if subpoenas cannot be enforced.
As Trump enjoys a rock-solid base of support, he is probably asking himself why he would want to fund Pelosi and the House Democrats to harass him, his family, and his supporters. The spectacle of Pelosi not having funds to accomplish her political mischief should be appealing to the president and all conservatives.
There has already been enough wasteful distraction caused by the funding of Robert Mueller and his search for non-existent crimes. The shutdown prevents a multiplication of that in the House.
The shutdown may even cause unexpected problems for the Mueller investigation itself, despite official denials. The Department of Justice insists that the Mueller probe will be unaffected by the shutdown, but reports are that President Trump thinks otherwise and he may well be right.
Federal district courts around the country are warning attorneys that court funding could run out by mid-January, which would place federal litigation on hold. Several federal courts have already suspended their pending cases involving the United States.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will need to prioritize the urgent cases in the Department of Justice as resources dwindle and dry up in courthouses and in his department. It is difficult to see how Mueller’s searching for imaginary crimes would rank as more important than processing drug kingpins.
Mueller depends on support by the Department of Justice for serving subpoenas, bringing people into custody, and making court appearances. Whitaker could politely decline that support of Mueller due to the shutdown, as there is no reason why Mueller should get special treatment over other investigations.
Mueller has already run aground in his effort to hold a foreign corporation in contempt. Chief Justice John Roberts intervened in that potential abuse of power by Mueller, and has set a briefing scheduling before allowing Mueller to move forward on that front.
But heat and light will be needed at the federal courthouses to resolve that and other pending issues in the Mueller investigation. Staff may not show up unless paid, and Chief Justice Roberts will not be assuming the role of the clerk to accept newly filed briefs.
The Constitution may require keeping the lights on at the Supreme Court, although it is unclear who could enforce this if bills are not paid. The Constitution does not require continued funding for all other federal courts, which exist entirely at the discretion of Congress.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has long been a liberal hangout to interfere with job creation, suffered the same fate that its regulations have caused to many businesses. Last week the EPA furloughed 13,705 employees, telling them to stay home without pay.
That means a slowdown in EPA regulations and enforcement actions, which is good for the economy. It is a temporary hardship on the EPA employees, but far more employees of businesses hurt by EPA regulations have permanently lost their jobs because of it.
So what is the hurry for ending the shutdown? Stand strong, Mr. President, and watch the Democrats beat a path to your door to end the shutdown, on your terms.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Christmas Echoes the One in 1776
by John and Andy Schlafly
December 24, 2018
For the 22nd time since 1975, an impasse between Congress and the President has resulted in a partial shutdown of non-essential government offices. Like the 21-day shutdown in 1995-96, this one is occurring over the Christmas holidays when little government work is done anyway.
Members of Congress went home after failing to approve a modest down-payment on essential border security. Thankfully, President Trump has stood strong for building a wall along our southern border, where over 100,000 people crossed illegally last year.
Of course the Republican Congress should have addressed this long ago, not days before they lose their majority in the House. It should not have required a successful “GoFundMe” fundraising effort for the wall to prod the House to finally authorize $5.7 billion to fund it.
Some Democrats are refusing to support a border wall merely because Trump supports it. As Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said last week, “I talked to four Democrats that said: ‘Look, if you just stop calling it the wall, we’re in.’”
Democrats have thought that a shutdown always works to their advantage, but that calculation changed after Republicans benefited from the Schumer shutdown last January. Trump had generously offered to sign legislation protecting the children of illegal aliens, but his offer was rebuffed by Schumer and Pelosi.
Democrats claim they support “border security,” but what they really mean is money to process thousands of bogus claims of asylum by people hoping to land in the great American safety net while they wait for their claims to be heard. Trump has outfoxed the asylum industry by requiring claimants to remain in Mexico while they wait.
To reinforce his commitment to protect Americans first, the president also announced plans to withdraw troops from Syria, where ISIS has been decimated, along with a reduction of our involvement in the 17-year, no-win war in Afghanistan. He accepted the resignation of the defense secretary who disagreed with these decisions.
Among the D.C. swamp dwellers, many of the same people who resist building a wall on our own border insist that American troops be permanently deployed in faraway countries. They support an endless presence by our soldiers elsewhere, but oppose a wall to protect our own people from the influx of illegal aliens and drugs from Central America.
“We fight for the borders of other countries,” Trump tweeted on December 22, “but we won’t fight for the borders of our own!”
It’s time to recall the first government shutdown in American history, and how a future president won that battle with his bold, decisive action. It was in December of 1776, when General George Washington was camped along the Delaware River in northeastern Pennsylvania.
On December 12, 1776, Congress adjourned without extending the enlistments of American soldiers or approving their pay for the coming year. Members of Congress abandoned Philadelphia, where they had been meeting, because they feared the British troops nearby in New Jersey.
Once the soldiers’ enlistments ran out, the Continental Army would disband and soldiers would return to their farms in the 13 colonies. Some soldiers had already gone home, some were barefoot, food was running short, and winter was coming in.
But Washington was not going to give up the American cause without a fight. In an incredibly bold and risky maneuver, he decided to load his entire army ― men, horses and munitions ― into boats to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas night.
To inspire his men, Washington ordered them to assemble for a public reading of Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet, “The American Crisis,” which had just been published on December 19: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
On December 23 and 24, many boats were collected and secured with the help of experienced seamen. The crossing began at sundown December 25, and lasted all night amid horrendous weather: rain, sleet, snow, ice, and winds that were called a hurricane.
It was daylight on December 26 when troops reassembled on the Jersey shore. They marched 9 miles to Trenton where they surprised and defeated a contingent of British-allied Hessian troops, took them prisoner and captured their food, supplies and horses.
That was the early turning point in the American Revolution, thanks to the leadership of George Washington against all odds. Trump displays the same kind of initiative needed to put our Nation back on the path sought by our Founders.
Amid the current Democrat-caused shutdown, Trump delivers to the People the best Christmas present a president can give: leadership to Make America Great Again
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Entrapment of Flynn Takes Another Dark Turn
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 18, 2018
Life in the Deep State took another dark turn on Tuesday, at the sentencing of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn that did not happen. Instead, he was asked if he had committed treason, which is something not even the partisan Mueller prosecutors ever considered charging him with.
This story would be suitable for Alice in Wonderland if it did not involve an injustice inflicted on an honorable man who risked his life for our Nation. Rather than being able to celebrate Christmas by putting this travesty behind him, Lt. Gen. Flynn is left wondering how his lifelong patriotism was called into question.
In a word, “entrapment” and an unconstitutional independent prosecutor are how the injustice against Lt. Gen. Flynn continues. He was ambushed by an interview that never should have occurred, misled into not having counsel present, and then left helpless against Mueller’s $50 million wrecking machine.
A mere four days after the inauguration of President Trump, then-FBI Director James Comey sent senior agents to ambush Lt. Gen. Flynn with a surprise interview. Comey admits that this was not ordinary procedure, and that proper protocol is to arrange such interviews through attorneys.
It was a setup of Lt. Gen. Flynn, with the since-discredited agents of the Deep State Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok playing their parts. Both have since been fired but as Shakespeare observed, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Lt. Gen. Flynn had been an outspoken supporter of President Trump which liberals consider unforgivable. Outside the federal courthouse on Tuesday, a crowd of Leftists chanted against him.
Flynn never would have been prosecuted by a properly functioning Department of Justice, but the unconstitutional Mueller investigation has spent more than a fortune hunting for crimes. The former National Security Advisor to President Trump would be a trophy for Mueller to justify his prosecutorial crusade, so after Flynn he went.
As a career veteran of the Armed Forces, Flynn lacked the resources to spend millions on attorneys to defend himself. A billionaire could have run multiple appeals of this case up to the Supreme Court, but Flynn’s career does not produce the war chest that businessmen have to dismiss these cases.
This Kafkaesque nightmare was supposed to end Tuesday morning at sentencing before the federal district court in D.C., where Flynn was expected to receive leniency. But instead the hearing unraveled when Judge Emmet G. Sullivan asked if Lt. Gen. Flynn’s conduct “rises to the level of treasonous activity.”
The unexpected question stung for the family of the man who has repeatedly risked his life defending our Nation. Even one of Mueller’s prosecutors then defended Lt. Gen. Flynn by stating that the investigation never considered charging Lt. Flynn with treason.
After a break, Judge Sullivan took back his question about treason, and urged everyone not to read too much into his comments. Judge Sullivan has been tough on prosecutors too, and a common mistake of bystanders is to place too much emphasis on speculative remarks in court.
But the emotional dismay at the injustice became too much at that point. Flynn’s attorneys felt compelled to request postponement of the sentencing, and the court requested a status report by March 13, 2019.
In the meantime, numerous secret filings in this case are not helping anyone except Mueller’s perpetual taxpayer-funded investigations of anyone he wants. Unsealing the records and removing his redactions would serve justice.
Judge Sullivan ordered Mueller to file a “302” report of the fateful interview of Lt. Gen. Flynn, which Mueller had long withheld from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. Mueller ultimately filed a heavily redacted “302” report with the district court on Monday, but he continues to conceal from the public how Flynn was entrapped by the Deep State.
On Tuesday Mueller submitted to the court yet another document under seal, which further withholds from the public what is really going on. All this is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that criminal trials be conducted in open court, and not be based on secret information.
The FBI already knew the answers to the questions it asked of Lt. Gen. Flynn during his fateful interview in January 2017, due to its secret wiretaps of his conversations. But entrapment may have been the goal of the Deep State, the term for the entrenched intelligentsia in D.C. that continued to oppose President Trump after his election by the American People.
We are more than two years past the presidential campaigns of 2016, and there is no plausible justification for Mueller to conceal so much information in his filings from the public that is footing Mueller’s bill. With no end in sight for Mueller’s probe, there should at least be some transparency.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Derails the Marrakech Express
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 11, 2018
A new attempt to impose globalism unfolds in Marrakech, Morocco, under the guise of helping migrants. Most of the 193 countries in the United Nations convened there in order to create new international law to require every participating country to accept vast hordes of foreign migrants, and be subjected to this new form of globalism.
Any other president, Republican or Democrat, would probably welcome and join this undermining of national sovereignty. But in another reminder of how great Trump is, he leads the way in denouncing this virulent strain of globalism.
Called the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, the Marrakech meeting would prevent the American people from deciding immigration policy for ourselves. Trump has posted multiple reasons why the United States and every country should reject this bad idea.
“We believe the Compact and the process that led to its adoption, including the New York Declaration, represent an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of States to manage their immigration systems in accordance with their national laws, policies, and interests.”
That sounds like something Phyllis Schlafly might have written during her lifelong opposition to treaties that undermine American interests. But the above statement was issued by none other than President Trump, and is available on the official usun.state.gov website.
“Decisions about how to secure its borders, and whom to admit for legal residency or to grant citizenship, are among the most important sovereign decisions a State can make, and are not subject to negotiation, or review” by international courts and documents, he explains.
In August, an international tribunal called the European Court of Human Rights commanded that Hungary provide food to migrants and refugees held in detention camps. It is no surprise that Hungary has joined the growing number of countries which are following President Trump’s bold leadership in rejecting the Compact.
Other countries imitating Trump by pulling out of this globalist Compact include Austria, Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Dominican Republic. Notice the immense diversity among nations rejecting this globalism.
Additional countries, including Bulgaria and Israel, are also considering getting out of this deal. The political coalition that rules Belgium has collapsed due to conservative opposition to how her prime minister has pushed that country into joining the Compact.
President Trump, in his official statement on behalf of the United States, properly criticizes the use of the legalistic name “Compact,” rather than the traditional labels of convention or a treaty. “Compact” implies binding legal obligations.
Proponents of global governance look for ways to bypass the Treaty Clause of the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of two-thirds approval by the Senate in order to ratify foreign treaties. Many treaties have been signed by American presidents but thankfully never ratified by the Senate, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Agreement on so-called climate change.
President Obama approved both of those treaties, which were also deceptively named to avoid the use of the word “treaty.” Trump campaigned against them in 2016 and they have never become law.
“The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France,” President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning about the violent protests there which have been the worst in decades.
The Compact on migration includes a “right to privacy” provision that is not recognized by international law, and should be rejected so that it is not misused to become some kind of international right to abortion. Most countries have strong pro-life laws and are subjecting themselves to judicial activism by an international tribunal if they remain in the Compact.
“Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens,” President Trump declared in a statement issued by the White House. He cited the Monroe Doctrine for the principle that we do not accept interference of foreign nations in our hemisphere.
It was nearly 200 years ago, in 1823, when President James Monroe promulgated that famous doctrine against European nations intermeddling in the affairs of the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine was based on the simple observation that the Old and New Worlds have different political systems and it is “dangerous to our peace and safety” to allow the systems to mix.
Likewise, it is dangerous to try to mix our American liberty and prosperity with migrants who may hate us, or at least not respect our culture and values. President Trump proves once again his tremendous leadership in being the first to reject the Compact, thereby setting a model which many other countries are following now.
As other countries are rejecting globalism thanks to President Trump, they are making their own countries great again.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Train Pauses for One Who Missed It
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 4, 2018
Amid well-deserved praise for former President George H.W. Bush, unfortunately he did miss the Trump Train. Yet President Trump is showing his class by paying his respects anyway.
It is difficult to imagine two Republicans who are more different from each other than George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. Bush based his career on the Establishment, while Trump rose by defying it.
Bush pushed for a “New World Order” and entangled us in foreign wars. Trump promotes national sovereignty and seeks to Make American Great Again.
Bush generally pandered to the liberal media, which mostly got its way with him. Trump is not afraid to take on liberals in the media and call them out.
Bush pledged “read my lips: no new taxes,” but then raised taxes anyway. Trump has not caved in on any of his campaign promises despite enormous pressure to do so.
Everything about Bush was a mixed bag, a compromise, and a combination of the bitter with the sweet. Everything about Trump is unambiguous, clear, and sharply defined.
Despite their contrasts and how the Bush family broke with precedent by refusing to support Trump, he has graciously put the federal government at the service of those honoring the 41st president. Now is a good time to observe how much the Republican Party has changed since it was Bush’s party.
The Bush political dynasty began when Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, was elected U.S. Senator from Connecticut in 1952. As a typical liberal Republican of that era, Prescott Bush voted to censure the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and backed his fellow eastern liberal Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s last-ditch effort to stop the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Prescott Bush, who made his money on Wall Street as a partner of the leading Democratic power broker, W. Averell Harriman, was the epitome of the “eastern establishment.” Like his mentor, Nelson Rockefeller, Bush was an internationalist and a fanatical supporter of birth control, both domestically and around the world.
Senator Prescott Bush’s son George H.W. moved to Texas as young man, first Midland and then Houston, but the apple didn’t fall very far from the family tree. During his brief service in Congress, George H.W. Bush sponsored the landmark legislation that made family planning a federal priority, the program known as Title X, which distributes $56 million a year in taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood.
Bush was a supportive acolyte to Ronald Reagan during his eight years as vice president, but as President Bush he seemed to forget the lessons that made Reagan so successful. Reagan was not a globalist, but Bush was.
It was in a high-profile address to Congress on September 11, 1990, that Bush shocked Americans with his proclamation that it was time for a “New World Order.” Ronald Reagan would never have used that kind of language, which Bush kept repeating although he never defined it.
By launching the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Bush changed American foreign policy from focusing on defense of the homeland to engaging in foreign interventionism. Bush’s war was the first of several futile attempts to impose Western values on Middle Easterners who lack the cultural conditions for democratic self-government.
President Trump, by contrast, has reclaimed and rehabilitated nationalism and America First. As he said in his address to the United Nations in September, “America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”
Even when it comes to Planned Parenthood, Trump has turned the corner on Bush. New regulations published by the Trump administration would curtail taxpayer funding of groups like Planned Parenthood which violate federal law by using abortion as a method of family planning.
In remembering Bush 41, we should note his affection for our national pastime, ever since he was captain of his college baseball team. As president, Bush honored the holders of two of the most remarkable records in baseball history, both set in 1941: Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams’ .406 season batting average.
Those records had stood for 50 years when President Bush welcomed the elderly DiMaggio and Williams to the White House in 1991. Another 27 years have gone by since then, but no other baseball player has ever come close to those feats.
Bush set important records of his own, which richly deserve the praise that he is receiving. He was the only president to have received the Distinguished Flying Cross, which he earned for having been shot down during a World War II bombing mission.
Bush also loyally stood by his Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas despite the all-out smear campaign by the Left to stop him. As Bush’s continuing legacy, Thomas has sided with Trump more than Bush did.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Was Right To Rebuke Chief Justice Roberts
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 27, 2018
President Trump rightly rebuked Chief Justice Roberts for criticizing his factual statements about “Obama judges” consistently ruling against the Trump Administration. Liberals are gaming the court system by running to activist judges in San Francisco, Hawaii and Maryland to obstruct the will of the People who elected Trump.
John Roberts is not the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or even the Chief Justice of all the federal courts. His office is the Chief Justice of the United States, which means he should be acting on behalf of all three branches of government, and not provincially defending lower court judges against justified criticism by the President.
As pointed out by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has been wonderful in confirming Trump’s nominees, Chief Justice Roberts was completely silent after the unjustified tongue-lashing given by then-President Obama against Supreme Court Justices during the 2010 State of the Union address. The double-standard in denouncing Trump now is striking.
President Trump was correct in saying that Obama-appointed judges have been unfair in issuing numerous sweeping rulings against the Trump agenda, which has necessitated quickly running those bad decisions up on appeal. Senseless delays and increased taxpayer expense have resulted from Roberts’ own failure to rein in the rampant judicial activism among certain lower courts, which he could curb.
"Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have 'Obama judges,' and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country," Trump tweeted after Roberts chided him. Indeed, nearly all of the high-profile injunctions against Trump have been by “Obama judges.”
Francisco is nowhere near the southern border and there is no valid reason why liberal lawsuits against Trump’s immigration policies are repeatedly filed there. The apparent motivation is this: 11 out of the 14 active judges in that federal district were appointed by Obama, and Trump properly criticized how that one-sided venue has resulted in national injunctions against the President.
Chief Justice Roberts should check with his fellow Supreme Court Justices about how abusive these nationwide injunctions have been. Justice Clarence Thomas persuasively opposed these nationwide injunctions in an opinion that Roberts should have written or at least joined.
San Francisco is a favorite venue of the Resistance to Trump because appeals go from there to the Ninth Circuit, which Obama packed with seven lifetime appointments. The liberal California senators have failed to allow Trump to fill six vacancies on that circuit, which has long been notorious for being reversed, often unanimously, by the Supreme Court.
The Ninth Circuit even issued decisions by activist judge Stephen Reinhardt after he died on March 29th of this year, including a July 24th decision in which the other judges on the panel stated that Reinhardt had agreed with the court opinion even though he had died nearly four months earlier. Perhaps because a party complained, the Ninth Circuit later withdrew that decision.
Trump’s Solicitor General Noel Francisco is doing what he can to combat the judicial supremacy. He has taken the extraordinary step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear certain appeals without first awaiting decisions by the U.S. Circuit Courts that are packed with Obama nominees.
Unlike the President, the Supreme Court decides for itself how much work to do, which controversies to take up, and when to adjourn for its three-month summer vacation. The Court takes far fewer cases than it did a generation ago, and it is shocking how it increasingly fills its docket with easy, non-controversial cases.
A cursory glance at the cases the Court has decided to hear this Term reveals much that is insignificant, while Trump works overtime addressing crisis after crisis. Much of the Court’s time seems to be spent dodging abortion and other hot-button issues; the Court has deferred again and again cases concerning the simple authority of states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Chief Justice Roberts failed to join the dissent by two Justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, to the spectacle of putting the Trump Administration on trial in New York for including a question about citizenship in the census. One would think that the first and most important question in a census by any country, dating back to ancient Rome, would concern citizenship.
But Chief Justice Roberts and a majority of the Court have allowed an Obama-appointed judge – the brother of Obama’s chief economist – to put Trump officials on trial. No court would have put members of the Obama Administration on trial with respect to their policy decisions.
Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts is still smarting from criticisms of him by candidate Trump in 2016. But as the Chief Justice of the United States, Roberts should be defending the President rather than taking cheap shots at him.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Make Tijuana Great Again, and the White House Too
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 20, 2018
The two-thousand-mile trek of migrants from Honduras arrived to an angry reception in Tijuana, just south of the California border. It was not President Donald Trump who shouted down the illegal aliens camped there, but Tijuana’s own mayor, along with many of his Mexican constituents.
“Make Tijuana Great Again” sported the Tijuana mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum, on his bright red hat nearly identical to the one worn by President Trump. Hundreds of Tijuana residents turned out in agreement, chanting “Tijuana First” and similar slogans.
Well, how about that! The false narrative perpetrated by liberals that only extremists who voted for Donald Trump are against illegal immigration is disproven by Mexicans in Tijuana demanding that the migrants return home.
“I would dare say that not all of them are migrants,” Mayor Gastélum observed in Spanish during an interview on the Mexican Milenio television channel. He suggested that some of the migrants are criminals.
Many tough, angry-looking young men can be seen in images of the caravan. In one photo, a construction worker is seen defying the Mexican police with a vulgar gesture at them.
The migrants seem to have been coached, because one of them claimed that he was the victim of racism by the Mexican police. The culprit is not racism but globalism: the assault on national borders, which are essential to maintaining liberty and prosperity.
These migrants should be trying to make Honduras great again rather than crashing through borders to overrun places where they are not wanted. Anyone who can walk (or hitchhike) two thousand miles, like these migrants, can use their pent-up energy to improve their own country, instead of demanding handouts from Mexico or the United States.
Many migrants undoubtedly left behind women and children who depend on the support of the able-bodied young men who comprise the vast majority of the migrant caravan. The United States should not allow these migrants to abandon their responsibilities, but should send them back home to support their families.
But a federal judge in San Francisco just interfered with President Trump’s efforts to do exactly that. Despite how border control is an issue of national security under nearly exclusive presidential authority, Obama-appointed Judge Tigar took it upon himself to issue an injunction against the presidential proclamation that limited asylum applications by Central American migrants.
That leaves Trump with no good option: either appeal to the liberal Ninth Circuit, where the deck is stacked against him, or file an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely interferes in cases pending in lower courts.
Often the immigrants who cross the border illegally from Mexico are not even from Central or South America. Near Laredo, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents recently caught six young men trying to enter the United States illegally from far-away Bangladesh.
Official statistics show that 668 Bangladeshis were caught near our southern border during the twelve months ending on September 30, plus another 75 in October. There is big money in this, with the illegals or their sponsors paying up to $27,000 per person to be smuggled into the United States, as reported by Breitbart.com.
By now President Trump has appointed many judges to the federal bench, but the vetting of those nominees was cast in doubt by the ruling last week against the White House concerning CNN’s Jim Acosta. Despite how a man’s home is his castle under centuries of precedents, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that President Trump cannot promptly exclude a misbehaving reporter from the White House.
Only the most conservative judges should be appointed to federal courts for the District of Columbia, which has no U.S. Senators who might object. President Trump, acting on apparently bad advice, nominated former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Timothy Kelly to that bench.
Kelly was confirmed almost unanimously, and into his courtroom landed the lawsuit by CNN against Trump to reinstate access to the White House by the abrasive Jim Acosta. CNN sued for Acosta to retain his access to the White House grounds even after he disrupted Trump’s post-election news conference with an argumentative non-question.
If a hostile reporter had combatively resisted relinquishing the microphone during a presser held by President Obama, the reporter would have been banned. But in a stark illustration of judicial activism, Judge Kelly ordered President Trump to return Acosta’s highly desirable “hard pass” for full access to the West Wing.
Judges require journalists to treat courthouses and court proceedings with extreme deference, but President Trump has been made powerless to regulate who can roam freely inside his own home. Let’s hope the President makes the White House Great Again by posting a burly security guard next to Jim Acosta with orders to remove him the next time he misbehaves.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Realigns the Political Map
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 13, 2018
After the Republican Party had been declining in strength in the executive and judicial branches, and in the U.S. Senate, Trump’s realignment has brought new life to all three. The Election Day results dismayed those who predicted a massive blue wave, and instead ushered in more evidence that Trump is the real future of the GOP.
Trump’s rallies in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota delivered resounding victories to Republican Senate candidates, in defiance of most polls. Trump also carried congressional candidates to victory in battleground regions of Southern Illinois and Minnesota.
Trump achieved what was thought to be impossible in ousting the entrenched liberal Claire McCaskill from her Senate seat in Missouri, by holding massive rallies that attracted tens of thousands to Trump. No one could have sent the Leftist-funded McCaskill to an early retirement other than Trump.
The Republicans who lost were mostly anti-Trumpers, as the president observed in reviewing the election results. “Mia Love gave me no love,” Trump quipped about the Republican who lost in the deep red state of Utah, and he listed other GOP candidates who drove their own defeat by opposing him.
By securing and even expanding on GOP control of the upper chamber, Trump paves the way for more conservative judges to join the federal bench. Democrats now admit that they lack a realistic chance of retaking the Senate until at least 2022, which means that Trump could have four more years of conservative judicial appointments.
Republican candidates won the governorships in Ohio and Iowa, in a further indication of how well Trump plays in the heartland. And it appears that the Republican senate and governor candidates in Florida also defied the polls and scored impressive wins.
A realignment of politics is taking place in America, greater than any since the 1960s when the South swung to the Republican Party and African Americans switched more heavily to Democrats. Prior to that southerners voted primarily for Democrats and a substantial fraction of blacks voted for the GOP.
Blue-collar America is turning more Republican, while big cities and the Left Coast continue to drift more to the Democrats. Working class men and their wives are shifting to the Republican Party for the first time, while single and divorced women tilt more heavily to the Democrats.
Voters like Republicans in charge in the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most senates, while Democrats made gains in the lower houses of legislatures. This bodes well for re-electing Trump in 2020 and restoring respect for the Constitution to the federal judiciary with senate confirmations of Trump nominees.
Iowa, in some ways a political cross-section of the entire country, displayed the cross-currents in this realignment. Democrats won seven new suburban seats in the House, but lost two blue-collar seats to Republicans.
In the Iowa Senate, the GOP actually had a net gain of two seats from the Democrats, again by racking up surprise victories in blue-collar districts. Trump’s persona and his America First policies resonate so well with working class Americans that Democrats suffered upset losses in those districts.
Conservative Congressman Steve King triumphed once again over vicious late hits and ambushes, which illustrates the tremendous resilience of those who are most principled. The Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, also won reelection.
The Rust Belt state of Ohio elected a Republican governor, re-elected all its Republican congressmen, and re-elected a supermajority of Republican control over its state legislature. This is a state that President Trump has successfully turned from purple to deep red, after Obama had won it in 2008 and 2012.
With only about 15 months left for the Democrats to coalesce around a presidential contender to run against President Trump, they have no one who can compete with him in middle America. Polls said that Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly would win reelection easily in Indiana, but instead he lost to political newcomer Mike Braun by a wide margin of 6 points, which could have even been a 10-point loss in the absence of the Libertarian Party candidate.
Runaway early voting procedures ensured Republican losses in Arizona, California and Nevada, and there is nothing Trump could have done to avert that. But Trump brought victories where none were expected, such as all-important U.S. Senate seats representing middle America.
The campaign for the presidency starts after the midterm elections, and Democratic contenders are already jockeying for position. But Trump appears invincible in the South, most of the Midwest, much of the Rust Belt, and nearly all of flyover country, which doesn’t leave enough Electoral College Votes for the Democrats to regain the White House.
Trump worked harder in campaigning for his supporters than any president in history, Republican or Democrat. Republicans would have done better in the House if more candidates had stood with him, as the Senate candidates did.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
The Mistake of Early Voting
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 6, 2018
More than 38 million ballots were cast before Election Day arrived this year, shattering the midterm election record for early voting. That was nearly double the level of early voting in the last midterm election, in 2014, when 21 million voted early.
Yet few genuinely benefit from this early voting fad, except political machines and the better-funded candidates. That means early voting boosts the Democrats, who held an enormous fundraising advantage this year along with their political machine that has long dominated Chicago and other big cities.
In the traditionally red states of Texas and Florida, early voting causes many races there to be decided prior to Election Day. Both states now have extensive early voting, and as a result both were targeted by massive cash for Democrats this election cycle.
The influx of tens of millions of dollars by liberals to fund Beto O’Rourke in his campaign for U.S. Senate in Texas baffled some, but not those familiar with the circus of extended early voting that is allowed in the Lone Star State. By herding traditionally Democratic constituents to the polls during the two-week period of early voting, well-funded Democrats in Texas have the hope of winning elections they would otherwise lose in that conservative state.
In Texas, early voting increased everywhere, but particularly skyrocketed in heavily Democratic areas such as Austin and Dallas. Casualties could include down-ballot Republicans, including state legislators and local officials.
Similarly, in the other large red state of Florida, more than 5 million votes were cast early this fall. That was 38.4% of the entire Florida electorate, and more than the number that voted on Election Day.
Smart liberal money flowed in a big way against Republican candidates in both States, attracted by the opportunity to herd people to vote early and tip the outcome. The candidate who raises the most money is more likely to win in elections decided by expensive early voting efforts.
The voting this past Sunday morning in Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county, tells the story. A record 40,000 ballots were cast, many bused from churches as part of the Democrats’ “souls to the polls” campaign.
That Sunday burst in voting gave the Democrats in Florida the lead in overall ballots cast early. Meanwhile independent voters, on whom Republicans often rely to get elected, are shut out of the early voting gamesmanship and thereby become less significant, particularly in non-presidential elections.
Last year Hans von Spakovsky released a report for the Heritage Foundation in which he concluded that early voting can increase the cost of campaigns, and actually decrease overall turnout. For example, early voting removes the social pressure to vote on Election Day.
Add to that how early voting has become the new form of machine-style politics that distorts the election process and changes results. The integrity and excitement of Election Day are undermined by the enormous spending to push people to vote early.
The average American in Florida, Texas, and other early voting states would be fine in getting their lives back, without the tiresome robocalls and other efforts to urge them to vote early. The vast majority of early voters would otherwise vote on Election Day, and having both sides spend millions to move those ballots a week or so early is wasteful.
There was no line to vote at many election polling precincts on Tuesday, which detracts from the experience and could result in fewer people voting next time. Early voting undermines the patriotic value of a unified Election Day.
The early voters had less information, including major economic data not released until last Friday. In some states, such as Montana, the libertarian candidate for Senate pulled out of the race and endorsed the Republican candidate after many votes had already been cast early.
In California, its mail-in balloting means that election outcomes can remain uncertain until long after Election Day, when ballots are finally received by election officials. It becomes impossible to check against voter fraud, and there is no place for precinct monitors.
Nevada is a state where elections are decided by early voting, and it has a tight Senate race for a seat held by a Republican. Yet ballots had already been cast by 40% of active voters there prior to Election Day, and Democrats defeated Republicans by a 41-38% margin in early ballots.
Republicans have controlled the Florida and Texas statehouse and governorship for years, so it is baffling why they allow pervasive early voting there, including Sunday voting in Florida which Democrats exploited. Other Republican states, such as Ohio and North Carolina, have sensibly tried to rein in rampant early voting.
There is a constitutional right to vote. But there is no constitutional right to vote early, and it is time to restore integrity and significance to Election Day by reining in early voting.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Ending Birthright Citizenship
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 30, 2018
President Trump, who frequently campaigned against the horrible practice of giving automatic U.S. citizenship to children of illegal aliens, has again startled the media by proving that he really meant what he said. In an interview released this week, Trump said he would issue an executive order stopping birthright citizenship.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump said in an interview for Axios. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
Trump’s blunt talk on the issue of illegal immigration was one of the main reasons Americans elected him in 2016. Yet his opponents pretend to be shocked and horrified that he plans to deliver what the voters expected when we elected him president.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he said, adding that he has run it by legal counsel. “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order,” Trump said.
The media insist that Trump is just “riling up his base” for the midterm election, quoting a tweet from the failed mayor of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel recently announced that he will not seek re-election in the city he has led from crisis to disaster.
Another failed politician, outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, pontificated to reporters, “Well, you obviously cannot do that.” Ryan went on to say, “I think in this case the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process.”
Actually, Ryan is half right: the 14th Amendment is “pretty clear” that birth alone is not enough to guarantee U.S. citizenship. To get automatic birthright citizenship, children must be born to parents who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of our country.
The key phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” means more than the duty to obey our laws, which applies to everyone, citizen and alien alike. It means that to become a citizen a person must owe allegiance to the United States, and not to any other nation or state.
You are a citizen of the country or nation to which you owe your allegiance, and vice versa. Diplomats, visitors, foreign students, temporary workers, and illegal residents -- all these people are citizens of their home countries, the countries they came from, even while they are temporarily inside our borders.
American history familiar to many high school students demonstrates how wrong birthright citizenship is. Indians living on reservations were not American citizens for most of our history, despite being born in our country.
Native Americans were considered members only of their sovereign Indian tribes, until Congress extended blanket citizenship in 1924. Similarly, children born to foreign ambassadors while in the United States are not American citizens, but are citizens of their country of origin.
In their crusade against President Trump, globalists trot out alleged experts claiming that Trump’s proposal is impossible, unconstitutional, or morally wrong. But the hysterical overreaction by his critics proves how right Trump is.
“The president cannot erase the Constitution with an executive order, and the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee is clear,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to fan the flames of anti-immigrant hatred in the days ahead of the midterms.”
In fact, the last time the Supreme Court addressed the issue of birthright citizenship was 120 years ago, in the case of a child born to a lawful permanent resident who had what is now called a green card. The Supreme Court has never decided the citizenship of those born to persons unlawfully present in the United States, or lawfully present on temporary visas for tourism, education, or temporary employment.
The ACLU was also bitterly opposed to Trump’s policy of vetting travelers from countries that are hotbeds of terrorism. Globalists falsely characterized the policy as a Muslim ban, but it was upheld by the Supreme Court last June; Trump’s new executive order should fare just as well when it gets there.
Trump’s announced intention to fulfill his campaign promise caps another week of setbacks for globalism. In Brazil, which is called the second-largest democracy in the Western Hemisphere, the conservative nationalist Jair Bolsonaro won its presidency by a landslide of 55-45%.
That adds Brazil to the United States, Hungary, and the Philippines where conservative nationalists have triumphed on Election Day. Meanwhile, the adversary of President Trump who has led Germany down the wrong path of globalism, Angela Merkel, mercifully announced her plans not to seek reelection in a few years.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Dems Tongue-Tied on Caravan Issue
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 23, 2018
Democrats have not been shy to criticize President Trump on every imaginable issue ranging from the NFL to the First Lady’s choice of footwear. But suddenly nary a word from the Dems about Trump’s criticism of the caravan of illegal aliens headed toward our southern border.
“Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!” Trump tweeted on Monday.
But where is the pervasive pushback by Dems to Trump’s tweets on this issue? Their silence is deafening.
The Senate race in Arizona casts light on why Democrats are suddenly speechless, two weeks before the midterm elections. That seat, vacated by the unelectable anti-Trump Senator Jeff Flake, has long been considered a sure takeaway from the Republican Party in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.
This summer the Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema was ahead in the polls by more than ten points, apparently cruising to a landslide. But Arizona bears the brunt of illegal immigration, and as that issue heats up this race has become too close to call.
Congresswoman and veteran Martha McSally, aided by an overflow rally held by President Trump last week in Phoenix, has surged in the polls for that seat. Ms. Sinema was hurt by the surfacing of a 2003 recording of her saying that “I don’t care” if an American joined the Taliban army, which fights against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
In Missouri, entrenched liberal incumbent Claire McCaskill was so rattled by Republican challenger Josh Hawley’s criticism of her during their recent debate that she left quickly afterward, not even staying for post-debate interviews. Pro-abortion donors have bankrolled McCaskill to a 4-1 fundraising advantage, and yet she trails Hawley.
Meanwhile, voters see photos of thousands of menacing youths approaching our southern border as part of a caravan that stretches for miles. Among them are potential new recruits for the vicious gangs, like MS-13, that plague our cities.
If Sen. McCaskill and her Democratic cohorts had supported building a wall as Trump seeks, then the massive caravan would not be a national crisis. But without a wall, young American soldiers must be put in harm’s way to try to stop these illegals from entering our country.
The presence of children among the migrants makes it even worse. Soldiers are trained to fight and kill, not change diapers for infants carted thousands of miles to cross our border illegally.
“We want to get to the United States,” said a 17-year-old migrant from Honduras, Maria Irias Rodriguez, who brings along her 8-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, plus her husband. “If they stop us now, we’ll just come back a second time.”
That sounds like a family that could help make Honduras great again. If the migrants have American values, and not all do, then they could spread those values in their own country and help it thrive as the United States has.
There is a process for foreigners to apply to enter our country legally. That includes proper vetting of the applicants, and separating those who love America from those who might not.
Amid the caravan of many thousands could be terrorists, as President Trump pointed out while on his way to lead a massive rally in Houston for Senate candidate Ted Cruz. The 19,000-seat Houston Rockets basketball arena was virtually filled with enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s stance against the caravan and illegal immigration.
But Monday was also the first day of an extended two-week early voting period in Texas, which enables the Democratic political machine to stuff the ballot box without any real safeguards against fraud. An enormous spike in the number of early ballots compared to the last midterm election in 2014 is flooding Texas election offices.
In small Midland County, Texas, five times as many people voted on the first day of early voting compared with the same day in 2014. In the immense Harris County, where Houston is located, more than three times as many people voted early on Monday compared with four years ago.
Liberals are counting on rampant early voting in Texas, California, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere to give them an undeserved boost in returns. Trump has joked that the caravan of migrants is coming to the United States to vote for Democrats, and that is not far from the truth.
In traditionally low-turnout midterm elections, stuffing the ballot box can change the outcome in many races. Trump’s spectacular rallies demonstrate the popularity of his positions with the American people, and an honest election would confirm it.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Judicial Supremacy Runs Amok Against Census
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 16, 2018
A stirring rebuke of judicial supremacy is, remarkably, posted on the Department of Justice website. Attorney General Jeff Sessions explains how fed up he is with the continued overreach by federal judges as they repeatedly encroach on Trump and Congress.
The latest outrage cited by General Sessions is a district court order, affirmed on appeal, that compels Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to submit to a deposition about why he wants the census to ask people if they are American citizens. Liberals absurdly claim that it is racist for the census to ask that basic question, and demand that Secretary Ross answer impertinent questions in which he will be falsely accused of secretly harboring a racist motive.
Cabinet officials should not be subjected to rude deposition questioning without any factual basis. Citizenship is not a race and immigrants come in all races, so it cannot be racist to ask people who live here, and who demand entitlements like Medicaid and public schooling, whether they are American citizens.
Before Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed, the Supreme Court seemed fine with allowing the deposition of Secretary Ross, a member of Trump’s Cabinet. But days after Kavanaugh joined the High Court, it put this deposition on hold pending the submission of further briefing on the matter.
President Donald Trump has successfully appointed two Supreme Court justices, 29 circuit judges, and 52 district court judges. But they are mostly in states that voted for him, while fierce pockets of resistance remain in deep blue states like California, New York and Hawaii.
An example is in New York City, where a Barack Obama-appointed federal judge named Jesse Furman is hearing a major case against the Trump Administration. Furman received that prestigious lifetime appointment when he was only 39 years old, and he will probably be elevated to a higher court by a future Democratic president.
In classic judicial activism, Judge Furman is trying to micromanage the government’s planning for the 2020 census, which is already underway. Plaintiffs and apparently Judge Furman are unhappy with how census officials plan to include a question about citizenship in the census.
It should be a no-brainer for the census to ask whether each person residing in our country is a U.S. citizen or not. That basic question was included on the main census questionnaire from 1830 to 1950, but starting in 1960 it was unfortunately demoted to a separate survey that goes to only a sample of Americans.
After the Trump Administration decided to reinstate this question on the questionnaire being sent to every household, a group of leftist organizations and Democratic officials sued Wilbur Ross as the Secretary of the Department of Commerce, which supervises the census bureau.
Only U.S. citizens are supposed to vote here, although there are numerous examples of non-citizens who were improperly placed on the voting rolls when they applied for a driver’s license. The problem is that even when non-citizens don’t vote, they are counted in the census in a way that enhances the voting power of people who do vote.
If non-citizens were evenly distributed across the United States, their presence wouldn’t dilute the voting power of U.S. citizens. But when they are concentrated in a handful of states such as California, whose population includes more than 5 million non-citizens, American citizens who live in other states are disenfranchised.
Non-citizens entitle California to at least 5 extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 5 extra votes in the Electoral College, all taken from states with few non-citizens. Even within California, non-citizens are concentrated in a handful of that state’s 53 congressional districts, such as Maxine Waters’ district where only half the residents are American citizens.
In the 2010 census, which Obama supervised, 6 electoral votes were taken from the states of Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which voted for Trump in 2016. That was on top of 4 electoral votes lost by those states in the 2000 census, plus another 4 lost by four other Trump states: Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are each projected to lose another seat in Congress and the Electoral College after 2020, as are Alabama and West Virginia. States where aliens live will gain seats, and retain the seats they already won in the last two census counts.
General Sessions emphasized in his posted speech that “the Judicial branch must show significant respect for the Executive branch and Congress. I fear, in a variety of ways, that respect has been eroding.”
Calling out the “eroding” deference by the judiciary is an understatement. So is the term “judicial activism,” when the better term is “judicial supremacy” as coined by Phyllis Schlafly to describe judicial interference with good policies like Trump’s census.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Fulfills Phyllis Schlafly’s Vision
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 9, 2018
The thrilling confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court fulfills the vision of Phyllis Schlafly in her early endorsement of Trump. By trouncing the radical feminists in this high-stakes battle for the Supreme Court, President Trump has transformed the Republican Party just as Phyllis wanted.
Kavanaugh’s 50-48 confirmation by the Senate was also a victory for the rule of law over rule by a mob. “You don't hand matches to an arsonist,” Trump declared afterwards, and “you don’t give power to an angry leftwing mob.”
It was a close call, when you consider that one woman on George Soros’ payroll almost succeeded in bringing Kavanaugh down – by screaming at Jeff Flake while he was trapped in an elevator as cameras rolled. Ana Maria Archila, the woman who confronted Senator Flake, reportedly draws a six-figure salary from a Soros-funded outfit called the Center for Popular Democracy, which grew out of the wreckage of the now-defunct ACORN.
But Christine Blasey Ford’s uncorroborated accusations were simply not credible to the fair-minded Senators. Their reigning moderate, Susan Collins, delivered a compelling hour-long speech detailing the many deficiencies.
Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh were worse than being implausible. They were also unworthy of the heightened attention given to them by the liberal media and the 48 Democratic Senators who voted against him.
Even if Ford's accusations had some basis in fact, they were not serious enough to be considered at this late date. The Senate demeaned itself by forcing Kavanaugh to explain what he meant in his writings as a 17-year-old in his personal diary and his high school yearbook.
By her own account, Ford said she attended and drank beer at an unsupervised house party along with older teenage drunken boys. She alleges that at some point she was groped by two of the boys, whose identities remain unknown, but she admitted that everyone was fully clothed at all times.
If such a complaint had been made then, the police would not have even bothered to pursue it. It would have been such a minor, unprovable infraction that criminal charges would never have been brought.
The complete silence by Ford for 29 years afterwards suggests that even if it did happen, it was not particularly significant to her. Most likely it did not happen at all.
Yet while talking to a therapist nearly three decades later, Ford supposedly “recovered” a memory that could easily exaggerate key details and make mistakes of identity. On the basis of her recovered memory, she tried to bring down Brett Kavanaugh’s career, while keeping her own identity secret in order to avoid the risk of cross-examination.
There is a moment when a movement loses its initial credibility with the general public, and this Kavanaugh confirmation may be that moment for the #MeToo movement. The collapse of support for the reelection of Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who ultimately voted against Kavanaugh, illustrates the backlash against doubtful accusations publicized by radical feminists.
Forty years ago, in the 1970s, an earlier wave of feminism called “women’s liberation” was cresting. Led by then-ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the feminists came close to putting their harmful “equal rights” amendment (ERA) into the U.S. Constitution.
But then the feminists also overplayed their hand, much as they just did with Kavanaugh. With a special appropriation of federal tax money in 1977, they held 50 state conventions for women, culminating in a national convention in Houston to promote International Women’s Year.
The nation watched in dismay as a parade of angry liberal women screamed and screeched their demands, primarily about lesbian rights and taxpayer-funded abortions. The public turned away, the ERA never garnered another state, and five states that had hastily ratified it then rescinded their previous ratifications.
A similar fate awaits the overly hyped #MeToo movement, which started a year ago in response to the lurid accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and others. Ostensibly a protest against the proverbial casting couch, which has always existed in Hollywood, the #MeToo movement is a double standard as it does not complain about many women who willingly use sex to advance their show-biz careers.
Meanwhile, our nation benefits from the new respect for ancient legal safeguards against false accusations. These include innocent until proven guilty, the right to confront your accuser, and the need for a short statute of limitations on accusations of sexual assault.
When Phyllis Schlafly met Donald Trump on March 11, 2016, before introducing him to a cheering crowd of thousands of supporters in St. Louis, she asked the candidate to appoint judges who would defend the Constitution. With the seating of Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, President Trump has honored his pledge in a spectacular way.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Call the Vote on Kavanaugh
By John and Andy Schlafly
September 25, 2018
Delaying the Senate vote has not helped anyone except those smearing the good man nominated to the Supreme Court. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have lost his way in supporting delay after delay on an up-or-down vote for Brett Kavanaugh.
McConnell promised that Kavanaugh will be confirmed, but his strategy has kicked away Democrats who might have voted for him. By giving a platform to Kavanaugh’s accusers, he has merely provided political cover for every Democrat in the chamber, such as Claire McCaskill who is in a tight race in Missouri.
McConnell should call the vote on Kavanaugh, and let the chips fall where they may. Delay simply facilitates more false accusations, embellished to an obscene degree.
It was a mistake to pander to Kavanaugh’s accusers by extending the deadline and begging them to show up to tell their coached narratives in the most damaging way that liberals can imagine. No court of law allows a witness to completely take over the scheduling as Kavanaugh’s opponents have.
Kavanaugh would have been confirmed by now if the Senate had simply called the vote. Never-Trump Republicans and even a few Democrats would have fallen in line and voted the right way, or gone down in history as a mob who hangs an innocent man.
But like the failure of a superior army to advance to win a battle, the dilly-dallying by the Republican leadership has led to disarray and lost opportunity. The delay allowed the politically motivated opponents of Kavanaugh to practice and embellish, divide and conquer.
Some hope that vigorous cross-examination of Kavanaugh’s accusers will prove to the world that Kavanaugh has the stellar character that all who know him describe. There are, of course, good questions about political motivation and the orchestration of this smear that should be asked.
But relatively few Americans will watch the hearing, contrary to what the Senators may think, and Abraham Lincoln-style moments on cross-examination are rare. The more that a witness is coached, the less likely a breakthrough at the hearing.
Instead, the vast majority of Americans will see only the headlines and selective sound bites, as spun by a media determined to sink Kavanaugh. The testimony itself is immune from defamation lawsuits, and news outlets will repeat the false accusations without including the cross-examination.
This is fake news in its worst form. Sexually explicit allegations are politically deadly, no matter how false and implausible they are, and the GOP-controlled Senate errs in giving the other side a platform.
“I think it’s horrible what the Democrats have done,” President Trump said on Tuesday. “It is a con game; they really are con artists … playing a con game and they are playing it very well, much better than Republicans.”
President Trump’s instincts have been right on target, as usual, in speaking out against the smear of Kavanaugh. McConnell reportedly telephoned Trump to tell him that his tweets critical of a Kavanaugh accuser were not helpful, but it is McConnell’s delay in the vote that has been unhelpful.
Trump is right that Senate Republicans have given far too many concessions to Kavanaugh’s opponents than they should have. No one was preventing accusers from telling their stories, and the Senate is mistaken to think that its committee hearing procedures will add anything to the equation.
The Senate committee lacks fundamental rules of evidence that any civilized judicial proceeding would have. Unreliable testimony that is more likely to create prejudice than aid in a genuine search for truth is not allowed in most courts of law, but is allowed by the Senate.
Sexually obscene testimony that is uncorroborated should not be allowed and given credibility by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Moreover, false descriptions like “attempted rape” should be ruled out of order and prohibited.
Refreshed recollections about something more than 30 years ago by someone who was drunk at the time, as Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate was, is not evidence that satisfies any reasonable standard of reliability. Most courts of law would prohibit repetition of sexually graphic allegations of such an unreliable nature to a jury.
Instead, advisers have mistakenly relied on administration of an oath as though that will protect Kavanaugh against false accusations. Republicans have underestimated the depth of deceit on the other side, even harboring hope that the accusers will not show up.
Senator Susan Collins and other fence-sitters can sit down to have chit-chats with accusers all they want. No one is interfering with any fact-finding, or falsehood-finding, that any senator wants to engage in.
The U.S. Senate prides itself on open debate, but in every assembly there comes a time when further debate is unproductive. A motion to “call the question,” first used in the British Parliament more than four centuries ago, is overdue to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Too Little, Too Late in Ambushing Kavanaugh
by John and Andy Schlafly
September 18, 2018
Statutes of limitations are necessary, because memories fade and it is pointless to consider a “he said, she said” dispute decades later. No one should give credence to a new accusation about something minor that supposedly occurred more than three decades ago, and the Senate embarrasses itself by holding a hearing to do just that.
Brett Kavanaugh fully denies the allegation of misconduct by him at a party 36 years ago, when he was merely 17 years old, and this issue is not something that Senators should be taking seriously today. On the verge of his confirmation to the Supreme Court, this politically motivated, last-minute smear against him should be laughed off the stage.
Only in the fantasyland of the U.S. Senate, where Clarence Thomas had to endure a similar ordeal in 1991, does fiction replace fact so easily. Accusations about teenage conduct in 1982, even if Kavanaugh was at the party, should not change anyone’s vote concerning his confirmation to the Supreme Court.
The confirmation process for Supreme Court Justices should have sensible limits on irrelevant testimony when considering nominees. It is time to repudiate untestable #MeToo allegations that were never reported within the statute of limitations, and it is time to draw the line before politics descends further into the theater of the absurd.
If Senators fail to establish reasonable rules of evidence, then it becomes a matter of how clever an accuser is at lying. Courts of law do not allow spectacles of irrelevant, unprovable accusations, and the Senate should not have a standard that is lower than that of traffic court.
Supposedly a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, or someone having a similar name, was drunk and had party-like contact with a fully clothed girl who had also been drinking. At the time, no crime was reported, no adult was told, nothing was prosecuted, and no discipline of any kind was ever sought or obtained.
Most schools would not even punish a student for such behavior at a party, even if true, let alone expel someone for it. It is beneath the dignity of the Senate to give credibility to an accusation about silly teenage behavior at a drinking party, as though that has any bearing on the abilities and character of an adult more than three decades later.
President Trump was elected to blow the whistle on this kind of circus that too often dominates D.C. Trump brought some grown-up relief to this crisis on Monday by rejecting a reporter’s question as ridiculous in asking whether Kavanaugh might be replaced as the nominee because of this farcical accusation.
Allowing this ambush of Kavanaugh feeds the chicanery of the Left, and encourages similar antics against future good nominees. Three Republican nominees to the Supreme Court have been confirmed in a row since liberals unsuccessfully attempted their last-minute smear of Clarence Thomas, and the GOP majority should not allow regression to that low point in the history of the Senate.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) probably dislikes allowing a hearing on this smear against Kavanaugh, but the Republican majority in the Senate is hostage to a handful who pander to the media. Never-Trumper Jeff Flake, who is an example of someone who does not belong on the Judiciary Committee, was elected by pretending to be pro-life but spends much of his time trying to defy Trump instead.
In court, scandalous testimony that is irrelevant is excluded without futile attempts to determine its truthfulness. The Senate should likewise exclude testimony by Christine Blasey Ford about isolated teenage partying which has no relevance to the fitness of the nominee Kavanaugh.
The oath does not have a magical effect in converting lies to the truth, and cannot establish relevancy. Long-ago high school partying is irrelevant to the important work the Senate and the Supreme Court should be doing.
Even worse is speculation about what a teenage Kavanaugh, or someone who looked like him, might have wanted to do. Teenagers are wrong about many things, even when trying to tell the truth, and the Senate should not allow such speculative testimony.
The high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas, as he described it, failed when an accusation was discovered to bear an uncanny resemblance to a line in the book The Exorcist. This time the allegations may be inspired by a book by Mark Judge concerning his own drinking binges at the same high school Kavanaugh attended.
But Mark Judge himself described the accusations against his classmate Kavanaugh as “absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way.”
It was a mistake to schedule a special hearing, and delay it by a week, which gives the story-tellers more time to practice and embellish. Allegations about the distant past which lack details are not credible, and the Senate should proceed to vote on Judge Kavanaugh.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Obama’s Tired Rhetoric Is a Flashback to Globalism
By John and Andy Schlafly
September 11, 2018
Barack Obama’s return to the campaign trail is a violation of tradition and common sense. His tired rhetoric on globalism is a powerful reminder of how fortunate we are without him and the Clintons in power.
“Global governance” was the pejorative title of a video produced by Phyllis Schlafly in the ’90s that successfully converted the concept into an object of scorn. Yet here is Obama recycling Bill Clinton’s discredited push for world government at a time which most nations are rejecting it.
Even in the liberal bastion of Sweden, the electorate delivered a mortal blow to globalism there on Sunday by voting in record numbers for an anti-immigration party. In Italy, the globalists were voted out of office earlier this year.
Perhaps it is too much work for Obama to update Bill Clinton’s speeches to keep up with the times. Obama spoke within the safe space of a liberal university campus, where few of the attendees were likely aware of the widespread repudiation of globalism.
The liberal college audience rewarded Obama with applause for every vacuous, anachronistic statement that he made. He flattered his academic sounding board by complaining that “demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems.”
Obama had eight long years to fix the problems of a broken economy, a North Korean dictator with nuclear weapons, ISIS terrorists, and the perpetual war in Afghanistan. He fixed none of those problems, but he did enact an incredibly complex scheme for health care.
Due to Obama’s refusal to support simple solutions, like tax cuts, he was the only president in American history to fail to achieve at least 3% annual growth in GDP. The economy took off like a rocket the day after Trump was elected and hasn’t stopped since.
Obama’s sleep-inducing platitudes tried to rehabilitate the discredited idea of globalism that is in retreat across the world. He praised a “bipartisan leadership” (otherwise known as the Deep State) which developed “norms” and a “consensus” that “extended beyond our borders.”
“From the wreckage of World War II,” Obama continued, despite being born in 1961, “we built a postwar web, architecture, system of alliances and institutions.” He left out how European countries are trying to unwind and disentangle that failed system, and how Europe lags the U.S. economically.
Obama’s backward-looking speech was a rehash of his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Bill Clinton, who spoke of a “web of institutions and arrangements” that set “the international ground rules for the 21st century.” Clinton urged Americans to support what he called “the emerging international system,” such as the International Criminal Court.
Mercifully, the Obama-Clinton claptrap received a rip-roaring response Monday from President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton. In a powerful speech to the Federalist Society, Bolton took aim at “the global governance dogma,” picking up where Phyllis Schlafly left off.
Two decades ago, when few stood up against Bill Clinton on this issue, Phyllis was delivering speeches to packed hotel ballrooms lambasting Clinton’s globalist agenda. With her witty play on Hillary Clinton’s book that it supposedly takes a village to raise a child, Phyllis asked a crowded Louisiana audience in 1998, “Is it the global village that’s supposed to raise your child?”
No, it’s not, and she urged the United States to repudiate the International Criminal Court after Bill Clinton signed us up. In 2002, Bolton persuaded President George W. Bush to unsign what Clinton had signed, to keep us out of that anti-American institution.
In his landmark speech on Monday, Bolton called the repudiation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) his “happiest day in government.” Now he will take steps to prevent American servicemen from being prosecuted by the rogue tribunal masquerading as a court.
Bolton issued a stern warning that judges and prosecutors of the ICC would themselves be prosecuted, sanctioned, and have their travel restricted by the United States if they dare investigate American citizens, particularly our soldiers. For once Americans have an administration protecting them, as Obama and Clinton should have done while they were president.
Bolton spoke to preempt threatened action by the ICC against Americans. With all the good that the United States brings to the rest of the world, it is disgraceful that the ICC would even think about bringing politically motivated charges against American citizens.
Bolton indicated that he may not stop there, but is also considering freedom for the United States from other institutions of global governance, such as the World Trade Organization. President Trump has stated his interest in withdrawing us from that international group, and the sooner the better.
We applaud Bolton's statement that his and the Trump Administration’s “view is that Americans govern Americans. How’s that for a radical thought?” he humorously added as Phyllis Schlafly might have.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
California versus Trump on Phony Net Neutrality
by John and Andy Schlafly
September 4, 2018
As part of its never-ending resistance to the Trump agenda, the California legislature has just passed a bill to reinstate the discredited concept of “net neutrality” for access to the internet. A bill described as the nation’s strongest form of net neutrality awaits the signature of lame duck Governor Jerry Brown.
Net neutrality is as phony as “free trade,” in that both are wonderful only for those getting the better end of the deal. Google, Facebook, and other California companies have been getting a free ride on net neutrality because it enables them to avoid paying their enormous share of internet traffic.
Net neutrality is a fiction invented by Silicon Valley monopolies to stop cable companies from charging them for their huge amounts of traffic. Yet these same monopolies do not believe in neutrality in how they conduct business, by censoring political content they dislike.
The many billions in profits flowing to the Silicon Valley companies is partly due to how they hog traffic on the internet for free, without paying their full costs. They avoid paying, for example, the many billions of dollars needed to bring internet service to people’s homes.
Imagine a toll road where big trucking companies did not have to pay a dime. This would result in overuse of the toll road by trucks, and underfunding of road improvements.
The free market would be far superior to the phony net neutrality that enriches only Silicon Valley, because the free market enables the owner to charge fees based on use of its property. Free enterprise is also better in protecting free speech and preventing censorship.
Once the favoritism is ended, whether on the internet or roads, then better facilities would be built and more efficient usage would occur. The internet could be light years ahead of where it is now, if net neutrality stopped giving billionaire companies a free ride.
Without net neutrality, the public would have far better and faster internet service than we have today, because cable companies could raise money from the traffic hogs to improve the service. Instead, billions of dollars line the wallets of Silicon Valley executives who invest very little of it in improving internet service.
Under the superior, free-market-based approach adopted by President Trump, companies that carry internet traffic would be able to negotiate with the traffic hogs to compel them to pay their fair share of costs rather than freeload off others. Google and Facebook would then no longer be able to discriminate against conservatives and shift their costs to us too.
The public who pays the cable costs could then insist on access to the content that they want, which they cannot do now as Silicon Valley censors it.
The Silicon Valley companies do not want any rules of neutrality to apply to them, of course, as they exclude conservatives to appease their liberal base. They demand net neutrality only when it favors them, and oppose any requirement that they be fair to content with which liberals disagree.
The California legislators know who butters their bread, and their Democrat majority just passed a bill that interferes with President Trump’s better approach of allowing competition to rule the internet. SB 822 is being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, and he has not yet said whether he will sign it by his deadline of September 30.
This new California law would prohibit cable companies and other internet service providers from charging high-traffic users more. This ban is an encroachment on the rights of private property, because the owner of the internet service should be able to require traffic hogs to pay rather than freeload on the private property.
Under the California law, cable companies and their millions of customers could not tell Google and Facebook to stop discriminating against content that people want. The California law inverts the internet by allowing Silicon Valley to dictate content on the internet, when internet users and internet providers should be able to tell Google to stop discriminating against Dennis Prager and other conservatives.
It is Google and Facebook that block access, and they want leverage to continue doing so. That is backwards as Trump and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recognize, and hopefully they will sue in federal court if California Governor Brown signs this ill-advised bill into law.
Meanwhile, Congress is holding a hearing this week to review San Francisco-based Twitter’s bias against conservatives. The FTC could be investigating Google’s unfair business practices, Sen. Orrin Hatch points out.
Internet service providers may sue to overturn the California law, which would establish one system in that State which is different from most other States. California is essentially trying to force its self-interest on the rest of us with respect to the internet, to which California has no special claim of right.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
End NAFTA, Starting with Mexican Trucks
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 28, 2018
President Trump’s bold action in renegotiating NAFTA with Mexico caught his critics and hostile Canadian officials off guard. Short for the “North American Free Trade Agreement,” NAFTA has been a mistake plaguing us ever since the Clinton Administration pushed it into law in 1993.
The Canadian government has been pursuing an anti-Trump agenda, but now they are begging to be included in the new deal with Mexico. Trump has responded that Canada will be allowed into the deal on terms that are good for America, but Canada will get slapped with tariffs if it insists on the favoritism that it received in the past.
Trump is reportedly limiting a massive loophole which has cost us auto manufacturing jobs. He is requiring that 75% of a car’s value be made in North America in order to qualify for the exemption from tariffs, up from the lax 62.5% threshold allowed by NAFTA.
Trump is also properly insisting that cars contain a greater amount of American aluminum, steel and other essential parts. The new deal will require that 40 to 45% of cars be manufactured by workers who are paid at least $16 an hour, which would reduce reliance on cheap foreign labor.
NAFTA has been a scourge on our country perpetrated the globalists, who hide behind the misleading term “free trade” to justify their destruction of American jobs. Real wages in the United States have not improved for workers in many decades, and the offshoring of manufacturing under NAFTA is a big reason why.
It is not “free trade” to export American technology to foreign countries for manufacturing there, and to give away our American trade secrets as many companies have been doing with China. Corporate executives enrich themselves with this approach and create a two-tier society having a massive gap between the rich and poor, as exists in Silicon Valley today.
NAFTA narrowly passed 234–200 in the House of Representatives despite opposition by both liberals and conservatives. NAFTA fell far short of the two-thirds vote needed to ratify a treaty, but President Bill Clinton signed it into law anyway.
Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary for president in 2016 by pointing out that NAFTA and other disastrous trade agreements are what destroyed Detroit. Then Donald Trump defeated Hillary in that same traditionally Democratic state to win the presidency, again by criticizing Hillary’s support of bad trade deals like NAFTA.
NAFTA has been a job-killer and worse. NAFTA has flooded our communities with illegal drugs and illegal aliens, as far away from the southern border as New Hampshire and Iowa.
Due primarily to NAFTA, imports to our country from Mexico increased more than five-fold in the first two decades after NAFTA became law. But it is inevitable that this massive increase in legal imports from the crime-ridden foreign country would bring in much that is illegal and harmful, too.
In 2015, despite the failure of a pilot test program, President Obama extended NAFTA to allow Mexican trucks to carry loads deep into the United States with drivers having only a Mexican, not American, driver’s license. This has harmed towns near the border that had nice businesses to transfer truckloads of Mexican shipments to qualified American drivers for delivery throughout the United States.
President Trump should completely end the invasion of Mexican trucks in the United States, and not merely modify it. Mexican trucks are not as safe as American ones, and Mexican drivers have been involved in horrific crashes possibly caused by their limited English ability.
One can only guess at how much in illegal drugs flows into our Nation from Mexico due to NAFTA, because only a tiny fraction of all incoming containers are actually inspected. Moreover, drugs are cleverly concealed in other shipments such that they can escape detection even when their containers are the subject of inspection.
The rise in vicious drug lords and gangs that render Mexico so dangerous today coincided with NAFTA and the increase in drug importation into the United States. It is a myth perpetrated by globalists in claiming that NAFTA has been beneficial to Mexico, when in fact it has resulted in uncontrollable murders by drug gangs there.
Few remember presidential candidate Ross Perot, but in 1992 he attracted 19% in the presidential election by talking about the “giant sucking sound going south” if NAFTA became law. The loss of manufacturing jobs has indeed resulted, as American companies used NAFTA to move good jobs to Mexico.
Now many of those jobs should be coming back, thanks to President Trump’s tough approach to negotiations with Mexico and Canada. If he can also keep the Mexican trucks off our interstate highways then that will be an added bonus for all Americans.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Social Media Must Stop Censoring Conservatives
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 21, 2018
The biggest threat to what some call “our democracy” is not collusion with Russia, but collusion among high-tech monopolies in Silicon Valley to censor Trump supporters. The strong-arm tactics of the Leftists who control Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple are making the Pravda of the former Soviet Union look like a free speech paradise in comparison.
Shadowbanning conservative users, which consists of blocking or hindering the distribution of their internet content without telling them, is a particularly pernicious form of censorship. The victim sees fewer viewers for his postings but does not know why.
Other tactics to stifle conservatives on the internet have included taking down their YouTube videos, excluding their “apps” from smart phones, and disabling links from Facebook to conservative websites. The problem is so pervasive that it has attracted the attention of House Republicans and President Trump himself.
On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen.”
The timing of this political censorship less than 60 days from the beginning of early voting in the midterms is no coincidence. Control of the House of Representatives hangs in the balance, and censoring Trump supporters gives Democrat candidates an unfair advantage.
“Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen,” President Trump continued. “Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”
“I won’t mention names,” the president said in an interview with Reuters, “but when they take certain people off of Twitter or Facebook and they’re making that decision, that is really a dangerous thing because that could be you tomorrow.”
The Department of Justice should take Trump’s tweets to heart, and investigate the Silicon Valley monopolies. If DOJ can afford $50 million for Robert Mueller to search for Russian collusion in the last election, then it should have enough money to expose how conservative speech is restricted by the corporations that control our social media.
Competition is a necessary condition of the American free enterprise system, but there is no real competition in social media or Silicon Valley. Instead, a privileged few are abusing their monopoly power to silence an essential segment of political dialog: conservative speech.
The Sherman Act, landmark Republican legislation passed way back in 1890, provides the Trump Administration all the tools it needs to stop the censorship. Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and the other California companies are violating the Sherman Act by restraining trade in the services they offer, as well as by attempting to monopolize the main channels of communication on the internet.
Senator John McCain’s political idol, President Theodore Roosevelt, would be telling Trump to bust up the Silicon Valley monopolies that are censoring conservatives. Not even John D. Rockefeller’s massive oil monopoly, a target of Roosevelt’s trust-busting, ever tried to impose censorship of American political opinion.
Teddy Roosevelt was also very Trump-like on the need for immigrants to assimilate and learn to speak our common English language. In addition to Trump’s positions on securing our borders, the first President Roosevelt would have applauded Trump for recently praising a U.S. Border Patrol agent who “speaks perfect English.”
While the Justice Department is preoccupied with searching for a nonexistent Russia conspiracy, another Trump cabinet member, Dr. Ben Carson, has issued a challenge to one of the social media giants. On Friday, Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) accused Facebook of discriminating against its users, in a Housing Discrimination Complaint.
Facebook makes its enormous profits by extracting demographic information about its users and then delivering that information to advertisers for a price. By doing so, Facebook “invites advertisers to express unlawful preferences by offering discriminatory options, allowing them to effectively limit housing options for these protected classes under the guise of ‘targeted advertising,’” Dr. Carson’s HUD said in a statement.
“The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination including those who might limit or deny housing options with a click of a mouse,” said the HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Anna María Farías. Facebook violates federal law by allowing its advertisers to unlawfully control which users receive housing-related ads based upon the recipient’s race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, and/or zip code.
The Leftist strategy to censor is bound to fail, and gives Republicans a campaign issue for the fall. Defending the right of free speech against censorship is an issue that resonates strongly with young voters, on whom Democrats traditionally rely for their margin of victory.
The political irony is rich. Democrats are making President Trump the new champion of free speech, and deservedly so.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Stephen Miller is our Rock of Gibraltar
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 14, 2018
When the Left resorts to digging up someone’s uncle to smear someone, then you know they are getting desperate. Yet that is the pathetic length to which the Trump-haters are going, to try to stop the most effective adviser in the White House.
Stephen Miller has been the guiding light on President Trump’s agenda to make America safe again after decades of illegal immigration and open borders. He is extraordinary in how he both writes Trump’s speeches on many topics, while also giving him substantive advice on the most important issues.
It has taken the media awhile to recognize that the low-key Miller is the Rock of Gibraltar in the White House amid the storms that fake news repeatedly creates. Miller is the one who stayed strong while House Speaker Paul Ryan and other sellouts on Capitol Hill demanded that Trump cave on DACA and other immigration controversies.
Phyllis Schlafly praised Miller back when he was crafting immigration policy for then-Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Miller authored detailed, highly effective reports against open borders while he worked for Sen. Sessions, which Phyllis then distributed nationwide.
When John McCain ran for president in 2008, Phyllis educated the grassroots in Iowa about the immigration issue and urged them to question McCain at gatherings he attended around the state. He expressed surprise and dismay afterwards about how significant the immigration issue had become in rural Iowa.
Significant indeed. Since then Miller first guided Senator Sessions and then President Trump on the issue, championing the needs of America against those who hate us around the world.
Enter Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist and Miller’s uncle who wrote a recent article highly critical of his nephew Stephen Miller in Politico.com. It is unclear if Dr. Glosser knows Miller well enough to criticize him on a personal level; instead, Dr. Glosser relies on how Miller’s maternal grandmother immigrated through Ellis Island more than a century ago without being able to speak English.
But those immigrants worked hard to learn English and assimilate fully into American society, and they raised their children to love America. Many of the Ellis Island immigrants, like Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, were highly patriotic and outspokenly supportive of America.
Justice Frankfurter, for example, was so patriotic that he voted against a constitutional right for any schoolchild to refuse to salute the American flag. The Supreme Court ultimately decided that issue in favor of a First Amendment right not to salute, but the immigrant Justice Frankfurter passionately dissented in support of West Virginia and its mandatory salute to the American flag in public school.
Stephen Miller has described how his experiences at his own public high school helped shape his views. He quoted President Teddy Roosevelt in his high school yearbook: "There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country."
Now Stephen Miller is reviving the “public charge” doctrine to reduce public welfare handouts to immigrants. If someone has been milking the taxpayers for Obamacare and other welfare programs, then why should he be granted American citizenship?
We do not have enough resources in the United States to give perpetual handouts to the rest of the world, and we should not be attracting immigrants who want to live on such entitlements here. Miller should take sensible steps to tie citizenship to self-reliance, and he does not need approval by Congress to do so.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the Trump Administration “is committed to enforcing existing immigration law, which is clearly intended to protect the American taxpayer by ensuring that foreign nationals seeking to enter or remain in the U.S are self-sufficient.” The Department added that it “takes the responsibility of being good stewards of taxpayer funds seriously and adjudicates immigration benefit requests in accordance with the law.”
Bravo! But liberals are howling mad, decrying how this could affect one million people in New York City alone.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, explained decades ago that “in a welfare state … the supply of immigrants will become infinite.” In other words, the combination of immigration and the welfare state is a recipe for economic disaster.
For example, liberals want Medicare for All, by which they mean all residents, legal and illegal. That is projected to cost the American taxpayer an astronomical $32.6 trillion over ten years.
President Trump can save us from that by enforcing "public charge" doctrine, by which all participants in such government handouts will be disqualified from obtaining American citizenship. This will advance Trump’s goal of attracting the best from other countries, not those who are least willing to work.
We are grateful to Stephen Miller for his courageous stance on immigration. Not even the welcoming poem at the Statue of Liberty invites those who are coming here for a handout.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Congress AWOL as Courts Derail the Trump Train
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 7, 2018
President Trump’s party controls Congress, but one would never know that by how it has been AWOL (absent without leave) while courts block Trump at every turn. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House who is retiring at the age of only 48, is doing so little that the public might wonder if he is even still in office.
Meanwhile, the judicial war of resistance against Trump continues unabated. In the last few days and weeks, federal courts have issued rulings requiring Trump to restart DACA, fund sanctuary cities, stop asking about citizenship in the census, include transgenders in the interpretation of Title IX, reunite illegal alien “families” even where the adults are criminals who have already been deported, and so on.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement on Monday criticizing the rash of judicial activism against the Trump Administration. “We have recently witnessed a number of decisions in which courts have improperly used judicial power to steer, enjoin, modify, and direct executive policy,” General Sessions explained.
“This ignores the wisdom of our Founders and transfers policy making questions from the constitutionally empowered and politically accountable branches to the judicial branch,” he said. General Sessions vowed that the “Trump Administration and this Department of Justice will continue to aggressively defend the executive branch’s lawful authority and duty to ensure a lawful system of immigration for our country.”
New lawsuits against policies Trump campaigned on are being filed by the Left nearly every day. Last week four liberal-controlled cities – Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Columbus – asked a federal court to force Trump to support Obamacare.
Imitating a familiar pattern pursued by liberals in other cases, the new lawsuit for Obamacare quotes out-of-court statements by President Trump as though they were evidence. For example, the lawsuit demands relief because Trump has said that “essentially, we have gotten rid of” Obamacare.
The power vacuum on Capitol Hill encourages judicial supremacy, as courts see that Congress is not providing any check or balance to the overreach by the judicial branch. Like unsupervised kids in a candy store, judges will grab as much power as they can until Congress checks their conduct.
The Supreme Court does too little, too late to rein in lower courts that legislate from the bench. Deciding only 58 argued cases during its recently ended term, the Supreme Court has been barely more than a remote outpost that takes far too long to protect our Constitutional rights.
In the last year the Supreme Court has ducked issues and declined to accept appeals on anti-Second Amendment rulings upholding gun control, and an anti-First Amendment ruling censoring videos taken by pro-life David Daleiden. This renders liberal Courts of Appeals the last word on key issues.
In a tactic known as forum shopping, Trump’s opponents file their lawsuits in courts where Democratic trial judges will likely rule in their favor at the district court level. Then, a year or two later at the appellate level, the overwhelmingly Democrat-nominated judges in the Fourth and Ninth Circuits predictably affirm.
Trump ultimately prevailed when the Supreme Court reinstated his temporary, so-called travel ban from several hostile nations, but it took nearly a year-and-a-half to do so, even with the expedited attention that case received. That wasteful litigation consumed more than a third of Trump’s entire first term in office, and far too much of his personal time, allowing uncertainty to persist and undermine other actions that Trump could have been taking for our country.
The Ninth Circuit presides over a fifth of our nation’s population – more than 64 million people – and more than two-thirds of its active judges were appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. Despite seven vacancies on that Circuit for Trump to fill, the Senate has so far confirmed only one, a compromise nominee opposed by more than half the Republican senators due to his weakness on the Second Amendment.
More than a decade ago, Congress did take an important step to curb judicial hostility to the Second Amendment. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) prohibits all courts, both federal and state, from entertaining lawsuits against gun manufacturers for crimes committed by their products.
This good law stands as a model of what Congress should also be doing to rein in the courts on additional issues where they are out of control. Despite the resounding success of the PLCAA in achieving its stated goal to “preserve a citizen’s access to a supply of firearms and ammunition,” Congress has not yet expanded this approach to eliminate other judicial activism.
Immigration policy is an issue uniquely within the domain of the President and Congress, and courts should have little say in the matter. Congress should take heed of Attorney General Sessions’ criticisms of judicial overreach on immigration, and withdraw the issue from the courts.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Revoke the Deep State’s Security Clearances
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 24, 2018
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, our wonderful White House Press Secretary, sent liberals into a tizzy on Monday with her announcement that President Trump is considering revoking the security clearances of several Deep State leaders. John Brennan, a liberal mouthpiece who became Obama’s CIA director after having once voted for the Communist Party for president, would be among the first to lose his security clearance.
Oh my. The Left has not panicked so much since the Election Night returns put Donald Trump into the White House.
Another candidate for revocation is Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser thought to have improperly obtained the identity of General Michael Flynn on a wiretap. The since-replaced national security adviser H.R. McMaster allowed Rice to retain her security clearance, waiving the customary “need-to-know” requirement to allow Rice unlimited access to anything she ever reviewed or received when in office.
In addition to Brennan and Rice, revocation is being considered for the discredited FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, and the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. It was Clapper who famously lied under oath to Congress about his secret surveillance program of Americans.
“They’ve politicized, and in some cases, monetized their public service,” explained Sanders to the media on Monday. “Making baseless accusations of an improper relationship with Russia is inappropriate,” Sanders added.
Sanders is precisely right that “the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.” Those who repeatedly make false accusations against our Commander-in-Chief are unfit to be trusted with confidential information about our national security.
The Never-Trumpers will always enjoy their First Amendment rights, but they should not have access to our national secrets while they are writing books and profiting from their irresponsible, false claims about our president. Some of them respond by saying their ability to see classified information has already been terminated, but those security clearances could be easily reinstated unless Trump revokes them.
Americans voted for a new direction for our country under President Trump, in repudiation of the path that Obama was taking us, so why are the losers still around pretending to speak with authority? Many Americans are probably wondering why the security clearances of these acolytes of Obama were not fully revoked long ago.
Phyllis Schlafly often criticized past Republican presidents who failed to “clean house” and replace the supporters of their defeated opponents. She extracted a promise from President Ronald Reagan that he would never appoint a Deep Stater from the Nixon-Ford era, Henry Kissinger, to anything of significance, and Reagan kept his promise.
Tossing out the entrenched insiders who are so determined to defeat President Trump requires, at a minimum, taking away the special authority they unjustifiably continue to enjoy. John Brennan and James Clapper would still be able to pontificate all they like on television, but they should not be able to do so with the implied authority of an active security clearance.
Late last Friday, in a delayed release to avoid the news cycle, the Deep State finally partially complied with a court order to hand over its FISA application for wiretaps of a former adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016, Carter Page. The heavily redacted, secret application was for repeated wiretaps of Carter Page’s phone, in an unsuccessful attempt by the Deep State to catch Trump in a misstep on a secretly recorded line.
FISA stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which authorizes secret proceedings to order wiretaps that would not ordinarily be allowed. This shadow system enabling investigators to obtain wiretaps from a secret court has grown ever since, with no meaningful check or balance.
The FISA application to wiretap the Trump adviser is filled with innuendo and false allegations that came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Wiretaps of someone connected with a presidential campaign, on such a flimsy basis, bring new meaning to the term “rubber stamp” in describing how the FISA court grants whatever the Deep State demands.
Allies of Brennan, Clapper, and the others, protest that President Trump may lack the authority to revoke their security clearances, but the power of the president to do so can hardly be doubted. They may run to court to enjoin the president on this, but hardly any Supreme Court Justice would rule against the presidential power to decide, in his own discretion, who should not have a security clearance.
“Mr. Strzok — as I understand — has lost his security clearance,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared last month about the disgraced FBI official Peter Strzok who stated he would “stop” Trump from becoming president. Trump should take similar action to ensure that others like him do not continue to have special access to our nation’s most confidential information.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Remarkable Press Conference
July 17, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
President Trump’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was remarkable in how Trump refused to pay homage to liberal fiction about hackers stealing the last election. Instead, Trump went on the offensive and laid blame for deteriorating relations with Russia where blame is due: at the doorstep of Mueller’s delusional investigation.
Many on the Left dislike Russia now because it is an increasingly Christian country that changed the name of Leningrad to Saint Petersburg and even enacts pro-life laws. Communism was overthrown in Russia more than a quarter-century ago, and its trend toward conservative values today angers Leftists immensely.
President Trump batted away the anti-Russian questions at the presser in Helsinki, and explained that there was “zero collusion” between hackers and his “clean” campaign that trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016. After more than a year of looking for collusion and not finding any, Mueller’s investigation should be winding down rather than winding up.
But last week, in a transparent attempt to disrupt the Trump-Putin summit, Mueller indicted the equivalent of 12 more ham sandwiches. Elusive hackers, a high-tech counterpart to witches of yesteryear, supposedly entered the Democratic National Committee’s computers when no one was looking and had no discernible impact on any election results.
Mueller was never given a blank check to investigate thousands of hackers, who may merely be teenage boys engaging in mischief on the internet from the basement of their parents’ homes. Mueller was authorized to investigate alleged collusion by the Trump campaign, of which there was no evidence, and tens of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars later, there is still no such evidence.
So far Mueller has indicted 25 Russian individuals and three Russian companies on charges that Mueller knows he will never have to prove in a court of law. At one hearing an attorney pointed out to the judge how one of the companies did not even exist at the time it was alleged to have done wrongdoing.
Senator Rand Paul stands with President Trump in repeatedly criticizing Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt,” pointing out that Trump’s alleged nefarious ties with Russia are a “hoax.” On Sunday, Senator Paul explained that it is a “waste of time” to attempt to penalize Putin for alleged interference by Russian hackers in American elections.
Meanwhile, Never-Trumpers came out of the woodwork once again to try to find fault with Trump. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, an ally of the Koch brothers and other Never-Trumpers, declared from the Senate floor that “everyone in this body should be disgusted by what happened in Helsinki.”
Sen. Sasse himself has an abysmal approval rating in the strongly conservative state of Nebraska, as Never-Trumper Sen. Jeff Flake has in Arizona. Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, a Trump supporter, is being urged to run against Sasse in two years but so far Ricketts has declined in order to focus first on another term as governor.
Retiring congressman Trey Gowdy, a rising star until he opposed Trump, has apparently also fallen for Mueller’s indictment stunts. Gowdy absurdly suggested that Trump should ask Putin where the 25 Russian witches, that is, hackers, can be picked up.
Gowdy has given Mueller more job security than anyone else in D.C., by implicitly inviting him to spend years indicting more ham sandwiches. No problem, the American taxpayer will be stuck with the tab of tens of millions of dollars.
President Trump’s takedown of the media concerning Mueller is an encore to draining the swamp of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). That entrenched bureaucracy has been bilking the American taxpayer for years while we get nothing in return.
NATO developed as a counterweight to the communist Soviet Union, but with Russia becoming more conservative than Europe it is unclear why we are still spending billions on NATO. Its largest country, Germany, is dependent on Russia for natural gas and no amount of American troops in Europe can force Russia to turn that pipeline on if she were one day to shut it off.
“Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting between 60 and 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline,” observed Trump at the opening of the recent NATO summit. “It’s a very bad thing for NATO, and I don’t think it should have happened,” he properly explained.
NATO member Poland, also a formerly communist country that is increasingly conservative, immediately praised Trump’s criticisms of Germany’s self-defeating globalism. Poland is buying natural gas from the United States and President Andrzej Duda astutely observed that “one of the most important goals for the European Union in the energy sector” should be to avoid dependency on any particular foreign country.
Globalists are not pleased by President Trump’s one-two punch abroad. But standing against globalism plays well with the American voter, as it should.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Cements Legacy with SCOTUS Pick
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 10, 2018
With his second conservative nomination to the Supreme Court, President Trump has already exceeded Ronald Reagan. Brett Kavanaugh is stellar on immigration and sovereignty, the life issue, and the Second Amendment.
Trump made this look easy, but liberals did everything they could to dissuade him from selecting Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy left by Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. A coordinated, sophisticated campaign to criticize Kavanaugh from the right was both insincere and deceptive.
The tiny Never-Trump wing of the Republican Party does not like how Kavanaugh has long agreed with Trump on core issues. Unlike Kavanaugh’s liberal rivals for nomination to the Supreme Court, he has participated in more than 3,800 cases and unflinchingly defended principles loathed by liberals.
How refreshing it is to actually have a Supreme Court nominee who supports American sovereignty, and does not defer to international law! Writing alone as he has often had to do on the liberal D.C. Circuit, Judge Kavanaugh has explained that the War Powers Clause is not restricted by international law.
That was in a 2016 decision which considered a challenge to a military commission by Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman Al Bahlul, who was convicted as the personal assistant to Osama bin Laden. Judge Kavanaugh stood strong against the lawsuit, as the entire Court of Appeals should have.
In another case that began in 2007, Judge Kavanaugh dissented from a decision that gave illegal aliens the same rights as American workers in forming unions for collective bargaining. Kavanaugh explained in dissent that “an illegal immigrant worker is not an ’employee’ under the NLRA for the simple reason that, ever since 1986, an illegal immigrant worker is not a lawful ’employee’ in the United States.”
On the Second Amendment, Judge Kavanaugh was on the panel that heard a challenge to DC's strict gun controls after the Supreme Court established an individual right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms. The majority of that panel then upheld the gun control as courts do across the country now.
Judge Kavanaugh strongly dissented from that pro-gun-control decision, and wrote in favor of a Second Amendment that should be defended as strongly by courts as the First Amendment is. Justice Clarence Thomas will have a strong ally on the Supreme Court for the Second Amendment once Kavanaugh is confirmed.
None of the other eight justices on the Supreme Court, including Neil Gorsuch, would join Justice Thomas’s dissent in February decrying how gun control laws are being upheld by Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court is refusing to accept those cases to review and reverse. The stark reality is that the Supreme Court has not taken a real Second Amendment case in years, and lower courts have gotten the message that they can uphold gun control laws without fear of being reversed.
Trump’s brilliant nomination of Kavanaugh to the High Court changes that. We can expect Kavanaugh to call out his colleagues if they continue to duck Second Amendment appeals, and his strong legal reasoning should help protect that fundamental right against further erosion.
On the life issue, liberals are of course sharpening their knives to try to block Kavanaugh from confirmation by insisting that he might overturn Roe v. Wade. But that is a very tough sell by the Left, as young people are increasingly pro-life and nearly a half-dozen Democratic Senators are running for reelection in pro-life states that Trump carried by a landslide.
The issue of Roe v. Wade has never sunk a nominee in the Senate, despite all the hoopla by pro-abortion feminists pretending that they can block a nominee on that issue. They failed in trying to block Justice Clarence Thomas on that issue, and were unable to block the confirmation of John Roberts or Samuel Alito, either.
We hope that Kavanaugh does not grovel to pro-abortion senators as they demand reassurances that the fallacy of Roe v. Wade be enshrined forever even though it has absolutely no basis in the Constitution. Kavanaugh need not answer questions about the issue, just as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the precedent herself for declining to answer specific questions about cases.
The isolated criticisms of Kavanaugh by the Never-Trump crowd have been unjustified. His ruling to uphold a narrow part of a campaign finance law relating to political parties is not a core issue to the conservative movement, and certainly not a basis for opposing his nomination.
Justice Anthony Kennedy turned to the right in his final year on the bench, both in his decisions and in allowing Trump to fill his vacancy. It is unlikely that Justice Kennedy would find anything to criticize in this nomination of Kavanaugh for the seat that Kennedy is leaving, and neither should any Republican or moderate Democrat.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Can Surpass Reagan with His Pick
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 2, 2018
President Trump has a golden opportunity to surpass Reagan on the all-important issue of the Supreme Court. With a good pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump can achieve what Reagan could not.
As good as Reagan was, two out of his three Supreme Court Justices were disappointments. Reagan’s first selection was his worst, and Trump’s advisors should take care not to allow history to repeat that mistake.
Reagan chose Sandra Day O’Connor after she was inadequately vetted as to her liberal positions on abortion, the Establishment Clause, and feminism. Reagan erred by picking her because she was the first he interviewed for the job, without Reagan bothering to interview the other candidates.
Immediately it was obvious that Reagan and his advisors had blundered. Although Reagan had promised to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, his more important promise was to appoint pro-life judges and yet he broke that pledge with his first nominee.
Let’s do as Reagan said when he urged a “trust but verify” approach. Whether by mistake or design, there are several candidates on Trump’s list who should not be nominated for Kennedy’s seat.
One candidate would fail to honor Trump’s pro-life pledge, and another would violate Trump’s Second Amendment pledge. The selection of either would be a devastating setback to the Trump agenda.
Ms. Joan Larsen was a volunteer for Joe Biden for president in 1987, where she helped with mailings and telephoning for Biden's campaign as she admitted on her Senate questionnaire. That political work for Biden is not something a pro-lifer would do.
Ms. Larsen has claimed there is sexism in the career of law, a common refrain by those who support abortion under the guise of equal rights for women. She has encountered Roe v. Wade often, without criticizing it.
Ms. Larsen, who kept her last name after marrying a law professor, is touted by her supporters as having been a law professor herself at the liberal University of Michigan law school. But in fact she never obtained a tenured chair, and her writings are not up to the level of real law professors.
The other candidate on the short list who should not be picked is Raymond Kethledge, whose selection would violate Trump’s pledge on the Second Amendment. Judge Kethledge notably failed to support the “strict scrutiny” standard for the Second Amendment that is essential to safeguarding the right to keep and bear arms.
Sixteen years of court-packing by Presidents Clinton and Obama have left most of our Nation’s population under pro-gun-control Courts of Appeals. The population-heavy 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 9th, 11th, and D.C. Circuits are all dominated by judges who refuse to treat the Second Amendment with the same respect they give to the First Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas laments how gun control laws are being upheld by the Courts of Appeals, and then petitions to the Supreme Court to review those decisions are being denied. Justice Thomas explained in February, in his dissent from one of those denials of cert, that the strict scrutiny standard of review used for the First Amendment is not being applied as it should be to the Second Amendment.
Yet there Judge Kethledge was in 2016, refusing to join an opinion by conservative judge Danny Boggs to adopt the strict scrutiny standard of review for the Second Amendment in the Sixth Circuit. Kethledge typifies the problem that Justice Thomas subsequently highlighted in explaining why gun control laws are not being overturned.
In Sherlock Holmes’ classic “Silver Blaze,” the compelling evidence overlooked by Scotland Yard was the failure of a dog to bark when a midnight visitor stole a prized racehorse away from his stall. That meant the dog knew the criminal, and the compelling evidence of silence should be a criterion in vetting the replacement for Justice Kennedy.
Many important decisions are made by the Supreme Court in refusing to grant a petition for cert, as it did earlier this year in denying David Daleiden’s petition concerning the infringement on his rights by the Ninth Circuit. By denying that petition and others like it, the Supreme Court allows anti-life, and anti-Second Amendment, rulings by liberal appellate courts to stand.
We do not need justices who are timid about speaking out or reviewing and reversing liberal decisions that come out of the Ninth and other Circuits. Similarly, we do not want a nominee who is unwilling to overturn prior mistakes of the Supreme Court itself.
Of all the pitiful clamor by Democrats and a few liberal Republicans, the most preposterous is their demand that the nominee refuse to overrule Court precedent. Every year the Supreme Court overturns its own mistakes, as it should, including its recent overruling of its own precedent of 41 years ago that wrongly imposed mandatory dues on government employees.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Triumphant Trump Vindicated Again
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 26, 2018
Only Donald Trump wins as comfortably in the hushed halls of the Supreme Court as on the backroads of rural America. In the past few days he has triumphed before the Supreme Court, leads by 51-36% in the latest approval poll concerning his economic policies, and prevailed by an incalculable margin in rebuking the restaurant that denied service to his press secretary and her family.
The new liberal strategy of harassing Trump officials is backfiring. As leading Democrats themselves recognize in unsuccessfully trying to rein in their extremists, it is un-American to harass fellow Americans for their political views.
Time magazine piled on with a ridiculous cover image of President Trump standing stubbornly over a little girl detained at our border. Yanela Hernandez was supposed to become the poster child for family separation, after she was brought here by her mother all the way from Honduras.
But it is the facts that are stubbornly ruining the anti-Trump script. The girl was actually separated from her father not by Trump but by her own mother, who took the child on a dangerous 3-week, 1,600-mile journey without telling her husband (the girl’s father).
Nearly 20 years ago, a 5-year-old Cuban boy named Elián González was brought by his mother on a dangerous journey to Florida. Elián was placed with relatives in the United States after his mother drowned, but as demanded by liberals President Clinton ordered him seized him at gunpoint and returned to communist Cuba.
Illegal immigration is what is separating families, not President Trump. Yanela Hernandez would not have been taken away from her family in Honduras if we had sensible border control.
Referring to the deprivation of his little girl from him by her mother in Honduras, her father Denis Hernandez told a reporter for the Daily Mail, “I do think it was irresponsible of her to take the baby with her, because we don’t know what could happen.”
“I thank God I have a good job here,” Mr. Hernandez said from his home in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, which is safe enough to be a tourist destination. “I would never risk my life making that journey.”
This case illustrates someone who should be sent back immediately without a judicial hearing, since the Hernandez family has no basis for claiming asylum or refugee status. When Trump suggested that, a news story in the New York Times declared it was “an escalation of his attacks on the judicial system.”
That criticism of Trump is ironic in light of the Supreme Court ruling in his favor on Tuesday, for which he patiently waited for nearly a year-and-a-half. Far from attacking the judicial system, Trump fully complied with all its procedures and prevailed as the Court upheld his so-called travel ban from nations hostile to us.
Let’s hope lower federal courts take a cue from the Supreme Court in deferring to presidential authority in these matters. But earlier this month, on June 6, a federal judge in San Diego allowed the ACLU to continue its lawsuit against the “practice” of separating migrant children from their parents without showing that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.
On June 5, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement blasting the Trump administration’s policy of zero tolerance for illegal entry into the United States. The statement ordered our government to “stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense — that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S.”
The UN human rights office accused our government of committing “a serious violation of the rights of the child,” before complaining that the U.S. “is the only country in the world not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.” That’s right, the United States has wisely refused to ratify that dangerous UN treaty since the 1990s, when it was pushed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and properly opposed by Phyllis Schlafly.
On June 19, the U.S. formally withdrew from a related UN agency called the Human Rights Council, whose members include some of the most repressive regimes on earth. Ambassador Nikki Haley denounced the council, which has passed more resolutions to condemn Israel specifically than to condemn Syria, Iran and North Korea combined, as “an organization that is unworthy of its name.”
Another globalist tribunal which our country declined to join more than 15 years ago is the international criminal court, located in the Hague. That did not stop a clueless protester from shouting at Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, that “you belong in the Hague!”
As hard as the Left smears and harasses him and his team, the stronger Trump becomes. “Triumphant Trump” emerges victorious again and again.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Should Stand Firm Against Illegals
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 19, 2018
The push for amnesty for illegal aliens is turbo-charged by stories of separating children from their parents at the southern border. But children are often separated from lawbreaking and even law-abiding American parents, so it is curious why liberals and others would suddenly complain when it happens to families for entering our country illegally.
The critics do not provide an alternative to the current policy of prosecuting lawbreaking parents while allowing their children to go free. If we had a border wall then these separations would not occur, and the critics of Trump are the same ones who oppose building the wall.
Migrant camps would be needed to keep all families together as the adults break the law, but that is a European rather than American approach. There is no crisis in Central America that justifies establishing refugee camps.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp,” President Trump rightly declared, “and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Not on my watch!”
The timing is suspicious for this media campaign about separating children from parents. The push for an amnesty bill has reached a fever pitch for more than a million young adults, who are euphemistically called “childhood arrivals” because many of them crossed our border illegally while teenagers.
These migrants would be wonderful assets to their homelands, and they have more relatives back home than they do here. Amnesty would merely encourage more illegality.
Lobbying groups in D.C. are turning up the heat on congressmen to get this amnesty passed, and the Koch donor network is demanding it, too. Big business benefits from cheap labor that crosses our borders illegally.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an immigration bill that granted amnesty and created the incentive for more illegal immigration. Far from solving a problem, amnesty induces more illegal immigration in the future.
So to attract support by President Trump, the House compromise amnesty bill includes funding for construction of a border wall, to the tune of $25 billion. But funding a wall is not the same as building a wall, because liberals run to court to block almost anything Trump does related to immigration.
Before the ink could dry on such a bill, even if it were to pass the Senate intact, liberals would file suit to obtain injunctions blocking the construction of a wall. They would sue in predictably activist jurisdictions such as San Francisco and Hawaii, where multiple injunctions have already been issued to block Trump’s executive orders that were tame compared with a border wall.
Congress has the authority to “strip” federal courts of jurisdiction, and has done so on many occasions. As explained by Phyllis Schlafly in her classic book The Supremacists, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) once stripped jurisdiction from federal courts over challenges to brush-clearing in his home state.
Before President Trump signs any immigration bill, he should insist on broad jurisdiction-stripping provisions. He should demand that Congress remove federal court jurisdiction over his executive orders limiting travel from hostile nations.
If federal courts are allowed to wield authority over the construction of a border wall, then multiple Clinton – or Obama – appointed judges will surely enjoin its construction. Reasons given will range from environmentalism to non-existent prejudice.
Fortunately, few Republicans who want to win reelection will cross President Trump at this point, after his tweet sunk Never-Trumper Congressman Mark Sanford in his own primary in South Carolina. There is no reason for Trump to cave into Republicans now.
Lame duck House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is stepping down at the age of only 48 rather than fight for the Trump agenda, has long given priority to the agenda of the pro-illegal immigration lobbyists. But their goals are not those of the American people who elected Trump as president.
Trump announced that he is not going to sign the Ryan immigration bill, which reminds us again why Trump is so much better than any other Republican presidential candidate. Anyone else would have capitulated to the pressure from Republican mega-donors and lobbyists to sign into law an amnesty bill.
No immigration bill can become law without the support of President Trump, and House leaders are meeting with him on Tuesday to seek a compromise. Trump should adhere to non-negotiable requirements, including a withdrawal of jurisdiction from the courts over issues relating to construction of the wall, Trump’s executive orders concerning immigration, and challenges to deportation.
Congressmen Steve King and Lou Barletta, who is a candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania against a Democrat incumbent, have long been leaders on this all-important issue of immigration. Both oppose the compromise bill being pushed on President Trump, and no bill on immigration is worth supporting unless Representatives King and Barletta are on board.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Winning Economic Positions
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 12, 2018
President Trump reasserted American leadership on trade and security in the last week, sending his doubters into disarray. Trump’s historic performance at the G-7 meeting in Canada, followed quickly by his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, left no doubt that America is indeed great again on the world stage.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s leftwing prime minister, was unnecessarily belligerent to Trump at the end of the G-7 summit, and Never-Trump Republicans should not have piled on. Lame duck Republican senator Jeff Flake, who is so unpopular in Arizona that he decided not to run for reelection, once again lashed out at Trump, as did other globalist Republicans.
But American workers are behind Trump, and the stock market shows no harmful effects of Trump’s pro-American, pro-tariff trade policies. The G-7 summit, a gathering of the leaders of seven large economies, demonstrated that it has become a farce.
It held a breakfast meeting devoted to “gender equality,” and we applaud how Trump showed up late for such an unproductive attempt at political correctness. The politicians at the G-7 summit are in denial about how voters throughout Europe, as in the United States and more recently in Italy, are rejecting the business-as-usual approach of the Establishment.
Meanwhile, although Trump’s pro-tariff positions receive all the attention, a little-noticed appointment back home may be nearly as important. Makan Delrahim, Trump’s handpicked leader of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, is working hard to ensure more competition domestically and Silicon Valley monopolies are nervous about this.
Small businesses create far more jobs than big business does, a fact lost on the pre-Trump Republican Party. President George W. Bush pursued policies favorable to big business and it all cratered in 2008, handling the election to Obama.
Once the home of countless tech start-ups, Silicon Valley has devolved into a two-tier society of haves and have-nots, and little real competition. A mere handful of giant companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google have exploited the H-1B visa program and failed to compete with each other for labor, such that salaries have not kept up with the cost of living there.
The latest average salary increase of tech workers in Silicon Valley — the region between San Francisco and San Jose that is the birthplace of many familiar technology behemoths — is only 0.4% per year. That is because there is not real competition there, but merely large companies that fight to maintain the status quo with them on top.
The cost of living goes up there, but real wages do not. The result is a large homeless population of people who simply cannot earn enough, even working multiple jobs, to afford housing.
Worn-out RVs line one edge of Stanford University, and homeless camps of families litter the landscape close to wealth centers like Google’s headquarters. Monopolies interfere with a healthy distribution of wealth, creating enormous disparities more familiar in countries like Mexico, where a few people control much of the property.
Big companies rarely innovate, and in fact often stifle inventions that threaten their dominance. The largest Silicon Valley companies have been most responsible for changing our patent system from one that rewarded the inventor to one that favors big business.
Trump’s outspoken criticism of Amazon.com has led others in his Administration and the Republican Party to look more critically at Silicon Valley monopolies like Facebook. The scrutiny is long overdue, and some antitrust enforcement may be just what the doctor ordered.
This is welcome relief from the failed policies of the administration of President George W. Bush, which rolled over for the Microsoft monopoly and got nothing for the American public in return. Bill Gates then poured some of his wealth into promoting Common Core and other liberal goals, which conservatives have fought ever since.
Many of these tech monopolies are too anxious to give away American trade secrets to China in exchange for making a few bucks in that market. Already China is manufacturing cheap smart phones, but where did it acquire the secrets to do so?
Apple itself did not invent the smart phone, as the Blackberry deserves more credit for that. But then Apple embarked on a business plan of selling in China, which typically requires giving China technology secrets to do so.
The profits Apple made on those sales have been mostly kept outside the United States, so they have not helped Americans at all. The long-term effect of Apple’s sales in China may simply be to transfer secret technology developed here to a foreign power hostile to the United States.
A strong antitrust policy against the monopolistic technology companies will complement Trump’s principled support of fair trade. Trump was right to reject the globalism of the G-7 summit, and to send a long-overdue message that the United States will no longer be taken for granted on trade.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Media Smear of Trump Backfires
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 29, 2018
Social media had a field day with a photo which appears to show that the Trump administration is keeping migrant children penned in cages along the U.S.-Mexican border. A photo that went viral shows two Hispanic children sleeping on a concrete floor behind a chain-link fence.
A news report that confirms what you already believe to be true is said to be “too good to check.” In this case, the photo seemed to corroborate what the media falsely believe about our President.
“Look at these pictures,” tweeted former President Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau. “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”
The picture was retweeted by other anti-Trump personalities including Shaun King, an activist who supported Black Lives Matter. “Take a look at these pictures,” tweeted Linda Sarsour, the radical Muslim activist who co-founded the Women’s March.
Donald Trump, as usual, had the last laugh on his critics. The photo was actually taken in June 2014, when Barack Obama was President. The picture was one of 10 photos published by a Phoenix newspaper, the Arizona Republic, under the headline: “Immigrant children flood detention center.”
The children, about 900 in all, had crossed the border illegally in Texas without their parents. They were shipped to Nogales, Arizona where the U.S. government set up a makeshift processing center bigger than a football field.
“The children, mostly of high-school and junior-high-school age, are housed behind 18-foot-high chain-link fences topped with razor wire,” said the reporter who was allowed to visit the facility. “They pass the day sitting on benches or lying side by side on tiny blue mattresses pressed up against each other on nearly every square inch of the floor in the fenced areas.”
“Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages,” President Trump tweeted on the day after Memorial Day. “They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires.”
“Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country.” Once again, Donald Trump emerges the winner while his critics, like Linda Sarsour, debase themselves.
“Our immigration system was a disaster long before Trump came along,” Sarsour insisted after her gaffe was exposed. “Now it will become increasingly worse under this White Supremacist Administration.”
It’s all very frustrating to George Lakoff, a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California Berkeley. Lakoff has made a second career trying to teach Democrats how to communicate the progressive agenda to ordinary Americans.
“When you repeat Trump, you help Trump,” Professor Lakoff wrote in an exasperated post to his friends on the left. “You do this by spreading his message wide and far.
“Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. “Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them.
“Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate” wrote the distinguished professor, who published a whole book on how to frame the debate.
“When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.”
The 900 children who were pictured in Nogales were among the tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who flooded across the southern border in 2014. Under the Obama administration, most UACs were placed with relatives living illegally in the United States, instead of being returned to their parents in Honduras or Guatemala, as they should have been.
President Trump is determined to change the system that allows UACs from countries other than Mexico (OTM) to remain here indefinitely. When the number of UACs spiked this spring, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions took several steps to stem the flow.
Meanwhile, pro-immigration Republicans are pressuring Trump to cave by extending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) without building a border wall. A pro-immigration group funded in part by the Koch brothers, LIBRE, is running ads urging Congress to pass “a permanent solution for Dreamers.”
In the pro-amnesty Koch orbit is Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, who complained about Attorney General Sessions considering enforcement of federal laws against marijuana sales. Legalizing marijuana is another hobby horse of the Koch network of donors, to the detriment of average Americans.
President Trump is welcome relief from politicians who care more about donors than voters. Trump should continue to be a “choice, not an echo” on immigration, and stand firm for a border wall.
Phyllis Schlafly Report
Santa Fe School Was Victimized by Censorship of Prayer
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 22, 2018
Another tragic shooting at a public school leads to another round of liberal demands for gun control. But missing from their clamor is how this shooting by a former football player occurred at the very same high school where the Supreme Court censored prayer at football games in a ruling in 2000.
The ACLU insisted that student-led prayer be banned at this same high school, and the Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the ACLU and against the school in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. Ever since, prayer has not been allowed over the loudspeakers at games, prayer that the shooter would have heard because he played in many football games there.
Liberals are notably quiet in commenting on how prayer was eliminated at this same school by judicial activism from the Supreme Court. The gun control typically proposed would not have stopped this crime, because it was perpetrated by a shotgun, which is not semi-automatic, and a revolver.
The student killer should have attracted immediate scrutiny for how he would wear a black trench coat on hot Texan days, and had postings on Facebook that included a “Born to Kill” t-shirt and images of Satan and atheistic communism. Likewise, the former student who shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was widely known to be a risk for violence, and multiple complaints about him to law enforcement fell on deaf ears before he massacred 17.
Had either student been profiled based on his public behavior, then both tragedies might have been averted, or at least curtailed. A reasonable dress code would have prevented hiding a shotgun in a black trench coat on a hot day, or at least allowed immediate preventive action to be taken.
Nobody wants airport-style security at every entrance to a public school, but no one wants more carnage either. Yet rather than suggest workable approaches to prevent copycat incidents, senseless attempts to blame President Trump fill the airwaves.
Entering stage left is Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night comedian who broke the record for the lowest Oscars audience ever when he hosted it in March. He insisted that Trump and the GOP are somehow “cowardly” because they supposedly “care more about the support of the NRA than they do about children.”
But none of the usual liberal remedies such as banning assault rifles, a ban on high capacity magazines, stricter background checks, tougher mental health screening, or closing the so-called gun show loophole would have prevented this tragedy. Yet that hasn’t stopped gun controllers from proposing the same litany of legislation.
Knee-jerk appeals to political correctness might boost Kimmel’s career after tanking in his Oscars performance. In his record-setting ratings failure for the annual show, Kimmel paid homage to the feminist Me Too movement without challenging the industry for the hypersexual content of so many of its movies.
“The only way we can make a meaningful impact,” Kimmel pontificated, “is if we vote for politicians who will do something,” without saying what that “something” might be. If he meant banning shotguns and revolvers in Texas, perhaps Kimmel himself was too “cowardly” to propose something so absurd.
An assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration suggested that parents keep their kids out of school until Congress passes “background checks for all gun purchases, a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, and funding for gun research.”
His former boss Arne Duncan, who was Obama’s longest-serving Cabinet member, tweeted: “This is brilliant. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?”
Not attending public school is something some conservatives have been saying for years, after witnessing the rapid deterioration in culture and values there. It is ironic that Obama’s Secretary of Education might finally be right for the wrong reason.
But missing from the script is any criticism of Facebook for how it has been the common denominator for many of these school shootings. The killers use Facebook to publicize their wanton desires in seeking their “15 minutes of fame,” to paraphrase Andy Warhol.
Meanwhile, if anyone hoped that the courts would defend the Second Amendment based on Justice Scalia’s 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller, that optimism has proven to be unfounded. Only one Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, defends the Second Amendment there, and he alone dissented in criticizing his colleagues’ refusal to review a pro-gun control decision from the Ninth Circuit.
Make no mistake: if the Democrats take control of Congress and have the votes to block Trump’s nominees for judges, courts will toss out the Second Amendment by permitting severe restrictions on gun ownership, and mandatory gun registration to be followed by gun confiscation. This has already happened in Great Britain and Australia, followed by predictable rises in non-gun crimes.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Floodgate Opens to Sports Gambling
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 15, 2018
The $250 billion domestic gambling industry gains access to a new $150 billion market, thanks to the Supreme Court. The 6-3 decision by the Court in Murphy v. NCAA opens the floodgates to sports gambling, while naively inviting Congress to clean up the mess that the Court just created.
Gambling wrecks families with a vengeance. The suicide rate among gamblers is higher than for any other addiction, and estimates are that a wagering habit pulls down ten people associated with the addict.
A family can lose its entire savings in one gambling binge, and many do. Gambling also corrupts our political system more than other addictions, as casino owners toss donations to candidates who then return the favors in spades after their election.
Gambling afflicts the poor more than the rich, and the uneducated more than the college graduates. Minorities and youth are particularly exploited by gambling.
Congress and most states have repeatedly expressed the strong public policy against gambling, which was illegal nationwide at the turn of the 20th century but expanded during the Great Depression.
Today 60% of Americans are sports fans, most of whom rearrange their schedules to watch their favorite teams. Until now, it has generally been illegal to target those sports fans with solicitations to bet on games.
But the Court dealt the gambling industry a royal flush on Monday, when the Court held that Congress was wrong, the Trump Administration was wrong, and conservative groups (including these authors) were wrong in urging the Court to uphold the federal law against sports gambling.
Justice Sam Alito wrote this decision that struck down an Act of Congress, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which has worked well for 26 years in limiting sports gambling. This ruling illustrates that when the Court makes headlines, it is almost never in a good way.
As a result, the task of defending against the scourge of sports gambling falls on state legislatures and the Department of Justice. Families will need to be more vigilant to keep their sports-fan children from getting pulled into the dark underworld of gambling that will destroy their lives.
Professional sports leagues, from the NFL to Major League Baseball, are making a colossal mistake if they think gambling will boost their declining attendance. Changing Yankee Stadium from “The House that Ruth Built” to “The Casino that Gamers Built” is not a way to fill seats in a ballpark.
It was nearly a century ago when professional baseball saved its sport by taking a strong stance against betting on the World Series, and college basketball did likewise in the 1950s. But future scandals seem inevitable under the Court’s decision allowing nationwide wagering on sports.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions should beef up enforcement of the Wire Act, which is a federal law enacted in 1961 to limit interstate betting. Professional and amateur sports are inherently interstate, and the Department of Justice should announce that it will enforce the Wire Act to shut down all attempts to ramp up betting on interstate sports.
State legislatures should pass strong laws prohibiting betting in their states, and can do even more than that. States should require all the teams based in their jurisdictions to take affirmative steps to discourage wagering on games by fans.
Perhaps Justices on the Supreme Court thought they were doing something good for states’ rights, but what about states wanting to be free from the plague of gambling? Texas has long stood strong against gambling, but soon its beloved Dallas Cowboys football team could become the object of multi-million-dollar gambling schemes nationwide.
Absent from the 49 pages of opinions of the Court was any observation that gambling is a vice, for which there is voluminous evidence about the enormous harm it causes to individuals and communities. Instead, the Court did selective research on the internet to paint an illusion that gambling somehow has a respectable history in our country.
The Court espoused euphemisms like “Americans have never been of one mind about gambling,” which is a vacuous statement that could be said about anything. Three hundred million Americans, of course, are not “of one mind” about anything, and that is a meaningless cliché.
The Court’s opinion epitomizes a “law without values” judicial philosophy, which is as morally bankrupt as it sounds. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was a famous advocate of this approach a century ago, and it led to some dreadful rulings such as upholding the forced sterilization of a woman because she supposedly had a very low I.Q.
Hopefully Attorney General Sessions, state legislatures, and families themselves will stand up now against gambling. They have trump cards of their own they can play to halt sports gambling.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Standing Up to Globalism
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 8, 2018
President Trump’s stand against world pressure for him to continue the one-sided deal with Iran is a defining moment in world history. His announcement at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to terminate the agreement is a watershed as the end of globalism.
One small event for man, one big moment for mankind, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong’s words when he landed on the Moon. It is not the interaction between the United States and Iran that is so significant here, but the rejection of the world order that has reigned supreme since World War II.
The wrong path of globalism will no longer be the road for our country, as President Trump wisely charts a new course in which international deals must be as fair to the United States as they are to foreign countries. Just as important is how the United States will no longer bow to pressure from Western Europe or anyone else about how we manage our foreign policy.
A few days earlier, the use of the word “Orwellian” from the White House in rebuking China for trying to boss around our airlines likewise signaled the dawn of this new era. Communist China insisted that airlines stop referring to Taiwan because China is in denial about the independence and freedom of that island nation, which was formed by those who fled the communist Chinese revolution in 1949.
In 1971, globalists seeking to appease communist China arranged for the United Nations to expel Taiwan, whose real name is the Republic of China. Early the following year, globalist Henry Kissinger persuaded President Richard Nixon to turn his back on Taiwan by visiting communist China and giving it legitimacy.
Then, in over-the-top bravado by Nixon that would have made Trump blush, Nixon declared that his trip to China was “the week that changed the world.” Eight months earlier Phyllis Schlafly published her P.S. Report warning that Nixon could lose the confidence of the grassroots, and the subsequent Watergate operation that got him in trouble arose from doubts about his winning reelection.
China and globalists have been trying to ostracize Taiwan ever since. They have even prevented Taiwan from competing in the Olympics as the independent country that it is, since 1976.
But the sentiment on the island of Taiwan is increasingly independent, as globalism is being rejected there like almost everywhere else. Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is more willing to assert the nationalism that Trump asserts for Americans.
Recently China demanded that businesses stop referring to Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong as countries. Quickly Marriott, the hotel chain associated with globalist Mitt Romney, caved in and pandered to communist China by apologizing to it.
China made its demand on 36 foreign airlines, insisting that they stop referring to Taiwan as a country. Many of these airlines are American carriers, such as Delta which has already apologized.
But President Trump, more so than any president since World War II, rejects globalist pressure like China’s demand. Trump will “stand up for Americans resisting efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose Chinese political correctness on American companies and citizens,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced.
Sarah Sanders declared that the Trump Administration is telling China “to stop threatening and coercing American carriers and citizens.” That’s right: China has no authority to push around our citizens and our businesses.
Then Sanders used the “O” and the “C” words, which not even past Republican presidents were willing to do enough. “This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies,” Sanders observed.
George Orwell was a visionary in criticizing the communist mindset, as a former Leftist himself. It is doubtful that any press secretary has ever applied Orwell’s truths so properly to the communist attempts at mind control, as Sarah Sanders just did.
Meanwhile, the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is up for renegotiation, and Trump’s rejection of globalism bodes us well for this issue also. Far from seeking to renew that deal, Trump should look to terminate as much of it as possible.
Economically, NAFTA has been far more harmful to the American economy than the Iran deal was. Trump’s criticism of the Iran deal as one-sided applies with greater force to NAFTA.
The flood of illegal drugs into our country, along with illegal aliens, has been facilitated by NAFTA. The loss of manufacturing jobs to south of the border is the result of NAFTA, too.
NAFTA was never properly ratified as a treaty because it never had the necessary support in the Senate. The agreement should be terminated and any replacement should only be considered under the 2/3rds ratification requirement of the Treaty Clause, which is the provision that globalists hate most about the Constitution.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
The ‘Caravans’ Are Coming
by John and Andy Schlafly
April 3, 2018
During the Easter weekend, when many Americans were watching the college basketball championships, President Donald Trump kept his eye on America’s southern border. It’s long overdue for a president to defend our borders.
“Getting more dangerous,” Trump tweeted on Easter Sunday before attending church with his wife, Melania, in Palm Beach. “‘Caravans’ coming.”
The president was referring to the “caravan” (their word) of some 1,200 men, women and children who were spotted in southern Mexico, heading toward the United States. Photographs showed a massive column of people walking north, herded by a few vehicles alongside.
A “caravan” is a group of migrants traveling together with all their belongings, often on foot or with covered wagons, stopping at makeshift camps along the way to eat and sleep. The word originated in the Middle East centuries ago when crossing the desert by caravan was a common sight.
In the frontier era of the 19th century, Americans traveled west by covered wagon for mutual protection as they crossed through hostile Indian country. Caravans are rarely seen in modern America, but it’s a different world south of the border, where millions of people live in primitive conditions that would have challenged our ancestors.
In this case, a caravan consisting of hundreds of men, women and children from Central America, mostly Honduras, crossed into Mexico on March 25, heading north. By April 1 they had traveled 140 miles to the town of Matías Romero.
A thousand people do not embark on a journey of over 1,000 miles without organization and financial support. The caravan now making its way through Mexico is being coordinated by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which means Town Without Borders (or People Without Borders).
The New York Times describes Pueblo Sin Fronteras as a “transnational advocacy group” whose leader, Irineo Mujica, is a “Mexican-American who holds dual citizenship.” There are so many things wrong with those phrases that it’s difficult to know where to start.
To begin with, the United States does not recognize dual citizenship, except in rare cases. A person from Mexico or anywhere else who goes through the process of becoming a U.S. citizen is required to take an oath swearing to totally renounce his previous allegiances.
Similarly, a “transnational” group is not allowed to exist in many countries without first registering to do business or conduct its activities legally in that country. We have enough problems with the outlaw transnational group called MS-13, which has committed murders of incredible savagery, primarily in areas populated by recent immigrants from Central America.
The caravan’s next stop is the town of Puebla, near Mexico City, which the migrants hope to reach by April 5. There they expect to attend two days of “workshops, led by volunteer lawyers” to learn about “their options for legal protections in the United States.”
During the Obama administration, lawyers would coach illegal migrants, who do not speak English, how to keep repeating the English phrase “credible fear.” When people show up at the border claiming a credible fear of persecution in their home country, they are treated as refugees with a right to stay here indefinitely until their claims are adjudicated.
“As ridiculous as it sounds,” Trump tweeted on Monday, “the laws of our country do not easily allow us to send those crossing our Southern Border back where they came from. A whole big wasted procedure must take place.”
If those people truly have a credible fear in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador, why don’t they apply for asylum right where they are, in Mexico? Under international law, according to a ruling of the European Court of Justice last year, migrants must seek refuge or claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, which in this case is Mexico.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has tightened the requirements for would-be refugees and expedited the processing of their claims. But there’s still a huge backlog of refugee cases from the Obama administration, so we need to pressure Mexico to cut off the caravan before it gets here.
The renegotiation of NAFTA gives Trump leverage, as he tweeted on Tuesday: “Mexico is making a fortune on NAFTA. With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours, at least until Congress changes our immigration laws!”
The alleged rights of illegal aliens know no bounds. Last week an Obama-appointed federal judge entered a sweeping order that teenage girls who illegally crossed our southern border without their parents have a constitutional right to an abortion in the United States.
An American teenage girl cannot ordinarily obtain an abortion in Texas without parental consent. But according to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was born in Jamaica, an illegal alien teenage girl can get an abortion here without parental notice or consent, even though abortions are illegal in her home country.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Eradicates the Deep State
March 20, 2018
By John and Andy Schlafly
A whopping 74% of Americans recognize the problem of the “Deep State” – the entrenched bureaucrats in D.C. who control our government. This was confirmed by a remarkable poll released on Monday by Monmouth University.
The FBI’s own disciplinary office recommended the firing of its disgraced former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled the trigger. But former Deep Staters sprang to the defense of McCabe, as if on cue, and tweeted invective at the people’s leader they hate, President Trump.
Chief among the chorus of former bureaucrats was John Brennan, who ran the CIA during Obama’s second term. Brennan admitted he voted for the Communist Party in 1976, so it is unsurprising that he would rant against Trump’s efforts to clean house.
Quickly McCabe received multiple job offers from Democrat politicians, which would be at additional taxpayer expense. He could also garner big bucks from a lecture tour at liberal universities, or like his mentor James Comey write a self-serving book with a hefty advance royalty.
Better yet, McCabe could form a band with Brennan, Comey, and James Clapper, all of whom are gone from their official positions but still dominate the news. They could call their band the “Deep State Blues,” and perform to empty houses across middle America.
Trump played to a packed house in western Pennsylvania ten days ago, delivering a magnificent speech that was decried by the media but loved by the grassroots. Trump laid out how he is trying to exorcise the evil that permeates D.C., which is fighting back like a trapped rabid dog.
The refreshing firing of McCabe was another shot across the bow in this comic-book-like struggle between the American people, led by Trump, and the dug-in Establishment. This illustrates what Phyllis Schlafly wrote about in her bestselling classic A Choice Not An Echo, which describes the long-running battle between the grassroots and the insiders who control government no matter who is elected.
Robert Mueller, or his superior Rod Rosenstein who fails to rein him in, should be next on the chopping block, and Trump needs to strike while the iron is hot. And Trump should fire any advisers who stand in his way on this.
Republican impediments such as Sen. Lindsey Graham are probably still bitter about how Trump humiliated them in the 2016 presidential contest. To this day Trump has a higher approval rating than Graham in South Carolina, which is Graham’s home state.
Mueller has already wasted far more than ten million dollars in taxpayer money while proving nothing of significance. Instead, Mueller has intimidated those loyal to Trump, which may be the real goal.
If the only thing President Trump achieves is to loosen the grip by the power-brokers on D.C., then he will have accomplished more than his four predecessors combined. But the fierce resistance by both political parties makes the outcome far from clear.
Fortunately, Trump does have some allies on Capitol Hill on this issue. Senator Rand Paul rebuked Brennan for his attack on Trump, pointing out that what is really disgraceful is how Brennan “had the power to search every American’s records without a warrant” and how that is an attack on “the freedom of every American.”
The Deep State has control of all the federal agencies in D.C., so it is a steep climb to triumph over it. Some might wonder if it is even impossible to return the power to the American people that is rightfully ours.
For example, in behavior typical of the Swamp, the IRS refuses to stop the use of 1.3 million stolen or bogus Social Security numbers of employed illegal aliens. It would be a simple matter to pull the plug on the employers of those illegals, yet the IRS as a matter of policy refuses to take action.
This conduct by the IRS has compelled the valiant Tom Homan of ICE to risk the lives of his agents by conducting three raids in the sanctuary state of California. The public overwhelmingly opposes employers hiring illegal aliens, jobs that could be going to Americans, and the IRS could easily stop the illegal employment without putting the lives of any enforcement agents at risk.
The Monmouth University survey was mostly of Democrats and Independents, with Republicans comprising only 27% of the respondents, so its results are even more extraordinary. When asked about the possible existence of “a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy,” known as the Deep State, 47% said it “probably exists” and 27% said it “definitely exists.”
With unusual consistency across Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, about 60% said that unelected or unappointed officials hold too much power in government. If Trump can end that, then Americans will be forever grateful.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Victimized High School Triumphed where Olympics Failed
February 27, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
After the poor showing by the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Winter Olympics, it was inspiring that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas boys’ hockey team captured the state championship on Sunday and will represent Florida at the national championship next month. The sister of one of the team’s hockey players was among the recent shooting victims at the high school in Parkland, Florida.
Boys’ hockey is thriving at the high school level, and this remarkable victory by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas team brings welcome relief amid the tragedy. Medals from this championship team were added to the memorial site of the shooting victims.
But boys’ hockey stars will find limited opportunities to play when they get to college. There are only a few dozen competitive college men’s hockey teams, not enough to develop the talent needed to compete with the rest of the world.
As a result, a ragtag team of Russians humiliated the U.S. men’s hockey team with a 4-0 drubbing in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The American team fared slightly better for its final game prior to its elimination in an overtime shootout against Slovenia, but NBC failed even to broadcast that exciting finish.
When the U.S. women’s hockey team won the gold in a victory against Canada, there was praise but none of the national excitement that occurred when our men’s hockey players defeated the Soviet Union at Lake Placid in 1980. Men’s hockey is far more popular than women’s hockey, for both men and women spectators.
Unfortunately, federal regulators who implement Title IX against college sports refuse to recognize this fundamental difference between men’s and women’s sports. Regulators require colleges to provide more athletic opportunities for women than for men, simply because there are now more women than men attending college.
Under the so-called proportionality test, which ignores the greater interest in men’s sports than in women’s, colleges have eliminated hundreds of men’s sports teams, many in Olympic sports. This hurts our national competitiveness and induces many young men to opt out of going to college where they are prevented from competing in the sport they love.
The Title IX regulators’ quota that limits men’s sports to their proportional enrollment in the college is senseless and not part of the law that Congress enacted in 1972. It’s based on a regulatory interpretation first imposed by President Jimmy Carter to appease the feminists, and President Trump could repeal it along with the many others he has been properly rescinding.
Many colleges have been unjustly sued when they do not comply with the feminists’ distorted view of Title IX. To avoid costly litigation, colleges have repeatedly eliminated men’s sports programs while adding women’s programs that they then have difficulty filling.
The Title IX regulations created a vicious cycle, discouraging men from matriculating to colleges that eliminated their sport. In 1980, equal numbers of men and women obtained college degrees, but now nearly 60% of college degrees are awarded to women and only 40% to men.
The hockey competition won by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas team in the Sunshine State of Florida illustrates how much boys’ hockey has grown in popularity. Colleges, however, are generally forbidden from having more sports teams for men than women, so if there is not enough interest in women’s hockey or another large team sport for women, the college is not likely to start a men’s hockey team.
In the traditional Olympic events of alpine and cross-country skiing, the United States men won a grand total of zero medals. Today there are more college women’s ski teams than there are men’s, perhaps again due to the impact of the proportionality test under Title IX.
Olympic sports themselves have been emasculated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which even tried to eliminate men’s wrestling from the 2020 Olympics. The IOC reinstated wrestling after an uproar but cut 56 positions, replacing them with events that “include more women” in the summer games.
Women’s figure skating remains popular to watch, but in a continuation of political correctness the public heard more about the men’s figure skating instead. Despite this, a large crowd did stay up past midnight on the East Coast to watch the exciting finale of the women’s figure skating competition.
Downplaying the overall nosedive in interest in the Olympics, some commentators say this is merely part of a more general trend. But the decline in viewership of football, still as masculine as ever, has been small compared with the bottom falling out for the Olympics.
When Phyllis Schlafly spoke for her last time at Harvard, she was greeted afterwards by Professor Harvey Mansfield, author of a book entitled “Manliness.” If NBC executives hope to recoup the billions they invested in exclusive rights for the Olympics then they might pick up a copy, and the Title IX regulators would also benefit from recognizing the greater demand for men’s sports.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Social Media Monopolies Advance Leftist Agenda
by John and Andy Schlafly
February 20, 2018
Despite his headline-grabbing indictment of Russian nationals for interfering with the U.S. election, special counsel Robert Mueller has still found no evidence of collusion between any Russians and the Trump campaign. Mueller indicted 13 Russians who apparently operated a “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, purchasing ads on Facebook and sending provocative messages to Americans through Twitter and other forms of social media.
According to the indictment, the Russian effort to sow turmoil, confusion and division started in 2014, well before Trump announced he was running for president. Even after the 2016 election was over, the Russian trolls promoted a “not my president” rally featuring Michael Moore in New York City on November 12.
The 13 Russians will never be extradited to face trial in the United States; the indictments are apparently merely a political ploy by Mueller. The bigger question is whether our social media services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter will respond to the indictments by ramping up their own censoring of political speech on their platforms.
Already Facebook has announced it will hire 10,000 employees tasked with policing “hate speech” on its pages. But the toxic label “hate speech” is likely to be used as a pretext to impose a politically correct ideology on millions of unsuspecting users.
No one denies that Facebook, Google and Twitter are among the most liberal corporations in America. Virtually all their executives and most of their senior staff were avid supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, and detested Donald Trump.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chairs a pro-amnesty lobbying group called Fwd.us whose primary mission is to oppose Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border. Facebook’s number two executive, Sheryl Sandberg, was spotted in John Podesta’s leaked emails writing that “I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can.”
The only prominent figure in tech who is known to have supported Trump for president is Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and a member of its board of directors. After beating back an effort to remove him from Facebook’s board for the heresy of supporting Trump, Peter Thiel announced he is moving both his home and his investment company to Los Angeles because he can no longer tolerate the suffocating politics of the Bay Area.
Google fired one of its highly paid engineers, James Damore, merely for raising questions about his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programs and policies. In a thoughtful essay he shared with fellow Googlers last year, Damore slammed the Silicon Valley “monoculture” with its “ideological echo chamber” where contrary viewpoints are shamed into silence.
Other tech workers have told the Wall Street Journal that the echo chamber extends beyond Google to the entire industry whose “groupthink and homogeneity” make it a worse place to live and work. Among tech workers polled in a survey quoted in the Journal, 59 percent of conservative respondents said they know someone who left the industry because they felt conservative views were unwelcome.
Two of the devious ways a social media platform can penalize conservatives are demonetizing and shadow banning. Demonetizing a site means that it is prevented from carrying the advertising it needs to defray its costs, while shadow banning means that the service provider is throttling back access to recent posts or systematically hiding them from viewers.
Cartoonist Scott Adams, a Trump supporter who draws the Dilbert comic strip, wrote last year that “hundreds of my Twitter followers have reported that I am being shadow banned on Twitter.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey denied it, but Scott Adams insisted that “anecdotally, the evidence is overwhelming” and that “a number of other high-profile Twitter users report the same problem.”
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, pointed out last year that Twitter “appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or deverifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users.” He cited the case of U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn whose campaign announcement was blocked because it featured a pro-life message.
The highest-profile Twitter user, of course, is Donald Trump, whose account was blocked (supposedly by accident) and threatened with deactivation for his politically incorrect tweets. The company finally said it would allow Trump to continue using Twitter, not because Twitter believes in free speech but merely because Trump is a world leader whose statements are inherently newsworthy.
Facebook and Google dominate their industries just as Standard Oil and AT&T once did, which were broken up under the antitrust laws. Why are Facebook and Google being given preferential treatment while they monopolize the market?
More than half of all advertising spending is now collected by Facebook and Google, which exceeds that of newspapers, television channels and other media combined. Competition and accountability are badly needed for these social media monopolies.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
The Right and Wrong Approaches to Immigration
by John and Andy Schlafly
February 13, 2018
“This will be our last chance, there will never be another opportunity!” to protect Dreamers, President Trump properly tweeted as the U.S. Senate plunged into a debate about immigration policy. The Left wants amnesty for Dreamers, who are illegal aliens who entered our country many as teenagers.
President Trump is right to insist on funding for a border wall, which would cost less than 1% of our national budget, and an end to chain migration whereby relatives of immigrants are brought in with little or no screening. President Trump’s approach is welcome relief to the failed, open-door policies of the prior Republican leadership.
Meanwhile, an unexpected voice weighed in from the other side of the world. In Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich emirate in the Persian Gulf, former President George W. Bush was speaking at a conference organized by Michael Milken, the junk bond king of the 1980s.
“Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees,” Bush said in response to a question, “but there are people who want to put food on their family’s tables and are willing to do that. We ought to say thank you and welcome them.”
Bush was right that Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees, as we can tell you from personal experience. But he was wrong to say we ought to welcome people from other lands so poor that they are willing to do that kind of work to put food on their family’s tables.
When we were teenagers, we spent a memorable summer vacation working on a cotton farm in the Mississippi delta east of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It was a miserable experience, but fortunately for us, it lasted only about two weeks.
It was too early to pick the cotton when we were there around the Fourth of July, but we learned how to chop it. Chopping cotton means chopping weeds with a hoe without damaging the cotton plant.
After awhile, we wondered why we saw no one else doing this backbreaking work in the 100-degree heat of the Mississippi delta, where cotton fields extend as far as the eye can see. That’s when we realized that chopping and picking cotton were already being done by machines, and the people who used to do it by hand had moved on to better jobs.
Once upon a time, more than 200 years ago, Americans imported African slaves to do the unpleasant work of cultivating cotton. Slavery was abolished in 1865, but African Americans continued to toil on cotton farms in conditions of extreme poverty that prevailed in the defeated Southern states.
About 75 years after the Civil War, some inventors finally made a successful cotton-picking machine. This invention came years later than the famous harvester invented by Cyrus McCormick, because cotton is so much harder to pick than wheat, corn or soybeans.
During the same period in which mechanization swept the cotton fields of the South, millions of African Americans moved north in search of economic opportunity and greater freedom. During this period known as the “great migration,” many black Americans found higher paying jobs in the factories of Chicago and Detroit, while others achieved success and fame in sports and entertainment.
Thanks to a legal and economic system that rewards invention and innovation, our high standard of living means that no American of any race has to chop or pick cotton at 105 degrees anymore. Bush grew up in Texas, which grows more cotton than any other state, and he should know that.
Bush’s foolish comment combined two of the worst slogans of the pro-amnesty movement, the myth of “jobs Americans won’t do” and the myth of “crops rotting in the fields.” On the contrary, the enormous growth of computer-aided automation, robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless vehicles is eliminating whatever opportunity there used to be for poor people from other countries to earn a living here.
While the debate rages in Washington, another debate is roiling the state of California, which has more immigrants (10 million) and more illegal aliens (2.4 million) than any other state. California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, is warning that state’s employers not to cooperate with the federal government.
“Businesses are increasingly caught between California and Washington,” the Wall Street Journal reports. A new state law imposes fines of up to $10,000 on employers who provide information about their employees to federal immigration officials.
In the last presidential election, California went in a markedly different direction from the rest of our Nation. But the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution requires that California obey the same federal laws on immigration with which the other 49 states must comply in protecting American workers against illegal aliens.
In the end, Californians might thank President Trump for taking a strong stand against illegal immigration, which is estimated to be costing that state about $30 billion per year. That’s far more than the costs of building a border wall to permanently solve the problem.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Marijuana Lights Up the Wrong Way
January 9, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being attacked on both sides of the aisle for rescinding the Obama policy that opened the floodgates to marijuana addiction. Funded by libertarian billionaires such as the Koch brothers, pro-pot senators like Cory Gardner are demanding that AG Sessions stand down and continue Obama’s misguided policy.
Sessions rescinded Obama’s command that the Department of Justice ignore federal law against marijuana production and sales, and instead Sessions instructed U.S. Attorneys to begin enforcing well-established federal statutes against large-scale cultivation and distribution of marijuana. These federal laws preempt state law, particularly in Colorado and California where a culture of pot addiction has virtually taken over.
Sessions wrote on January 4th that “today’s memo on federal marijuana enforcement simply directs all U.S. Attorneys to use previously established prosecutorial principles that provide them all the necessary tools to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country.”
That hardly seems controversial, but money talks and politicians beholden to mega-donors went ballistic in response. Senator Cory Gardner, who heads the misguided fundraising arm of Republican senators, even took to the Senate floor to rant against Sessions for wanting to enforce the law.
Sen. Gardner is the same guy who is pushing the agenda of the same mega-donors to enact amnesty for certain illegal aliens, wanted for their cheap labor. Yet every time Gardner opens his mouth he makes it more difficult for Republicans in Congress to hold onto their majority in the upcoming midterm elections, because American voters reject Republican candidates who support either amnesty or legalized pot.
New Year’s Day rang in the sale of pot in retail stores in California, which expands the hazards it poses to the public there. In addition, anyone over the age of 21 may smoke pot on private property now in California, simply to get high over and over again.
This push for pot is not really coming from the freedom-loving culture of rock music. Instead, like gambling, legalizing pot is driven by a multi-decade campaign of investors seeking to profit from cannabis, as it’s now being advertised for marketing purposes.
First it was sold to the American people under the guise of “medical marijuana,” and predictably anyone with a little back or joint pain was obtaining prescriptions to get high. The strategy was to open the door to the inevitable recreational use by anyone, which is occurring now in eight states.
This is too much even for rock fans, as California's popular Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival recently responded to the legalization of marijuana by banning it at its concerts: “Sorry bro. Marijuana and marijuana products aren’t allowed inside the … Festival. Even in 2018 and beyond.”
If concerts won’t allow smoking pot, why do the rest of us have to put up with its pungent odor and harmful consequences? Costly emergency room visits by “potheads” and deadly car accidents are just two of the burdens that rampant marijuana addiction brings to our society.
Among traffic fatalities in Colorado when operators were tested for marijuana, 25% of those crashes had an operator who tested positive for the drug. This is a sharp increase since marijuana was legalized there, and the real number may be higher because unlike alcohol there is no close correlation between impairment and tissue levels.
Although supposedly limited to adults, marijuana use by youths between 12 and 17 years old, and college-age adults between 18 and 25, has risen sharply in Colorado since pot was legalized there four years ago. Now Colorado has the highest rate of marijuana use by youths in the country, according to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
Meanwhile, the town of Pueblo, Colorado, is buckling under the expense of “marijuana migrants,” attracted to the town’s pro-marijuana publicity. Instead of finding real work, however, these marijuana migrants live mostly in boxes, resorting to buckets as toilets.
Billionaire George Soros has been behind the push to legalize marijuana around the country, but the problem now is that he has been joined by a few billionaires associated with the right side of the political spectrum. They are misleading GOP politicians to make the colossal mistake of embracing this leftist agenda item.
Starved for money to finance their campaigns for office in 2018, hopeful Republican candidates will feel the pressure to cave in to pro-pot demands of mega-donors. But while Democrats can get away with that, Republican candidates surely cannot.
The vast majority of our country, and particularly working-class Republicans, reject the legalization of marijuana with all of its harmful consequences. Republican candidates for office who go along with the demands of billionaire donors to endorse their pro-pot agenda will see their own candidacies go up in smoke among voters.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Dream on, Establishment
by John and Andy Schlafly
December 19, 2017
If money talks, the loudest noise in America would be an article published last Thursday entitled “Congress must act on the dreamers.” Legislation to protect the 690,000 illegal aliens known as Dreamers, the article insists, “is a political, economic and moral imperative.”
A movement is afoot either to slip this into a final 2017 bill when few are watching, or to make it a litmus test for candidates seeking to raise campaign cash for races next year.
“Delay is not an option,” the authors wrote, ignoring the backlog of unfinished business in Washington. “Congress must act before the end of the year.”
The op-ed was signed by Charles Koch, who shares a $97 billion fortune with his brother David. The Koch brothers are aligned with the “never Trump” Republicans who have undermined much of President Trump’s agenda.
Charles Koch is a businessman, and he likes to get his money’s-worth when he spends it. After striking out the past two years with their political agenda, the Koch network of mega-donors could be making support of DACA a litmus test for Republican primary candidates in the 2018 election cycle.
Republican candidates would be wise to decline, just as candidate Trump declined support by the Koch network last year, and won anyway on a platform of opposing illegal immigration.
Koch was joined by co-author Tim Cook, who succeeded the late Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple. Cook supports many liberal causes, and was criticized by candidate Trump for how Apple would not cooperate in unlocking the iPhone of a terrorist who went on the killing rampage in San Bernardino about two years ago.
Cook’s corporate practices at Apple hardly commend him to lecture about what is best for America. Apple stashes hundreds of billions of dollars – that’s billions, not millions – of its profits overseas in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States, and thereby avoid investing it in American workers here.
Moreover, Apple’s claim of employing a few hundred Dreamers – far less than 1% of its workforce – in mostly low-skill jobs would not ordinarily attract the attention of a CEO. But Cook and Koch are not just in favor of entitlements for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, but also for many millions of other illegal aliens.
Cook and Koch declare in supporting DACA, “If ever there were an occasion to come together to help people improve their lives, this is it.” But where is the compassion for helping Americans improve their lives, which ending benefits for illegal aliens would do?
Senator Jeff Flake was a frequent attendee at the Koch conferences of donors, and he has remained anti-Trump to this day. All that got him was a disapproval rating so high in his home state of Arizona that he resigned at a young age rather than even try for reelection.
Now Senator Flake is leading a group of other anti-Trump senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-SC), to try to forge a deal with Democrats to protect these illegal aliens.
The day after the Koch-Cook article appeared in the Washington Post, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report throwing cold water on the bum’s rush to protect the Dreamers. The CBO estimates that legalizing Dreamers would cost taxpayers $25.9 billion over the next decade.
The CBO explains why the costs of Dreamers would far exceed any benefit that Americans would ever see. Once legalized, the Dreamers would become eligible for the full array of benefits for the working poor including Obamacare, Medicaid, food stamps, and much more.
Dreamers would consume more benefits and pay less taxes than the average American because their skills and education are so much lower. Even though most Dreamers are now in their twenties or thirties, for example, more than half of them never finished high school.
Part of the skills gap is because Dreamers were never required to demonstrate English fluency, and many are functionally illiterate. Of those who signed up for DACA, many required the help of a translator to fill out the form.
The CBO estimates the cost of all those federal benefits at $27 billion over 10 years, while only $1 billion of new tax revenue would be generated from Dreamers moving “out of the shadows” to regular employment. Combining those two amounts produces a net cost of $26 billion.
Even in Washington, where the federal budget is measured in trillions, $26 billion is real money. And that number almost surely understates the true cost by a wide margin.
Democrats are acutely aware of the value of $26 billion, whether or not they are willing to admit it where the Dreamers are concerned. Trump's border wall, which Democrats consider exorbitantly expensive, would cost only $21.6 billion according to a study conducted by the Department of Homeland Security in February of this year.
Rather than spending $26 billion on keeping illegal immigrants here, perhaps we should be spending that money to build the wall and keep illegals out.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Small Business Needed for Economic Growth
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 28, 2017
While large corporations dominate the news and the lobbying in D.C., economists have long known that small business is the real engine to drive economic growth. Headlines about big business are more likely to mention “massive layoffs” than any hiring plans.
Small business and innovation by small inventors are essential to our economy, as some of them will become the big employers of tomorrow. Kodak and Xerox were just two of the successful businesses founded on an idea of a small inventor, and a patent that secured for him the fruits of his labor.
Yet today 80% of challenged patents are invalidated in some way by the Patent and Trademark Office, without the patent owner ever getting his day in court. Imagine the outrage if homes or other property were taken away by an administrative agency without a court hearing.
On Monday, in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy, the Supreme Court held lively oral argument in a challenge supported by small inventors to how the federal government is taking away their property in deprivation of their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Several Justices expressed dismay at how our patent system, once the envy of the world, has denigrated into a victim of the administrative state.
Due to a federal law enacted in 2011, the America Invents Act, the Patent Office changes its mind and tosses out most of the patents that it previously issued, if someone asks it to. Anyone – a competitor, a disgruntled employee, or even a stranger – can ask the Patent Office to strike down a previously issued patent, without the right of the patent-holder to have a trial in court.
During the one-hour hearing before the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer expressed alarm at how a patent can be in existence for 10 years, with $40 billion invested in developing it, and “then suddenly somebody comes in and says: Oh, oh, we want it reexamined, not in court but by the Patent Office.” Phyllis Schlafly opposed this bad law at the time, but corporate lobbyists pushed it through.
Our economy depends heavily on new inventions to grow, because cheaper labor will always be available in other countries. Our competitors, such as China, recognize how important innovation is, and they force American companies to share the secrets of our inventions with them.
The result has been devastating to the real elements of economic growth: jobs and wages. Neither has improved in years.
Only 63% of potential workers are actually working in the United States. This labor participation rate is near its 38-year record low, set during the Obama Administration.
Likewise, real wages actually decreased in October, and over the past year wages have barely kept up with inflation. This is in sharp contrast with nearly two decades ago, when hourly pay was increasing at a much healthier rate of 4%.
When the Governor of Virginia issues a press release to brag about a company in his State creating merely 15 new jobs, as Democratic Governor McAuliffe did on Monday, it underscores how scarce good jobs are. Pandering to lobbyists of big corporations, as Congress does, will not help.
The American economy grew fastest when the incentives of our unique patent system existed for small inventors. Buoyed by the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, our economy boomed in the late 1800s.
Thomas Edison obtained more than a thousand American patents, which enabled him to attract large investments. With such funding Edison was able to light up New York City in September of 1882, using his new electricity-generating power plant.
Raymond P. Niro explained how important the rights of small inventors are to a prosperous future, in an article available on the helpful website IPWatchdog.com. He listed nearly three-dozen inventions that have changed the world, all by “individual inventors who ultimately formed companies to exploit their ideas, but who initially manufactured nothing.”
Justice Sotomayor asked rhetorically during oral argument on Monday, “If I own something, … how can a government agency take that right away without due process of law at all? Isn’t that the whole idea of Article III, that only a court can adjudicate that issue?”
Indeed, and it is ironic that while Congress talks about boosting our economy with a tax bill, it is actually the Supreme Court that may do more for job and wage growth if it rules in favor of small inventors in the Oil States case. Congress seems uninterested in helping small investors and small business, but the Court might.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
No Thanksgiving at the Border
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 21, 2017
On the first day of Thanksgiving week, U.S. Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez died and an unidentified second agent was seriously injured as they patrolled a lonely stretch of Interstate 10 in west Texas, near the Mexican border. The agents’ injuries were apparently caused by grapefruit-sized rocks thrown by men who had illegally crossed the border in an area where, as the New York Times reports, “drug and human trafficking are common.”
The U.S. Border Patrol has tallied 720 assaults on border officers in the last fiscal year, and 38 agents have been killed in the line of duty since 2003. You’d think the dangerous assaults on federal agents would have given pause to the federal judge in San Francisco who was considering a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities, but no.
Judge William Orrick went right ahead on Monday night with his 28-page order declaring a nationwide permanent injunction against the president’s effort to punish sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funds. Judge Orrick was named to the federal bench in 2013 after he bundled at least $200,000 for Obama and donated another $30,800 to groups supporting him.
As U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week in his address to the Federalist Society, “an increasing number of district courts are taking the dramatic step of issuing nationwide injunctions that block the entire U.S. government from enforcing a statute nationwide. In effect, single judges are making themselves super-legislators for the entire United States.”
“The Supreme Court has consistently and repeatedly made clear that courts should limit relief to the parties before them,” General Sessions continued. “So if lower courts continue to ignore that precedent, then the Supreme Court should send that message again.”
Last month California became a sanctuary state when Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that limits what state and local officials can say to federal immigration officers about people detained by police or awaiting trial. It also prohibits law enforcement from inquiring about a person's immigration status.
The law, known as SB 54, was championed by state senate president pro tem Kevin de Leon, who is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate. If elected, he would represent a state that is home to more than 2.3 million illegal aliens – a state where 45 percent of the population told the Census Bureau that a language other than English is spoken at home.
The harm of sanctuary policies is illustrated by the case of Nery Israel Estrada-Margos, who was arrested by Santa Rosa, California police on August 18 after allegedly beating his girlfriend, Veronica Cabrera Ramirez, to death. The illegal alien had been arrested two weeks earlier, on August 2, for domestic violence, but released because he had no prior convictions.
The sheriff of Santa Rosa county, which has its own sanctuary policy, defended the prior release by claiming he gave a heads-up to agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In fact, local officials gave ICE only 16 minutes to travel over 60 miles, and the man was gone by the time ICE got there.
Similar atrocities have occurred in other sanctuary jurisdictions, which are mostly found in the 20 so-called blue states that voted for Hillary Clinton for president. In Maryland near Washington, D.C., Montgomery County officials ignored a detainer from ICE in order to release Mario Granados-Alvarado, who broke into an unmarked police car and stole an AR-15 and ammunition from the officer’s trunk.
Near the town of Brentwood on New York’s Long Island, three more young bodies were found bearing the marks of ritual killing by the gang called MS-13. They were Angel Soler, 15, from Honduras, who had been hacked to death with a machete; Javier Castillo, 16, from El Salvador; and Kerin Pineda, 19, from Honduras.
In Massachusetts, the popular columnist and talk-show host Howie Carr identified an assortment of violent crimes recently committed by “Third World illegal-alien criminals.” In just the last few weeks a Cambodian, an African, a Salvadoran, a Dominican, a Vietnamese, a Chinese, and a Liberian were charged or convicted of murder, assault, drug trafficking, identity fraud and resisting a federal officer.
The tax reform bill moving through Congress plugs one of the ways in which illegal aliens have been supporting themselves with federal tax credits. The bill requires a valid Social Security number to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit, under which $4.2 billion a year has been paid out to illegal aliens who lack a valid number.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but child tax credits should require a valid ID from both parents, not just one. An even better reform, which is not currently in the bill, would be to prohibit employers from getting a business tax deduction from wages paid to unauthorized alien workers.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, $165 billion a year in deductible wages is currently being paid to illegal workers, thereby saving their employers about $25.4 billion a year in federal taxes. Plugging that gap would yield $254 billion over 10 years which could support additional tax cuts for law-abiding Americans.
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.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
The Phyllis Schlafly Report delivers a thoughtful, clear voice on behalf of the family, traditional values, and a strong America.
Did you know that this insightful report is being continued by Phyllis Schlafly's sons Andy Schlafly and John Schlafly?
To read the latest weekly columns of the The Phyllis Schlafly Report, please go to: The Phyllis Schlafly Report columns at Pseagles.com
