Archived columns
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.
