Archived columns
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Sessions rescinded Obama’s command that the Department of Justice ignore federal law against marijuana production and sales, and instead Sessions instructed U.S. Attorneys to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.
