Category: U.S. Supreme Court

Who Really “Chose” Trump’s Three Supreme Court Justice Nominees?

January 18, 2022

Editor’s Note: This is actually a documentary piece that should be treated as a treatise. I urge all to take the time to follow the links and verify for yourself the accuracy of the content of this story. Our Special Correspondent Kelleigh Nelson painstakingly takes time to investigate, document, and write factual “treatises” for all of us. This is one of her most in-depth investigative pieces.

 

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. Ayn Rand

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. Thomas Jefferson

Threats to the rule of law come not only from rioters and looters in the streets but also from activist judges on the bench. Tom Fitton

Bullying wasn’t okay in elementary school and it isn’t okay now, especially when it comes in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court decision. John Doolittle, former CA Congressman

Anyone who still believes President Trump’s three chosen supreme court justices are true Constitutional Conservatives has not been paying attention. Not one of them even follows the US Constitution. What is so discouraging is that they take turns being on the side of those who vote against our constitution and against American citizens. Watch how they vote and you’ll notice that one of the three will always side with Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer.

So, how did Trump choose these three judges, or did he? Two organizations were chosen to submit lists of “conservative” nominees for Trump.

 

Heritage Foundation

In response to hearing the two organizations who were to choose the list of Supreme Court nominees, my column, President Trump, Heritage Foundation is Controlled Opposition, was published on December 12, 2016.

Over the past 35 years, Heritage has also been funded by private foundations such as Pew Charitable Trust which also funded many GOALS 2000 initiatives. Bill Clinton signed the Goals 2000 law on March 31, 1994, creating new education bureaucracies and facilitating federal control of local education institutions. William Greider’s bestseller, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy reveals other benefactors, “Heritage received grants from Amoco, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank (David Rockefeller) and right-wing foundations like Olin and Bradley.”

Koch organizations support Heritage as well as private donors including some who are members of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations and many who were pro-abortion.

Stuart M. Butler, a Brit who is a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institute, the same Institute that is promoting the privatization of education, wrote a monograph for Heritage entitled Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans. Please pay particular attention to Item #2 on page 6 of this document wherein it states, “Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.”

The idea of creating a North American free trade zone was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow and Council on Foreign Relations member, Richard Allen, in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study.

There is also a strong Rockefeller/Heritage connection. Edwin Feulner, former President of Heritage Foundation, who strongly supported the U.S.-Soviet education agreements, and who had an office in Moscow, supported Soviet-style magnet schools (i.e., tax-supported choice/charter schools), and had state affiliate organizations across the nation writing charter school legislation that reads as though it was written by the U.S. Department of Education, the Carnegie Corporation and the National Education Association.

Vice President Michael Pence

The “trustworthy” and devout “Christian” Vice President was more than willing to tell the politically naïve President that Heritage was a conservative think tank who would guide him to Constitutionally Conservative judges for the Supreme Court.

Like the majority of others our 45th President hired for his administration, he failed to vet his choice for vice president. Had he done so, he would have found out that the two closest congressional friends of Mike Pence were Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, both enemies of President Trump. He also would have known that Pence had been funded by the Koch brother’s foundations and Richard and Betsy DeVos from the inception of his political aspirations, both of whom were enemies of Trump.

Pence and Heritage are old friends. Three decades ago, it was The Heritage Foundation’s influence that inspired Pence to help create a think tank in his home state of Indiana. In 1991, Pence became president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation (IPRF), which is part of the State Policy Network in Indiana. Link They are satellite affiliates of the Heritage Foundation whose goals and interests are similar to the Koch organizations. The IPRF was a small group back when Pence was their president, but in the years since, it has amassed an enormous budget thanks in great part to the largess of the Koch network of donors and others.

After coming to Washington as a congressman and later as vice president, Pence frequently collaborated with Heritage. Mike Pence joined The Heritage Foundation as a distinguished visiting fellow in February 2021 after serving four years as President Trump’s VP.

Pence has also started a podcast and will be writing a monthly op-ed and speaking at conferences and colleges in his new capacity as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Scholar at conservative Young America’s Foundation. YAF is an associate member of the State Policy Network. The foundation was founded at the home of neo-con William F. Buckley, (CFR, CIA and Skull and Bones) and is heavily funded by Koch brother organizations and famous icons of the neo-con rightwing including former Amway executives Richard and Helen DeVos and Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.

I have written numerous articles about VP Pence, now referred to as Benedict Arnold Pence for his actions on January 6th, 2020. If you still believe Pence is a man of integrity and faith, I would hope you’d take the time to read the series of articles exposing this man.

Judas Mike Pence Joins Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold, Part One

Mike Pence, Water Boy for the Deep State, Part Two

Satan’s Minions, the Financiers of Michael R. Pence, Part 3

VP Pence never excelled at anything President Trump assigned him to oversee. And he was the one who chose Drs. Fauci, Birx, and Redfield to lead the COVID Task Force. Those three Deep State insiders helped to destroy President Donald J. Trump and this country. The transfer of billions to the big box stores and Big Pharma along with the destruction of small businesses and the middle class will never be recovered.

Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway have been close friends for decades. Kellyanne worked for Mike when he was in Congress. She is also affiliated with the Kochs, and she and Pence even have family members who have intermarried.

The Federalist Society

In late January 2017, The Federalist Society, Friend or Foe was published. Kellyanne Conway and her Trump-hating husband, George, have been members of the Society for years. They joined because it was “pro-life.”

The Federalist Society began at Yale Law School, (home of Skull and Bones), Harvard Law School (that bastion of higher liberal learning), and the University of Chicago Law School, (home of Bill Ayers and where protestors disallowed a 2016 Trump rally). It originally started as a student organization that challenged what its members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology found in most law schools. Yet, these three Ivy League schools are known as having a Marxist agenda.

The Society’s notable membership has included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Justice Scalia actually served as the original faculty advisor to the organization. Other members include Pro-Constitutional Convention Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University; Former Energy Secretary, David Schizer who clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsberg; and Alex Kozinski, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The Society was also started by a group of prominent so-called conservatives, including former Attorney General Edwin Meese; Solicitor General and Reagan Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork; former Indiana Congressman, David McIntosh, head of pro-amnesty and anti-Trump Club of Growth; Lee Liberman Otis; former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Steven Calabresi.

In 2013, the Federalist Society held their annual dinner with guest speakers Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas, and Federal Appellate Judge Diane Sykes. This was a $200-per-plate black-tie fundraising dinner, funded in part by the Koch brothers. Link

“By headlining this fundraiser, Judge Sykes is clearly in violation of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges and Justice Thomas would be as well—if only the Supreme Court was bound by an ethical code,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) said in a statement. The ethical codes are there to ensure that outside interests do not sway judicial decisions.

Sponsors for the dinner are recognizable names like Chevron, Verizon, Google, Facebook, and Time Warner, none of whom are pro-life standard-bearers.

Many of the links exposing who was at this dinner have been removed, but among those who gave $100,000 are the following:

Koch Industries, David Koch, and their Claude Lambe Foundation each gave $100,000. David Koch was pro-abortion.

Google and Microsoft are among donors who gave $100,000 or more, according to the society’s annual report for 2015. Neither Google nor Microsoft has ever been pro-lifers.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation is a big donor. Sarah Scaife was the mother of wealthy businessman Richard Mellon Scaife, who donated up to $30 million to the Heritage Foundation. Scaife funded Planned Parenthood and even took an ad out in the WSJ promoting taxpayer funding of abortion. His mother, Sarah, had Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, into her home every Sunday afternoon for tea.

Those donating $25,000 to $49,000 included:

Amway Multi-Marketing Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. These are the in-laws of Betsy DeVos, former education secretary, and Verizon.

In the final category are Delta Airlines, ExxonMobil Corporation, Facebook, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pepsi, Co. None of whom support life.

Kellyanne Conway

Kellyanne was Donald Trump’s campaign manager after Ted Cruz lost his bid for the same. Conway was also employed by the Cruz campaign as a strategist for Keep the Promise I, a pro-Cruz super-PAC, bankrolled by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who ran attack ads against Trump during the primary campaign, including one blasting the real estate mogul for supposedly supporting government-run healthcare, which of course wasn’t true. Robert Mercer then switched to a Super Pac which is running attack ads against Hillary Clinton.

While working for Ted Cruz, she consistently disparaged Donald Trump, but then went to work for him as his Senior Counselor after he was elected. The scandal-laden anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project, was co-founded by Kellyanne’s husband, George Conway.

George and Kellyanne are members of the Federalist Society and give $50 to 100K per year to the Society.

Conclusion

Working together and being friends for decades, it was only logical that Pence would suggest Heritage Foundation and Kellyanne would suggest the Federalist Society choose conservative judges for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Both of these people are Deep State insiders or “controlled opposition” at the least. Few true conservatives endorsed and stood by Donald J. Trump through four years of unmitigated attacks against his person and his administration.

Kellyanne Conway left Trump’s administration in August of 2020, allegedly for family reasons. Michael Pence was never a Trump supporter, he and his wife were always Deep State players, and on January 6th, 2021, Pence knifed Trump in the back and the Republic in the heart.

The three Supreme Court Justices placed on the court by President Trump were actually chosen by Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway.

Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy on the court. Kennedy was often thought of as the “swing” vote. All three of Trump’s appointees have been “swing” voters, as we just saw with Justice Kavanaugh siding with the left against medical freedom and for Biden’s unconstitutional healthcare medical mandate.

 

 

 

 

Will The Biden/OSHA Employer Mandate To Vaccinate Employees Stand?

November 18, 2021
What’s the REAL Substance Of The OSHA Vaccine “Mandate/Rule?”

The Biden administration unveiled its emergency rule for COVID-19 protections for large companies that employ roughly two-thirds of the American workforce to adopt mandatory vaccination policies or take alternative steps. The new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule came two months after President Joe Biden announced a series of measures that he said would help swiftly end the pandemic.

“Vaccination requirements are good for the economy,” Biden said in a statement, avoiding the word mandate to describe the OSHA rule. “They not only increase vaccination rates, but they help send people back to work – as many as five million American workers. They make our economy more resilient in the face of COVID and keep our businesses open.” The president said that while he would have preferred to avoid the rule, “too many people remain unvaccinated for us to get out of this pandemic for good.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill responded with fury at the announcement. A group of GOP lawmakers said they would try to use the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to block new federal regulations in some circumstances, to nix the OSHA rule. Other members expressed support for a bill that would abolish OSHA altogether because of the announced rule. Florida state lawmaker Anthony Sabatini even urged “every Republican state” to nullify the federal rule and arrest OSHA officials who try to enforce ita proposal that would violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and spark a constitutional crisis.

In nearly every statement other than Biden’s, and in many news reports on the matter, the OSHA rule was described as a “vaccine mandate.” But this is not actually correct. The new rule is better understood as a testing mandate with a vaccine exception—and that distinction could be crucial as it works its way through courts of law and public opinion.

What did OSHA actually do? The agency unveiled what is known as an “emergency temporary standard,” or ETS, on COVID-19 vaccination and testing for most companies with more than 100 workers. The ETS is roughly 490 pages long, with fewer than two dozen pages dedicated to the rule itself and the rest devoted to its justification. It requires eligible companies to do a few things to make vaccinations easier for their employees to obtain: provide paid time off so workers can get vaccinated and recover from any side effects, maintain lists of which workers have already been vaccinated, establish a notification system for workers who test positive, and other administrative requirements. It also generally requires employers to tell unvaccinated employees to wear masks.

What the agency will not be doing is forcing anyone to get a vaccine – at least, not directly. According to OSHA, the ETS requires companies to “develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy.” But – and this is a big but – there is a pretty clear way around this. The affected companies can forgo a vaccine mandate policy if they “instead establish, implement, and enforce a policy allowing employees to elect either to get vaccinated or to undergo weekly COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at the workplace.”

Imagine that you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. OSHA has effectively presented you with two choices. Your first option is to order your workers to get vaccinated to comply with OSHA’s requirements. Your second option is to order your unvaccinated workers to get regular testing and wear face coverings while on the job. Though the Biden administration is framing the vaccine-mandate part of the ETS as the default and the testing-and-masking part as an exemption to it, there’s no reason it can’t be the other way around.

That might sound like a meaningless distinction for some workers who may now be compelled to get vaccinated either way. But there’s a difference between a mandate imposed by the government and one imposed by a company. In the actual ETS, OSHA said that an employer-based vaccine mandate, as opposed to one from OSHA itself, “will be the most effective approach for increasing the vaccination rate of its employees and ensuring that they have the best protection available against the worst consequences of a COVID-19 infection.”

And while OSHA claimed in the rule that it “may well have the authority to impose a vaccination mandate” itself, the agency said it instead decided against “pursuing [a] strict vaccination requirement” in favor of a rule that would “strongly encourage” vaccines. “OSHA’s traditional practice when including medical procedures, such as medical surveillance testing and vaccinations, in its health standards has been to require the employer to make the medical procedure available to employees, and has viewed mandating those procedures as a measure to avoid if possible,” the agency explained.

OSHA outlined a few benefits of mandating vaccines for employers themselves. “Most obviously, employers with a mandatory vaccination policy ‘should’ enjoy a dramatically reduced risk that their employees will become severely ill or die of a COVID-19 infection,” the agency said. Of course, if companies always cared so deeply about their workers’ health and welfare, OSHA wouldn’t exist. So it also discussed the cost-benefit problems of having a largely unvaccinated workforce, which is more likely to have higher rates of worker absences for illness.

The real benefit for employers who issue a vaccine mandate is saved for last in OSHA’s explanation. “Additionally, only employers who decline to implement a mandatory vaccination program are required by the rule to assume the administrative burden necessary to ensure that unvaccinated workers are regularly tested for COVID-19 and wear face coverings when they work near others,” the agency noted. In other words, under the new rule, it may be cheaper for large companies to tell workers to get the shot rather than pay for thousands of weekly COVID-19 tests.

There are some exceptions, of course. The rule does not apply to workers who telecommute or otherwise don’t work around other people, where there is no risk of workplace transmission, as well as workers who work entirely outdoors, where the transmission risk is dramatically lower. Companies with fewer than 100 workers are also exempt, OSHA said because they are less able to shoulder the administrative burden relative to the public health benefits. The OSHA rule also works in concert with existing bona fide vaccine mandates issued by the Biden administration: It recently issued vaccine mandates for federal employees, for workers at companies with government contracts, and for the entire U.S. military.

As with virtually every other aspect of American life, litigation over the OSHA rule was inevitable, and the lawsuits are already flying! One question for courts to resolve will be whether COVID-19 counts as a “grave danger” under the law that allows OSHA to issue an ETS in the first place. Another one that will likely attract the courts’ attention is whether workers can seek religious exemptions from company-imposed vaccine mandates, especially when enacted under the weight of an OSHA rule. Conservative legal groups have already filed multiple lawsuits against the Biden administration to block the rule on more general grounds. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which is generally wary of federal regulatory power, may be more inclined to uphold a vaccine mandate that, well, doesn’t actually mandate vaccines for anyone.

So why doesn’t the Biden administration just call it a testing mandate or something like that? The White House’s use of the phrase “vaccine requirement” suggests that it’s trying not to use the phrase “vaccine mandate,” while also trying not to say, “It’s not a vaccine mandate.” Perhaps the most likely answer is that the administration wants Americans to think there’s a massive federal vaccine mandate without actually risking the legal or political consequences of imposing one. It’s more practical – and perhaps more quintessentially American – for the government to outsource a coercive policy goal to the private sector instead of doing something itself.

Indeed, large companies like Google, Ford Motors, and Tyson Foods have already mandated vaccines for their workers. Other employers who might want to issue mandates can now say, “Hey, don’t blame us, we’re just trying to comply with OSHA here.” To make things easier, the OSHA rule also supersedes state and local bans on vaccine and mask mandates in Republican-led parts of the country. Obviously, many are hopeful that if the courts allow it to take effect, the rule may yet prompt enough companies and enough workers to get the shot to help end the pandemic for good. Just don’t call it a vaccine mandate.

Courts Already Ruling In Mandate/Rule Cases Filed

The litigation is rampant, but just beginning. State and federal courts have been flooded with suits. The Biden administration will inevitably ask the Supreme Court to review the decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt its vaccine mandate, which it reaffirmed when the Biden Administration instructed American companies to ignore the Court’s initial ruling. The Biden effort at the SCOTUS is likely to be futile, however. Writing for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Kurt Engelhardt confidently predicted that the mandate’s challengers “are likely to succeed on the merits” under judicial review. Engelhardt took particular exception to the attempt to impose the mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), pointing out that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and the nondelegation doctrine preclude OSHA from making such “sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the most  profound of ways.”

The decision also declared the mandate “fatally flawed on its own terms,” emphasizing that it purports to “save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat.” This seriously undermined the administration’s claim that the purpose of the mandate is a response to a genuine national emergency: “The underinclusive nature of the Mandate implies that the Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary.” This created questions concerning OSHA’s use of the emergency temporary standard (ETS):

As the name suggests, emergency temporary standards “are an ‘unusual response’ to ‘exceptional circumstances.’” Thus, courts have uniformly observed that OSHA’s authority to establish emergency temporary standards under § 655(c) “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’” But the Mandate at issue here … is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly “grave danger” the Mandate purports to address.

The appeals court goes on to point out that President Biden and OSHA have both undermined the legitimacy of the mandate by contradicting their own prior positions concerning the need to impose such a measure. Judge Engelhardt quotes Biden’s answer to a question posed to him on December 4 of last year concerning whether vaccines should be mandatory: “No, I don’t think [they] should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory…” The judge also quotes a D.C. Circuit Brief filed by OSHA in May of 2020: “Based on substantial evidence … an ETS is not necessary both because there are existing OSHA and non-OSHA standards that address COVID-19 and because an ETS would actually be counterproductive.”

At length, the 5th Circuit points out what should be a blindingly obvious practical dilemma associated with the vaccine mandate – it is far too unwieldy to implement efficiently. As the decision phrases it, “The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad, applying to 2 out of 3 private-sector employees in America in workplaces as diverse as the country itself.” Nor was it lost on Judge Engelhardt that the hare-brained scheme to implement the mandate using OSHA was hastily cobbled together by staffers. As Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley points out, the decision includes a footnote indicating that White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain was foolish enough to advertise it as an end-run around the Constitution:

Klain acknowledged that the use of OSHA was a “work around” in light of the constitutional barriers preventing President Biden from ordering a national mandate directly.… The Fifth Circuit decision could now lead to a showdown in the Supreme Court where Klain’s tweet could be again highlighted. This is a challenge that alleges that the OSHA rule was a thinly disguised attempt to circumvent the Constitution. Klain then rushed to remove even that thin veneer by heralding the “work around” of the constitutional limitations. It is an “admission against interest” that is likely to be repeated in litigation in a variety of cases.

This blunder will raise eyebrows at the Supreme Court when the Biden administration appeals the 5th Circuit ruling. Even the Court’s most liberal justices will take a dim view of such contempt for the Constitution. Yet the Biden Department of Justice insists that it will “continue to vigorously defend the standard and looks forward to obtaining a definitive resolution following the consolidation of all of the pending cases for further review.” Their argument, however, depends less on the constitutionality of the mandate than the manipulation of public opinion: “With the reopening of workplaces and the emergence of the highly transmissible Delta variant, the threat to workers is ongoing and overwhelming.”

But, as Judge Engelhardt writes, “The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions – even, or perhaps particularly when those decisions frustrate government officials.” That, in the end, is exactly what the entire controversy is about. No president possesses the authority to order private citizens to get vaccinated or command private businesses to enforce a vaccine mandate. Moreover, when Congress created OSHA, it didn’t authorize the agency to enforce anything resembling such an edict. Thus, the mandate will be DOA when it hits the SCOTUS docket.

Summary

Care for my opinion on the matter? (Here it is whether you want it or not!)

I think the Biden Administration purposely used the OSHA rule in an attempt to sidestep direct pushback against the Administration which can say easily, “We didn’t mandate anything. It’s an OSHA ‘Rule,’ not a mandate. So go talk to them.”

One might think saying that is just confirmation of what Biden has stated publicly when asked about his issuing a vaccine mandate. But I think there’s far more to this process.

First, Democrats NEVER do anything “off the cuff:” everything they do is carefully planned and implemented. Believing that is so in this case, an obvious question arises: what’s their reasoning, and what’s the hoped-for end result?

I’m confident they KNEW the Rule is likely to fail the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court and will eventually be ruled unconstitutional. But even if that happens, it will NOT happen for a month or more.

What’s the benefit of that? Thousands if not millions more Americans will say, “Well, my company is requiring we all abide by the Vaccine mandate, so I’ll just go ahead and get it now.”

Bingo! Biden will have accomplished getting many more vaccinated, and no one can “blame him for trying.”

In other words, these actions fit exactly what Democrats do in almost every major situation: find ways to at least “say” they did what they promised to do, but will be able to say, “Someone else stopped us!”

“Symbolism over Substance” wins again!

And the American people will pay the price just like always.

 

 

 

Enough is Enough: Supreme Court Should Overturn Roe v. Wade

May 23, 2021

Abortion is nothing new. As long as people have been creating babies, people have found reasons and ways to rid their babies’ lives before birth. Yes, it is unconscionable to believe people somehow justify doing so. Even worse is the excuse that destroying life is a fundamental right included in “Healthcare.” You know, that “My Body My Choice” thing.

Year after year since the 1970s, anti-abortionists have sought to somehow find legal standing to overturn Roe v. Wade. Time after time, laws passed in the state legislatures have found their way to the United States Supreme Court challenged for their unconstitutionality. One by one, they have been summarily dismissed by the Court.

Maybe things are now changing.

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the constitutionality of a Mississippi statute banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The court should use this opportunity to liberate America from the long nightmare of nationalized abortion policy. It should overrule Roe v. Wade.

Abortion involves profound social and moral issues. This essay, however, focuses on political, judicial, and constitutional issues.

Politically, Roe has proven to be the most divisive Supreme Court ruling since Dred Scott v. Sandford, the notorious case that helped provoke the Civil War. Since Roe nationalized abortion policy in 1973, abortion has become fodder for special interests that poison civic life. Roe is a major reason judicial confirmation hearings have become arenas for slander and political assassination.

Further, Roe’s nationalization of abortion diverts federal elections and policymakers from issues the Constitution actually assigns to the federal government, such as foreign and budgetary policy.

Judicially, Roe v. Wade was what lawyers call a “rogue decision” because it violated accepted judicial standards. Courts normally respect precedent, but Roe reversed hundreds of years of Anglo-American law. Courts generally defer to legislatures on policy questions, but Roe effectively voided statutes in all 50 states. Roe converted democratic resolution into Supreme Court diktats.

Roe violated a rule that courts do not adjudicate “political questions”—those that cannot be answered using “judicially discoverable and manageable standards.” Before a court decides an issue, that issue must be one the judge’s legal training equips him to decide.

But Roe and the Supreme Court cases following it force judges to address such questions as:

  • Does a state restriction impose an “undue burden” on abortion?
  • How does a state legislature balance protection of fetal life with “reproductive freedom?”
  • Does the value of fetal life increase with the progression of pregnancy? If so, what restrictions invalid for a woman at 10 weeks become valid at 20 weeks? 30 weeks?
  • Is a regulation appropriate for the City of Houston inappropriate in rural Texas?

Issues of that kind are quintessential legislative policy questions. They do not belong in a court of law. Only within the realm of abortion do the courts fail to recognize that fact.

Now let’s turn to the constitutional aspects of Roe.

Roe v. Wade pretends to be constitutional law, but it’s not. It’s an absurd ruling stemming from arrogant decision-making and misuse of history. Even leading pro-choice scholars have acknowledged Roe’s defects.

To understand why the ruling in Roe was absurd, let’s start with some background.

The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, included 10 constitutional amendments protecting a long list of personal rights against federal abuse. Among them was the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on the federal government denying a person “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, contained a shorter list of rights that protected against state abuse, including the rule that states may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The Roe court ruled that the right to abort was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Many books and articles have elucidated Roe’s constitutional defects. Here’s an overview:

First: In Roe, the Supreme Court held that abortion was a “liberty” protected by due process, in part because abortion was generally legal in 1868. But the court’s treatment of history was deeply flawed. For example, the justices misunderstood the former meaning of legal terms such as “misdemeanor.”

Second: As its name indicates, the Due Process Clause is about the process—that is, procedure. As explained below, it regulates how the state must prosecute private citizens. It has nothing to do with substantive law.

Roe is one of several oxymoronically named “substantive due process” cases in which judges pretend that the Due Process Clause forces them to decide political issues autocratically rather than democratically. Substantive due process has no basis in the Constitution. It originated—appropriately enough—in the Dred Scott case. Over time, the activities the Supreme Court protects through substantive due process have varied with the political views of the justices.

Third: When the Constitution was written, the phrase “due process of law” was centuries old, and its meaning was plain: If government prosecutes you criminally or civilly, it must follow pre-existing procedures. It can’t make up the rules as it goes along. Alternatively: When the government proceeds against you, it can’t change procedures retroactively. Due process has nothing to do with abortion.

Fourth: Some writers admit the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause is narrow, but insist the Fourteenth Amendment version is much broader. They claim court cases decided between 1791 and 1868 widened the definition.

A rule of legal interpretation says that when the same word or phrase appears more than once in a document (such as the Constitution), then the word or phrase is presumed not to change the meaning. Therefore, the burden of proof is on those who claim “due process of law” is wider in the Fourteenth Amendment than in the Fifth.

Have they carried that burden? No. Several years ago, I examined the 1791–1868 cases they cite. I found that they had been misunderstood. All were merely applications of the traditional due process “anti-retroactivity” rule. And there was no suggestion anywhere in those cases –or in any other contemporaneous sources—that “due process” included abortion.

Fifth: The Constitution’s text also tells us that “due process” is a fairly narrow right. It’s only one of many rights the Constitution lists. Other rules of interpretation tell us that when you see a list like that, you should presume that each item says something different and that the scope of each item is similar.

Suppose, for example; a wife tells her husband to buy “lettuce, carrots, broccoli, and cabbage.” But the husband brings home only lettuce, carrots, and a double-helping of broccoli. She asks, “Where’s the cabbage?” He responds, “Well, dear, if you knew your botany, you’d know that broccoli is a member of the cabbage family. By purchasing broccoli, I thereby purchased cabbage.”

Of course, this smart-aleck knew that when his wife said “broccoli,” she did not intend the widest possible meaning. That’s why she listed “cabbage” separately. This husband is on the direct route to what we hubbies call “Big Trouble.”

Similarly, the fact that “due process of law” is accompanied by many other enumerated rights tells us that due process is not a mixed salad of other rights. As explained above, it means that when the state prosecutes you, the state has to follow pre-established procedures.

Sixth: Advocates of Roe v. Wade argue that because it’s 48 years old and people have relied on it, it has become a “super precedent.” They, therefore, argue courts should venerate it more than it deserves.

This is self-serving rubbish. For one thing, no one relies for more than nine months on the availability of abortion, other than the people who profit from it. If abortion became a state issue again, state legislatures could—and no doubt would—take such reliance into account.

More fundamentally, the same people who claim “super precedent” status for Roe applaud when the court reverses heavily relied upon cases of even longer standing. For example, in 1896, the Supreme Court upheld state racial segregation. That case lasted 10 years longer than Roe, and people and institutions relied very much upon it. Yet advocates of Roe universally praise the court for (properly) overruling it.

Similarly, many of those claiming “super precedent” status for Roe praised the court when, in 2015, it reversed at least 6,000 years of precedent by requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages. Compare this statement by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) claiming “super precedent” status for Roe with her statement cheering the same-sex marriage decision.

Few of Roe v. Wade’s knowledgeable defenders think it’s well-reasoned constitutional law. They think merely that, as a matter of policy, abortion ought to be freely available.

They’re entitled to that belief. But they’re not entitled to misrepresent the Constitution. They are, furthermore, free to lobby for their policy preferences. But they should do so in the legislatures, just as the rest of us must do when we promote issues we care about. They have no right to impose their views on us by judicial fiat.

The Supreme Court must de-nationalize abortion before the issue tears apart our country and Constitution. The court must overrule Roe v. Wade.

Memo to the United States Supreme Court: Theft of Presidential Election Violates the U.S. Constitution

December 21, 2020

Many Americans were shocked at the rejection by the U.S. Supreme Court of the Texas lawsuit against the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia for disenfranchising the voters of Texas by exercising fraudulent actions in the November 3, 2020, presidential election. The Court did not accept the case, rejecting it on the basis of Texas not having standing to file such a case against other states.

Louisiana Attorney John Milkovich penned a Memo to the Court expressing his angst and that of millions of other Americans at the inaction of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding this very serious matter.

John Milkovich is an American politician and attorney from the state of Louisiana. A Democrat, Milkovich represented the 38th district of the Louisiana State Senate, based in  Shreveport, from 2016 until 2020. Milkovich was born and raised in Roundup, Montana, and went to the University of Montana. After obtaining his J.D. at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Milkovich worked as a judicial clerk for Fred C. Sexton Jr. of the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Milkovich has also been an attorney at law since 1985.

Memo to Supreme Court:  Theft of Presidential Election Violates the Constitution

It’s true.  The theft of a Presidential Election violates the Constitution.   It constitutes illegal insurrection. It embodies a War on Freedom.  It is for a time such as this, that you wear the robe.

Hyper-technical considerations of Jurisdiction, Casuistic deliberations over Standing, and Ivory Tower hairsplitting over legal causes have their place. But that place is not the Highest Court of a Crumbling Republic.

Your job is to defend the Constitution.  And sometimes, in order to defend the Constitution, you must defend the Country–– without which there would be no Constitution.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all understood:  A Constitution has no meaning or value, if the Nation it was designed to protect, it no longer exists.  If there is no Country — there is no Constitution.

What happened in the 2020 Presidential Election was a coup, akin in some respects to the midday murder of President John F. Kennedy,  in broad daylight, in Dealey Plaza, on November 22, 1963.

From all over America and the World, ordinary citizens whose primary expertise about the legal system comes from Traffic Court Summonses, understand this:   You cannot take down America, without violating the Constitution.  In the face of a tsunami of massive election fraud and deceit, if you do not defend the Country, there may be no Constitution left to defend.   Next to the right to worship God, there is perhaps no other Constitutional right so fundamental to freedom, as the right to elect officials in honest elections.  And if that right is lost, if the corrupt voting machine companies, Corporate Media’s stream of unconsciousness, and amoral vote thieves are allowed to steal a presidential election in full view of the American public, we may never have a fully free election again.

  • It’s past time to jettison the hackneyed, philosophic divergence between judges that are liberal, activist legislators from the Bench — and conservative non-interventionists.
  • It is not the Supreme Court’s job merely to determine whether pleadings and causes of action fit neatly within the contours of statutes and judicial precedent.
  • Occam’s Razor does not divide Conscience, Country, and Constitution.
  • Now is not the time to shrink from Constitutional Duty, confessed to God, because of the specter of Soros-sponsored street mobs. As  History instructs, those that seek to dominate by violence, proceed from Riot to Rule.

The people that pay taxes, raise families, and defend the Country in uniform are sending you a message: This is an assault on America and an attack on the Republic; a war on Freedom.  “Be Strong and of Good Courage.”   Defend the Constitution. And the “One Nation Under God,” without which the Constitution cannot exist.

 

John Milkovich

Keithville, Louisiana

 

“Is the Texas Suit in the SCOTUS Valid:”What The ‘Experts’ Say

December 10, 2020

Have you read the 154-page lawsuit filed against the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia? I have. I am NO Constitutional expert, but the fundamental premise of the suit seems elementary to me. Let me break it down in layman’s terms:

  • Individual states are required by the Constitution (Article II) to choose those who will serve for each state in casting the votes for those citizens in the electoral college for President.
  • Each state’s lawmaking body — or “legislature” — determines in passed laws the processes for choosing those electors.
  • The legislatures are required — in the same Article II — to set the details of how elections are to be structured. Any changes in each election system can only be changed by amending previously passed laws. No governor or other state official has the legal authority to alter the election process enshrined in state law.
  • The Supreme Court is to resolve disputes between states. That gives the Court the sole responsibility to resolve this lawsuit between Texas and the four other states.

What Are the Potential Actions by SCOTUS?

The Court will view the states’ responses due by 3:00 PM Thursday and decide to push forward with the lawsuit or to simply refuse to get involved.

As we see it, the option to hear the case and oral arguments would be to determine ONLY whether any or all of these four states violated the provision of the U.S. Constitution in Article II.  This section set the requirement of states’ lawmaking bodies to set the election process.

If the Court decides to NOT take the case, that would remand the case back to Texas. That would mean the election results as certified by those four states’ governors would stand and the electors as chosen by those states would participate in the electoral college process. That, in essence, would result in a Joe Biden presidency.

The Dangers of Each Choice of the SCOTUS

Let’s assume the Court takes the case, hears it, and decides to remedy the unconstitutional actions of these states. That approach leaves them few options.

One would be to instruct the applicable states to take actions legislatively to select electors outside their previous process. That ruling would mean the votes tallied and included in the certified results previously would have to be revised. That may NOT be possible because of the constitutional mandate for the inauguration of a President on January 20th. State legislatures might themselves select electors.

It is possible but unlikely, a legislature could identify each of the ballots that were cast, counted, or both that were NOT done so legally. If so, invalidating those illegal votes and recounting using only the legally cast votes might be an option. It is doubtful this would work.

A Few “Experts” Opinion

The above was the TruthNewsNetwork opinion. No one here is an attorney and certainly not a Constitutional expert. But there ARE plenty of “experts” who have weighed-in on this historical matter.

“It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category,” said Steve Vladeck, professor at the University of Texas Law School.

“Although the Supreme Court has ‘exclusive’ jurisdiction over disputes between states, it does not automatically hear all such cases,” Vladeck said. “Rather, states have to receive ‘leave to file,’ which usually requires showing that there’s no other forum in which these issues can be resolved.”

Vladeck called the filing “insane” and noted that Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins isn’t named in the suit.

“Anyway, it takes five votes to grant a motion for leave to file — which isn’t going to happen,” Vladeck said. “And it’ll take some time. So chalk this up as mostly a stunt — a dangerous, offensive, and wasteful one, but a stunt nonetheless.”

Rick Hasen, professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine and a CNN Election Law Analyst, was equally dismissive of the case, writing a brief article on his blog describing the suit as “dangerous garbage.”

“The Texas case is not serious. Far from it. It’s a publicity stunt masquerading as a lawsuit. AG Paxton should be sanctioned for it. It goes against the will of millions of voters,” Hasen wrote on Twitter.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, who’s recently come to national attention for his efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the county, said that Paxton had provided no evidence to back up his request that the election results in four states be thrown out.

“Texas Sues Four States in Supreme Court Over Results in 2020 Presidential Race. This is a publicity stunt. One state has no standing to complain about how another state(s) choose their presidential electors. Plus @KenPaxtonTX fails to cite any evidence of fraud,” Jenkins tweeted on Monday.

Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar, and professor at Harvard Law School, also suggested that Texas may not have standing to bring the case, and therefore the court may decide not to hear it.

“This is truly ridiculous,” Tribe said. “If the 50 sister States could sue one another to overturn each other’s election results, there’d be a mind-blowing cascade of at least 50! (ie 50 x 49 x 48 x … x3 x2) intra-family Electoral College megasuits. Endless!”

Democratic Congressman Colin Allred of Texas’ 32nd district, a former civil rights attorney, echoed much of the criticism from legal experts about the case being a publicity stunt.

“Deeply embarrassing that TX’s AG is wasting our tax dollars trying to subvert an election,” Allred tweeted. “This stunt will not distract from Mr. Paxton’s scandals and will not change the result of this election, it will only hurt our democracy and waste your money.”

What Experts Confirm the Validity of the Texas SCOTUS Case?

Quite honestly, we have yet to find any Constitutional expert who has publicly commented favorably on the 154-page lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General. It is obvious, however, that the Attorneys General of the 17 states that have joined Texas in the lawsuit believe the case is legitimate and constitutionally necessary.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was asked by Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly to represent him in the Supreme Court case filed last week asking for the Court to invalidate Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe’s election results certification. (The SCOTUS denied that emergency action by Kelly) And President Trump has asked Cruz to represent him in the Texas case, which President Trump joined on Wednesday.

Summary

It is disheartening that the 2020 election has devolved into this. It’s nauseating to see any elected state officials who would even consider throwing-out a provision in the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with their “personal” preferences to change their state’s election law WITHOUT legislative action. The audacity of the leaders of these four states is more obvious now as are their attacks on the Rule of Law.

Further, the fact that few, if any, Constitutional experts have joined in the cry for justice through Constitutional requirement for how states are to set their own election structures, is concerning.

Could it be that this happening is a signal that many officials at both state and federal levels have turned their backs on the Rule of Law? Is it that they despise Donald Trump and the current wave of populism in the nation so much that they are willing to do anything necessary to bring down the President and this wave of Populism among the people?

Are they willing to turn their backs on American Democracy and our representative republic form of government?

Make no mistake: there is NO option to allow these unconstitutional actions by the leaders in these to stand AND preserve our current government structure! The two ideals cannot mutually exist.

However, the Supreme Court decides this case will determine the future of the United States of America. We will either continue to be the freest and most powerful nation in World history, or we will send a message to the World that we as a nation prefer to be an “also-ran” nation that functions exactly like numerous other countries: in either socialist or totalitarian structure and laws.

God help us.

Does the Texas Suit Filed at SCOTUS Have Any Merit?

December 9, 2020

On Monday, just before midnight, the State of Texas filed a lawsuit that is far more important than all of the others surrounding the presidential election of November 3rd.

Texas brought a suit against four states that did something they cannot legally do: they violated the U.S. Constitution in their conduct of the presidential election. And this violation occurred regardless of the amount of election fraud that may have resulted. The four defendant states are Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Texas filed the suit directly in the Supreme Court. Article III of the Constitution lists a small number of categories of cases in which the Supreme Court has “original jurisdiction.”  One of those categories concerns “Controversies between two or more states.” Texas’s suit is exactly that. The Supreme Court has opined in the past that it may decline to accept such cases, at its discretion.  But it is incumbent upon the high court to take this case, especially when it presents a such a cut-and-dried question of constitutional law, and when it could indirectly decide who is sworn in as President on January 20, 2021.

The Texas suit is clear, and it presents a compelling case. The four offending states each violated the U.S. Constitution in two ways.

First, they violated the Electors Clause of Article II of the Constitution when executive or judicial officials in the states changed the rules of the election without going through the state legislatures. The Electors Clause requires that each State “shall appoint” its presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

In the early years of the Republic, most state legislatures appointed their presidential electors directly, without holding a popular election for President. That would change during the early decades of the nineteenth century. But the constitutional principle remained the same.  Regardless of whether a state appoints its electors by a vote in the legislature or by a vote of the people, it is the state legislature — and only the state legislature — that sets the rules.

Thus, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended by three days the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots, contrary to the law passed by the state legislature, the state court changed the rules in violation of the Electors Clause. Similarly, when Georgia’s Secretary of State responded to a lawsuit by entering into a Compromise Settlement Agreement and Release (i.e. a consent decree) with the Democratic Party of Georgia, and modified the signature verification requirements spelled out by Georgia law, that changing of the rules violated the Electors Clause.

The second constitutional violation occurred when individual counties in each of the four states changed the way that they would receive, evaluate, or treat the ballots. Twenty years ago, in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court held that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when one Florida county treated ballots one way, and another Florida county treated ballots a different way. Voters had the constitutional right to have their ballots treated equally from county to county.

So when election officials in Wayne County, Michigan, ignored the requirements of Michigan law and denied poll watchers access to vote counting, while other counties in Michigan followed the law, that violated the Equal Protection Clause.  Similarly, in Wisconsin, when the Administrator of the City of Milwaukee Elections Commission ignored the requirements of Wisconsin law and directed election workers to write in the addresses of witnesses on the envelopes containing mail-in ballots, while ballots without witness addresses were deemed invalid elsewhere, that resulted in the unequal treatment of ballots in the state.

Importantly, the Texas lawsuit presents a pure question of law.  It is not dependent upon disputed facts.  Although these unconstitutional changes to the election rules could have facilitated voter fraud, the State of Texas doesn’t need to prove a single case of fraud to win. It is enough that the four states violated the Constitution.

The lawsuit asks the Supreme Court to remand the appointment of electors in the four states back to the state legislatures. As the Supreme Court said in 1892 in the case of McPherson v. Blacker, “Whatever provisions may be made by statute, or by the state constitution, to choose electors by the people, there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time…”.

What should and what could possibly result from the Supreme Court case that has been accepted by the Supreme Court? Here with a brief breakdown of the case and what’s involved is Jay Sekulow:

If Texas prevails, the four state legislatures could follow any number of courses in appointing their presidential electors.  They could assess the election results and try to exclude those ballots that were counted in violation of state law in order to determine a winner, or they could divide their Electoral College votes between the two candidates, or they could follow a different path. But they have to follow the Constitution in whatever they do.

In the rest of country, the states followed the constitutional rules in appointing presidential electors. The offending states cannot be allowed to violate those same rules. It’s not just a matter of constitutional law. It’s a matter of basic fairness.

“Justice” Barrett Hits Homerun; Fauci Strikes Out

October 27, 2020

A Catholic girl from Metairie, Louisiana who attended a girls’ school and then Notre Dame is now the ninth Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In spite of her amazing qualifications as the World saw during three days of exhaustive attacks by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barrett — who will be known now as “ACB” — shocked many of the experts by staring down those Senators who sought desperately to find reason to disqualify her. They failed miserably. Last night, Amy Coney Barrett assumed the seat of former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

There is not yet much to say about ACB, but you can be in just a few days there will be MUCH said about her sitting on the SCOTUS. Consideration of a challenge to Obamacare will be heard by the new Court. Many on the Left swear she’ll be the swing vote to kill Obamacare even though she reminded Senators the challenge is on just one provision of the law and “Severability” could easily determine that one part unconstitutional but allowing the law to survive. Never mind, this is election year and Democrats need fodder to feed their minions to convince voters to vote Left.

The other pending law being challenged is Roe v. Wade. This law too is NOT being challenged in its entirety, but several parts of the law. And Barrett three years ago in Judiciary Committee hearings when asked stated she sees Roe v. Wade as possibly NEVER being overturned.

What we absolutely know is certain is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would, if still with us, be pleased to know that her replacement is probably as close as a judge can be to Ginsburg herself in the understand of the Law with a similar commitment to view every case without political prejudice and rule soley based on law. That may not be good enough for Democrats, but it certainly will prove to be good for the Rule of Law and protect for years to come the U.S. Constitution.

Amy Coney Barrett stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park, a homerun for the American people!

The Strikeout King: Dr. Anthony Fauci

The Washington Post has been a joke for a long time, at least since the days when it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about a child heroin addict who turned out not to exist. The paper is now filled every day with poison pen “analysis,” backed by phony “fact-checkers,” criticizing almost anything President Trump says or does. Somehow, basic facts that may impact the coronavirus story, such as the federal record of failure in the development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine, escape mention.

President Clinton in May 1997 had announced a “comprehensive AIDS vaccine research initiative” that has failed. To repeat: 23 years later, the project has failed. To emphasize this fact is not to denigrate the efforts that were made. Instead, it is appropriate information that might help us understand if the current push for a coronavirus vaccine, strongly backed by the United Nations, makes any medical sense at all. Perhaps money for a coronavirus vaccine can be spent more effectively somewhere else. Perhaps vitamin therapy, nutritional supplements, and other alternative treatments such as Hydroxychloroquine should be used on a massive scale immediately. In a major breakthrough about this,  Governor Kristi Noem announced that South Dakota will become the first state to conduct a full clinical trial on hydroxychloroquine, to understand its role in treating and potentially preventing coronavirus.

In the same way that HIV/AIDS may have been misunderstood by the “experts,” the jury is still out on the nature of the China virus. But such information is critical to understanding whether a vaccine is even possible and whether fast-tracking a risky vaccine is wise. In addition to the failure of the HIV/AIDS vaccine experiment, the swine flu vaccine scandal of the 1970s confirms how government vaccination programs can go horribly wrong.

The Post ran a story about Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who specialized in HIV/AIDS vaccine research, referring to them as having “worked together at the dawn of the AIDS crisis.” It said Birx and Fauci are still “on a continuing search for a cure and vaccine,” a backdoor way of acknowledging that the vaccine project has failed. But the paper won’t say that in a direct or factual way.

Fauci and Birx are clearly knowledgeable but they are not infallible. Their records are not above reproach. But because they carry the label of doctors and “scientists,” they seem to be immune from serious criticism. It’s time for that to change. More and more it seems — at least as it pertains to COVID-19 — our “experts” are not very “expert” at giving us accurate information that, each time they do, they tell us they are “facts.” Too often they are NOT.

The paper is defending Fauci’s record as an “infectious disease specialist” but his comments about the nature of the China virus have varied, depending on which program he has been on. And there have been a lot of such programs. On one show in January, Fauci said, “But this is not a major threat for the people of the United States. And this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” This followed the WHO’s claim on January 14 that coronavirus could not be spread person to person. It cited China as the source of that information.

Fauci told the NBC Today show as late as February 29 that “there is no need to change anything that you are doing on a day-by-day basis.”

One thing we do know is that Fauci has been a reliable contact of the U.N.’s World Health Organization, having signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the WHO’s Dr. Tedros in 2018. The “understanding” seemed to be that Fauci would rely on the WHO, a China front, or China itself, for information on virus outbreaks and pandemics originating in China. That was a big mistake.

Ignoring his pattern of misleading statements, the Post claims that Fauci “developed a reputation as a skilled public health expert while combating the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.” He was certainly “skilled” in public relations. But in fact, the federal government’s HIV/AIDS vaccine initiative has been a failure. The American people have a right to know that these “experts” can be wrong and often ARE wrong.

As recently as 2014, Fauci was writing scientific papers about how an HIV/AIDS vaccine “remains essential” and that “recent advances in vaccinology offer new promise for an effective HIV vaccine.” But HIV/AIDS vaccines have repeatedly failed. The latest failure was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The $100 million experiment was 10 years in the making.

Fauci has served as director of the NIAID at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1984, the year scientists claim to have identified and isolated HIV. Controversy continues to surround this “discovery.” Recently, during a daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Fauci talked about alleged “health disparities,” in terms of the numbers and backgrounds of people getting sick and dying from the coronavirus, and asserted he saw something similar when HIV/AIDS struck LGBTQ people.

“During that time, there was extraordinary stigma, particularly against the gay community,” Fauci said. “And it was only when the world realized how the gay community responded to this outbreak with incredible courage and dignity and strength and activism — I think that really changed some of the stigma against the gay community, very much so.”

His comments ignore the fact that life-threatening and deadly diseases such as HIV/AIDS emerged in the gay community because of the manner in which they have sex. To this day, male homosexuals are still far more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV. The book, The Health Hazards of Homosexuality, speaks about the power of the LGBTQ lobby and “unprecedented censorship” in the medical profession and scientific establishment about how the gay lifestyle spreads the disease.

This is still a taboo subject for many but the story needs to be told. Fauci won’t tell it, apparently because he thinks it somehow contributes to the “stigma.” Yet, smokers are regularly shamed into quitting because they use tobacco, rather than marijuana. Indeed, the government funds programs to discourage smoking but not gay sex.

Other so-called “disparities” consist of federal funding that has favored AIDS over other diseases. Indeed, a group called the FAIR Foundation was formed in order to point out that AIDS was getting a greater  share of the federal research budget, even though it is killing a fraction of Americans each year when compared with diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Typically, the flu kills far more people than AIDS.

In 2017, for example, 5,698 people died of AIDS. But 55,000 died of the flu. It was number eight on the list of leading causes of death. The figures show that HIV disease has not been among the 15 leading causes of death since 1997.

Strangely, the biography of Dr. Birx says she “helped lead one of the most influential HIV vaccine trials in history (known as RV 144 or the “Thai trial”), which provided the first supporting evidence of any vaccine’s potential effectiveness in preventing HIV infection.” But that was 10 years ago and note the use of the word “potential.” At this date, there is still no HIV/AIDS vaccine.

A history of failed HIV/ADS vaccine efforts notes, “Factors that led the U.S. government to take action included vocal activism by people infected with HIV and their allies as well as persistent efforts by advocates in the scientific world.” In other words, the gay community and people like Fauci and Birx rushed into development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.

Some might review this failed project and nevertheless conclude that at least they tried to help people. But the fact is that the gay community lobbied for a quick-fix vaccine that failed to materialize when it can be argued that the “Medical Deep State” should have been spending their time (and our money) on projects to solve other health problems affecting many more people, such as the flu.

Consider that while billions were wasted on an HIV/AIDS vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says current flu vaccines reduce the risk of getting the flu by only 40% and 60% among the overall population “during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine.” This caveat means that effectiveness also depends on the nature of the flu and which vaccine was produced for which year.

All of this proves that the scientific “authorities” need oversight and fact-checkers. The American people should not leave their health in the hands of bureaucratic “experts” who have wasted billions on failed vaccine experiments and played politics with disease.

A Look at SCOTUS Nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s Notable Cases and Rulings

October 13, 2020

Americans deserve to hear the REAL things about Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and NOT just the prognostication of Democrats that she will destroy the World by throwing out Obamacare and Roe v. Wade. How about a look into her work as a federal judge? Wouldn’t that shed some light on how she things regarding judicial matters and cases? Instead of sitting in a Senate hearing and pontificating about Obamacare’s certain demise if she is confirmed and womens’ healthcare being hijacked because she’ll destroy the god of Abortion, why not look into her case history. They won’t, so we will. What follows are the summaries of multiple cases heard by Judge Amy Coney Barrett and her actions in deciding these cases.

Facts Matter!

A Look at Judge Amy Coney Barrett

Judge Amy Coney Barrett is expected to face a tense confirmation hearing later this month. Her experience as a judge and her opinions and votes during her short tenure on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to be placed under a microscope and questioned as part of the confirmation fight.

If Barrett is confirmed, she would be considered as one with the least courtroom experience—with only three years experience as a federal judge—but one whose record and personal qualities endear her to conservatives and some libertarians.

“I think she’s an epitome of what a jurist should be,” Thomas Brejcha, president and founder of the conservative pro-Life law firm Thomas More Society, said. “She is not a person who simply goes along with her political inclinations.”

“She is a person who believes that in her judicial role, she must follow the law as she interprets it. … There is a sense of judicial self-restraint and discipline that I think speaks very well of her conservative nature,” he added.

Liberals, on the other hand, are likely to continue to oppose her confirmation  to the bench while strongly expressing concern over the future of abortion and the Affordable Care Act.

“Amy Coney Barrett is a threat to our reproductive rights and health care. Nominating Barrett is an insult to [Ruth Bader Ginsburg]’s legacy and everything she spent her life fighting for. This is the people’s court, the people’s seat,” the Planned Parenthood Action Fund said in a statement on Twitter.

While on the bench of the 7th Circuit Court, Barrett participated in some noteworthy and possibly controversial cases ranging in due process and abortion. Here is a look at some of her notable opinions and votes.

Abortion

Barrett has grappled with some abortion regulation cases while on the 7th Circuit bench and cast votes that signaled opposition to rulings that struck down abortion-related restrictions.

In 2018, Barrett voted to rehear a case “en banc” — to have the three-judge panel decision reviewed by the full court — involving an Indiana law that required fetal remains to be buried or cremated after an abortion. The trial and appeals court judges found that the law violated the Constitution. Ultimately, Barrett was outnumbered and the 7th Circuit ruled to deny the rehearing and reinstated an original opinion that blocked the law from being enforced.

At the time, she joined in a dissenting opinion authored by Judge Frank Easterbrook. The dissent addressed another portion of the law that had been struck down but was not at issue in the rehearing proceedings, which Easterbrook described as the “the eugenics statute.” That portion of the law bans abortions for sex, race, and disability reasons.

Easterbrook argued that the Supreme Court had never ruled on such a law and would be the only authority to rule on the issue.

“Using abortion to promote eugenic goals is morally and prudentially debatable on grounds different from those that underlay the statutes [Planned Parenthood v.] Casey considered,” the dissent reads. “None of the Court’s abortion decisions holds that states are powerless to prevent abortions designed to choose the sex, race, and other attributes of children.”

The Supreme Court later reinstated the Indiana law on the disposal of fetal remains.

In 2019, Barrett voted to rehear a ruling by a three-judge 7th Circuit panel that upheld a challenge to another Indiana abortion law. That state measure would require the parents of a girl under 18 seeking an abortion be notified, even in situations when she had already asked a court to give consent instead of her parents.

The 7th circuit eventually denied the hearing. Barrett joined a dissent for denying the rehearing authored by Judge Michael Kanne, who said, “Preventing a state statute from taking effect is a judicial act of extraordinary gravity in our federal structure.”

Also in 2019, Barrett joined an opinion on a First Amendment case involving a Chicago ordinance that barred pro-life sidewalk counselors from approaching and talking to women who entered an abortion clinic, also known as the “bubble zone” law. That ordinance was modeled after a Colorado law that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a case, Hill v. Colorado, in 2000. Judge Diane Sykes wrote in the opinion that the appeals court had no choice but to follow the top court’s precedent.

“The road the plaintiffs urge is not open to us in our hierarchical system. Chicago’s bubble-zone ordinance is materially identical to — indeed, is narrower than — the law upheld in Hill v. Colorado,” she wrote. “While the Supreme Court has deeply unsettled Hill v. Colorado, it has not overruled the decision. So it remains binding on us. The plaintiffs must seek relief in the High Court.”

Thomas More Society was one of the law firms that represented the challengers in the Chicago case. Brejcha noted that although Skyes, who was joined by Barrett, found that subsequent cases had shaken the foundations of Hill v. Colorado, as a circuit court they did not have the authority to overrule the Supreme Court precedent.

He said this demonstrates Barrett’s judicial discipline and self-restraint as a jurist. “Her methodology is very limited and disciplined,” Brejcha said.

Ilya Shapiro, the director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that Barrett’s votes and opinions in the abortion regulation cases show that she might not necessarily vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, what they show is that she would take each regulation as it comes and best apply the government standards, he added.

supreme court scotus

Due Process

Barrett authored the majority opinion in a due process case brought by a male Purdue University student who had been accused of sexual improprieties. As a result of the accusation, the male student, who was referred to as John Doe, was suspended from the school which then led to his expulsion from the Navy ROTC program and loss of his scholarship. He had maintained his innocence during the allegations.

John sued school officials claiming that the school’s discipline process was deficient. He argued that the school had violated his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Title IX by imposing a punishment based on gender bias. Title IX is a federal law that protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs.

The university, in a report, allegedly “falsely claimed that [John] had confessed to Jane’s allegations” and had left out information about Jane’s emotional state from John’s testimony, according to Barrett’s opinion. The female student was referred to Jane Doe in the case.

John was also not given an opportunity to present witnesses, the panel members had not read the report — indicating that they based their judgment on accusations rather than evidence — and John was unable to address evidence because he had not seen it during the school’s discipline program. The school also did not receive a written statement from Jane about the accusations.

He was later found guilty “by a preponderance of the evidence of sexual violence.”

The district court dismissed the male student’s due process claims, but the appeals court panel disagreed with the ruling and reinstated the lawsuit. The court said John should have been allowed to pursue his claims.

“Purdue’s process fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension,” Barrett wrote in the case cited as Doe. v. Purdue.

The court also found John’s Title IX claims plausible but added that he “may face problems of proof, and the factfinder might not buy the inferences that he’s selling.”

Shapiro, who is also the publisher of “Cato Supreme Court Review,” said this case is important because it shows Barrett places importance on individual rights and due process protections under the Constitution.

Supreme Court Barrett

Gun Rights

Barrett indicated her support for gun rights in her dissent in Kanter v. Barr, a 2019 case that challenged a federal law that took gun rights away from nonviolent felons. A businessman who had pleaded guilty to mail fraud argued that the law violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The 2–1 majority, both judges who were appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, said the federal law and a similar Wisconsin one were constitutional.

In her dissent, Barrett said that since the country’s founding, legislatures have taken gun rights away from people who were considered dangerous.

“History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns,” she wrote. “But that power extends only to people who are dangerous.”

She added that while the federal and state governments have a strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they had failed to show that the business owner owning a gun would pose a risk.

“The Second Amendment confers an individual right, intimately connected with the natural right of self-defense, and not limited to civic participation,” she said.

Shapiro said the Kanter case is important because “it shows that she takes the text structure and history of the Second Amendment seriously as well as looking at understandings of the bar on felons possessing firearms and looked at what that meant historically.”

“Her dissent was longer than the majority opinion. It’s a very well reasoned scholarly piece of writing,” he said.

Immigration

Barrett ruled on several immigration cases and sided with the Trump administration for the most part. She dissented from a majority decision that upheld a lower court’s block on the administration “public charge” immigration rule in Illinois. The rule restricted the eligibility of new immigrants who are deemed likely to rely on public assistance.

She did not agree with the challengers characterizing their arguments as a “disagreement with” a “policy choice.” She added, “litigation is not the vehicle for resolving policy disputes.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court lifted the injunction upheld by the 7th Circuit Court.

Barrett also authored the majority opinion in another case, cited as Yafai v. Pompeo, where she agreed with a State Department decision to deny a visa to the wife of an American citizen on the ground that she attempted to smuggle two children into the United States, even though the parents said the children had died in an accident. Her application was reconsidered but was denied.

The majority upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case relying on a doctrine known as consular nonreviewability, which prevents courts from reviewing visa decisions made by consular officials abroad.

Barrett also found that the plaintiff did not show that the consular officer acted in bad faith, saying that decision to deny the visa application was facially legitimate and bona fide. She said the officer had asked for additional documents, which “suggests a desire to get it right,” and that the embassy had sent an email to the plaintiff’s lawyer, which “reveals good-faith reasons for rejecting the plaintiffs’ response to the smuggling charge.”

Criminal

Shapiro said Barrett has shown that she is “not reflexively pro-law enforcement, nor pro-criminal defendants” in the way that she has ruled in criminal-related cases.

She has denied qualified immunity to law enforcement officers who have abused their powers and violated constitutional rights, while in other cases she has ruled for the government against criminal defendants.

“She’s very methodical about how she approaches things,” Shapiro said.

In the case, Rainsberger v. Benner, she wrote the majority opinion to deny qualified immunity, legal protection that shields public officers from civil liability to a detective who had submitted falsified information for a probable cause affidavit.

“The unlawfulness of using deliberately falsified allegations to establish probable cause could not be clearer,” she wrote in the opinion.

In 2019, she vacated a conviction that was obtained in part after Drug Enforcement Agency agents searched a suspect’s apartment. The agents obtained consent to search the apartment from a woman who did not live there.

“Is it reasonable for officers to assume that a woman who answers the door in a bathrobe has authority to consent to a search of a male suspect’s residence?” Barrett wrote for the majority.

“The officers could reasonably assume that the woman had spent the night at the apartment, but that’s about as far as a bathrobe could take them. Without more, it was unreasonable for them to conclude that she and the suspect shared access to or control over the property,” she added.

In another 2019 decision, she dissented in a case granting habeas corpus to a criminal defendant who argued that his due process rights were violated because the state withheld evidence favorable to his case.

Barrett said she dissented because the majority opinion “fails to give the Indiana Court of Appeals the deference” required under federal law. She said even though she believes the withholding of evidence constitutes a violation of due process under a 1963 Supreme Court decision, “it was neither contrary to, nor an unreasonable application of, clearly established federal law for the Indiana Court of Appeals to conclude otherwise.”

Other Cases

In Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Autozone, the commission asked the court to review a decision en banc that had ruled for a store, AutoZone, that was using race as a defining characteristic for transferring employees into separate facilities. The federal government had argued that the store violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which makes it unlawful for employers from segregating or classifying employees based on race.

Barrett, who had just taken the bench, joined four of her colleagues to deny a rehearing of the case en banc. Barrett was not on the three-judge panel that ruled in the appeals case.

Summary

Sadly, the above case history will probably not be referenced Tuesday and through the week as Senators question Judge Barrett. Isn’t it ironic that in this confirmation hearing, personal feelings and emotional haranguing should be checked at the door of the Senate Chamber. The only things that should guide Judiciary Committee members and their questions is Judge Barrett’s judicial history, her written opinions, and matters of jurisprudence. Her personal feelings about anything should be irrelevant.

Instead of working to maintain the Rule of Law by verifying this nominee meets the qualifications for a Supreme Court Justice, Judiciary Committee Democrats showed in Monday’s hearing they care little for any of the case history detailed above. They care only about how they appear on television when they drill the nominee, making her look as bad as possible. Yet this nominee is probably more qualified than several serving Justices.

Americans deserve better: not better than Judge Amy Coney Barrett — better than the Democrat Senators on that committee who are showing the world they are little more than political hats that are in the tank to impress voters and donors sufficient to keep their jobs.

To hell with the American people! What matters to the government balance of power doesn’t matter. All that matters is keeping Republicans from getting a leg up on the Democrats. They sadly show that all they care about is political might.

Amy Coney Barrett deserves better than that, and so do the American People.

“Corona-Lockdown” Legal or Not?

April 16, 2020

Hundreds of cars, trucks, and SUVs descended on Michigan’s state capital Wednesday afternoon as part of a noisy protest against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s social-distancing restrictions that critics say have gone too far.

Dubbed “Operation Gridlock” and organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, the protest did just that – creating bumper-to-bumper traffic throughout downtown Lansing as demonstrators blasted their horns, waved Americans flags and hoisted placards deriding Whitmer’s orders and demanding that she reopen the state’s economy.

The lockdown measures are meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, but Whitmer has gone further than some other governors — and the backlash in Michigan is among the most heated in the country.

Has Michigan’s governor violated the Constitutional rights of Michigan citizens?

When In Doubt, Check the Law

Benjamin Franklin once said that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” But what would Franklin have given up to secure a lot of permanent safety – to stop a highly lethal virus that has already killed thousands of people? Like so much else in our world, his statement now faces a severe test from the coronavirus.

To save lives, all but eight states have already imposed aggressive measures rarely utilized outside wartime. As the death toll climbs, more severe measures may be on the way. Several prominent voices have now advocated the imposition of a nationwide lockdown. A well-known legal academic even suggested a national lockdown should be immune from judicial oversight. And the Justice Department has proposed that Congress grant it oppressive emergency powers.

While the coronavirus is undoubtedly frightening, so too is massive state power used in the name of emergency. We should all be thankful we live in the United States for many reasons, but especially now. We COULD be stuck in Sri Lanka. The government in Sri Lanka responded to coronavirus by imposing a military curfew. Authorities arrested several thousand people for merely leaving their homes during that curfew. Residents worried about whether they had enough food to last until the curfew lifted. Finding oneself in a situation like that in the United States is, at best, a frightening thought. Add to that the fact that if such a thing happens here, it will be the government of the freest country on Earth that has taken away a slew of the most fundamental rights that have for 250 years been solely the right and responsibility of American citizens and NOT Big Brother.

In this country, we are taught to pause when asked to trade liberty for security. So we should take a moment to think about the legal restrictions governing potential lockdowns inside the United States. Could the federal government or a state impose a Sri Lankan-style lockdown to stop the pandemic? Could the courts be excluded from overseeing such emergency action?

What About the Constitution?

Constitutional law provides substantial guidance for understanding the government’s authority to respond to the pandemic. While court cases involving quarantines to control infectious diseases are (thankfully) sparse, “lockdown” in its various forms is a creature of preventive detention: a restriction on physical liberty without a finding of guilt after a criminal trial. Although the Supreme Court has stated that “in our society liberty is the norm and detention, without trial, is the carefully limited exception,” our constitutional system has long recognized several forms of preventive detention as lawful. Most relevant, the state may preventively detain individuals who have a serious mental disorder and present a danger to themselves or others.

In general, any use of preventive detention authority raises three basic constitutional questions. First, does the state have substantive authority in this pandemic to detain someone or some people without a criminal trial? Second, is the state’s exercise of that authority reasonable about its purpose – i.e., are the length and conditions of confinement necessary to address the harm at issue? Third, has the state provided adequate procedures to ensure the detailed plans for the exercise of that authority are met for the particular individual(s) involved?

For a moment, let’s just “suppose” the federal government orders a nationwide lockdown. If that happens, you can bet there will be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of suits and temporary restraining orders filed against all the authorities involved in the lockdown process. If someone were to challenge a lockdown order issued by the government, courts would apply the three principles described above to decide the case. Because a lockdown order restrains physical liberty, the writ of habeas corpus gives courts the final authority to determine its legality. Almost everyone has heard the term “habeas corpus” used often. But few know its meaning. “Habeus Corpus” is a writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, chiefly to secure the person’s release unless lawful grounds are shown for their detention. In other words, a person cannot be held for any alleged illegal activity or acts committed indefinitely. That person has a right to appear before a judge or in some court to determine whether being held without a speedy trial should be happening.

Some have suggested Congress should try to exclude the courts from even considering the lawfulness of any lockdown order. That would be a big mistake for both practical and legal reasons. Practically, there is little risk that the judiciary – including the Supreme Court, which has already postponed oral arguments due to the pandemic — will underestimate the threat posed by a coronavirus. Courts have a vital role to play both in ensuring any lockdown preserves our freedom to the greatest extent possible and in reviewing alleged abuses on a case-by-case basis.

Excluding the courts would also be an assault on our most basic constitutional values that could harm our nation for years to come. As awful as it is, the coronavirus pandemic will likely be over in a year or two, but a decision upholding the law permitting the government to imprison anyone without any court oversight based on the state’s claims that the public health requires it could be with us far longer. The Constitution allows Congress to suspend habeas corpus in some instances of “rebellion or invasion,” but the coronavirus is NOT an “invasion.” Though people sometimes speak of a virus “invading” the body, the courts read the Suspension Clause in light of what the Constitution’s Framers believed it meant in 1789. The Framers intended to refer to “invasions” by people, not diseases, as Justice Scalia once made clear in a description of the historical precedents. And while he suggested there that the courts should choose a reasonable legislative judgment about when an invasion has occurred, that precedent Scalia made clear still stands. Remember: long before coronavirus, President Trump repeatedly called caravans of Central American refugees as an “invasion.” If the government tried to close the courts based on claims like that, the judiciary would undoubtedly step in quickly with their authority to prevent that radical step.

How Should We Handle a Lockdown if one Happens?

First, our legislators should right now come to a consensus on what events must be present to justify a national lockdown. They should draft legislation to clarify existing laws as they pertain to this and other future pandemics that might result in a need for a lockdown to save the lives of people. In doing that, Congress should act quickly and as diligently and just speedily as Congress drafted those Articles of Impeachment and tried the President, they should lock themselves away with Constitutional scholars, put aside petty political partisanship, and draft legislation so specific and so detailed that NO court would find any loopholes in what was written and passed. The point often stated that “every bill signed into law is always subject to subjective interpretation” needs to be abandoned in such a process. For once, Congress MUST lay aside agendas of all but one kind: to protect the American people, and not just our health through a lockdown. Undoubtedly, doing so is a necessity, finding political advantages if not. Members of Congress — ALL members of Congress — need to lay aside political party and personal agendas to pass legislation to protect from this and other pandemics while, at the same time, guaranteeing Americans that the rights of ALL citizens will NOT be infringed by such legislation.

Can they do that? I believe they can. I’m not sure how many attorneys serve as members of the House and Senate today. But I know it is certainly a majority. Don’t you think all those lawyers, if committed to writing legislation void of partisanship, could get the job done quickly — IF they want to?

Of course, in the group reading this, some will put another “IF” in an added question. It would then read like this: “IF the pandemic was a trick of nature and not an effort by someone to create chaos and pandemonium during this election year to guarantee there will not be a second Trump term in office.”

I don’t care about any of that! Let’s get coronavirus licked and do it without unnecessarily giving up any Constitutional rights — PERIOD!

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The Dismantling of the U.S.: Pending

August 14, 2019

I never thought we in America would ever be discussing the dismantling of our country. Some of us have feared it as being something that might happen — “eventually” — but not in our lifetimes! I think the “eventually” may be upon us.

As quickly as a shooting star, the oppressiveness of totalitarianism that for a century has been secluded to “those countries far away” is creeping today into our political system. There have been warning signs for a good while, but almost all Americans while seeing them, brush them off as being impossible. Impossible is what they should be — but they’re not. Let’s take a look.

  • A group of U.S. Senators sent a warning to the Supreme Court telling the Court that it better change the way it operates — or else. The following was reported about the alert to SCOTUS today: “The ominous and unusual warning was delivered as part of a brief filed Monday in a case related to a New York City gun law. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., referenced rulings by the court’s conservative majority in claiming it is suffering from some sort of affliction which must be remedied. ‘The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it,” the brief said. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it is ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.'”

As shocking as this notice was, it’s not unexpected. Think about it: we have been living in an atmosphere for some time in which politicians have been giving us signs that inexorably point to not just their desires, but to their intentions to push the U.S., not just further to the left, but to the far left.

This control spirit existed in the shadows for several decades. Fortunately, champions of freedom like Ronald Reagan kicked the consuming monster of mass control out of sight long enough for a generation of Americans to bask in the light of real freedoms across the board, for a decade or more. But since, steadily and stealthily it has slipped back into everyday U.S. life.

And then Barack Obama promised in 2008 that he would famously lead “the fundamental change of the United States.” And he made good on his promise.

His first term was somewhat limited without control of the entire Congress for a couple of years. But when Democrats gained control, the “transformation” that he promised took off. It was obvious what his fundamental change was planned to look like:

  • To fundamentally transform America from a society where the majority of people live by the sweat of their brows to one where the majority live off the labors of a shrinking productive class.
  • To fundamentally transform America from one where the American dream is a job, home, and family to one where the dream is food stamps, welfare, Obama-phones, and government dependency.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a society that strives, however imperfectly, for color-blind equality to one where race matters in everything from enforcement of voter protection laws to college admissions, to hiring, to school grades and discipline.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a nation that is a beacon for freedom and democracy to one that leads from behind in the world.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a country that believes in entrepreneurial efforts and free markets to a controlled economy where central planners make economic decisions for you.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a country that rewards success and hard work to one where those who disagree still believe they are entitled to a “fair share” of what those who do have earned.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a country that believes in rugged individualism to a caricature of a European socialist dependency, where citizens all belong to interest groups ever demanding more largess from the government.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a country where our grandkids have a brighter future to one where they will live in poverty and destitution under the yoke of unpayable debts to fund ever-larger vote-buying schemes from leftist interest groups.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a land of plenty to one where the poor cannot drive, heat their homes, or feed their families as they are crushed by energy costs to please environmental interest groups and green crony contributors — like the “Green New Deal” hopers.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a society that strives to eliminate class to one of four classes: wealthy elite liberals, government union bureaucrats, the growing dependent poor, and the shrinking pool of working, productive folk employed in the private sector who are expected to support the other three classes.
  • To fundamentally transform America from a society that believes in and defends our culture and values to one where multiculturalism declares equal respect and value for cultures that hang gay people, mutilate the genitals of young girls, stone women for adultery, execute “witches,” murder apostates, prohibit education of girls, riot violently against free speech if someone offends them, and murder female relatives over trivial affronts to the family’s “honor.”
  • To fundamentally transform America from one where there exists a balance of power between the states and the federal government, and between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, to one in which an all-powerful elitist class rules everything with virtually unlimited power.
  • Let’s don’t forget this one: To fundamentally transform America from one that believed in a life to one where babies are routinely aborted because of their gender or disabilities or just for inconvenience.

Summary

We’ve seen it happen for years. The insistence and embedded practice of ignoring laws at the federal level. Folks, drug possession and recreational use have been illegal — criminal law violations — for years. Yet during the Obama Administration Attorney General Eric Holder instructed federal law enforcement to ignore “minor” drug offenses and its offenders. Illegals continue their journeys to our southern border and their numbers are now in the millions. Yet, it is a federal crime for one — anyone — to cross into the United States without having expressed permission. Yet for decades, federal authorities have — at least in part — turned blind eyes on many of these illegals who do so. And the list of allowed lawlessness goes on and on.

What is the reasoning of federal authorities for doing this? After all, the United States is a “nation of laws.” I could play you videos of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, numerous Senate and House leaders through all of these administrations make speeches confirming the importance and the necessity of the “rule of law.” Yet it’s almost as if they think Americans don’t look-in on how our government acts. Certainly, many Americans don’t pay attention and many don’t care. Maybe it’s because they’re out there working, trying to make good livings for their families. And in doing so, they pay taxes — billions in taxes — that our leaders in Washington who supposedly represent all those Americans find ways to spend not just the taxes we pay, but borrow more and more to spend on additional “necessary” programs. All this while trillions are flushed at the hands of purveyors of special interests that have nothing to do with the support of the American people.

For me, these Democrat Senators have drawn a line in the sand. In effect by doing so they have for political purposes told the U.S. Supreme Court, “You either get your stuff together, start ruling on these controversial cases that come before you in ways that WE think you should, or we’re going to take you to the woodshed.”

That’s Dangerous!

The atmosphere to set up a top-down, bureaucratic, control authority in D.C. to run the nation without the people having any say-so is on the edge of town. And they want it. And they want it desperately.

They’ve been hard at work while good Americans slept doing their busy work as Americans have always done. But these Swamp Rats really don’t care. They smell it, they hunger for it, and their objective is to get power: no matter what it takes.

This is our wakeup call. We need to be vigilant and make ourselves heard. None of us want to be the frog on the stove in a pot of cool water that has the burner turned up very slowly. That frog gets lulled to sleep never thinking he’s in any danger — until it’s too late.

When the water comes to a boil, it’s all over. And in America, these folks have started turning the burner up a little higher every day.

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