Archived columns
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
The Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act
By John and Andy Schlafly
March 12, 2019
While Congress considers new infringements on constitutional rights for a new Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), they overlook where the most violence is occurring. The New York Times recently featured an exposé about how nearly every woman is raped during their migration from Central America to our open southern border.
Shutting the border is the only way that the United States can protect those women. That would take away the incentive for the long, dangerous journey.
Yet House Democrats want nothing of that remedy to stop violence against women. Instead, Democrats push for more infringements on the rights of Americans as part of a proposed new VAWA.
In their subcommittee hearing on March 7, House Democrats were uninterested in the terrible violence against women resulting from their insistence on an open southern border. The minority Republicans were allowed to invite only one witness, and she did not address the violence among migrants either.
An organization called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has proposed numerous sensible reforms to the now-expired VAWA law, which was causing more harm than good. For starters, the prior law lacked a clear, appropriate definition of what it even meant when it referred to violence against women.
The Obama Administration defined domestic violence very broadly to include conduct that was not violent at all, such as alleged economic, emotional, or psychological abuse. Fortunately, the Department of Justice in the Trump Administration has sensibly clarified the meaning of domestic violence to include only conduct that would be a felony or misdemeanor if charged as a crime.
Inclusion of non-violent behavior then becomes a means for grabbing guns from men, and imposing automatic sentences in prison if they are found to have any guns. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham announced last week that his committee will hold a hearing on March 26 on “red flag” laws, which give government special power to seize and confiscate guns from individuals whom someone thinks might be dangerous.
The First Amendment is at risk, too, in this planned reauthorization of VAWA. Proposed expansions to the law include authorizing federal monitoring of internet communications, under the guise of punishing cyber stalking and so-called bullying.
That could result in censorship of the internet as prosecutions are brought against communications which the federal agents might consider to be inappropriate. The freewheeling online environment that makes it so popular could be chilled by a new VAWA.
Even President Trump’s colorful tweets against the women who are vying for the Democratic nomination to run against him might be considered cyberbullying, depending on how VAWA is rewritten. Robert Mueller might need to be recalled into service to do a new investigation into tweeting by Trump and his supporters.
Liberal women attempt to make VAWA a women’s issue, but in fact intimate partner violence against men is comparable in frequency to violence against women, according to a National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). More importantly, domestic violence has been decreasing for decades, prior to the billions of dollars of handouts by VAWA to feminist groups.
One’s home with a spouse has always been the safest place for both men and women, and spousal murder is very rare. Yet VAWA trained workers to separate domestic couples, and file a complaint against men which often causes them to lose their jobs and their employability.
Women, once their partner is going to lose his job that supported both of them, then try to stop the harmful VAWA process and withdraw the accusations. But laws make that impossible, such that the women are greatly harmed by the loss in the men’s jobs that VAWA causes.
The abusive “ex parte” court orders under VAWA, which are issued without the man being in court to defend himself against false accusations, would probably expand under a new VAWA. Recall how late-night comedian David Letterman discovered in 2005 that a woman in Sante Fe had obtained a restraining order against him.
The woman insisted that Letterman had used code words on his television show to communicate that he wanted to marry her, and have her become his co-host. She said Letterman had been mentally cruel to her and caused her to endure sleep deprivation for more than a decade.
A New Mexico state judge granted the woman’s demand for an ex parte restraining order, and it became a humorous topic for Letterman’s show. His attorneys were able to reverse the court order, but most men do not have the luxury of time, money, and influence that a television celebrity has.
Perhaps VAWA should be considered under a new name that more accurately describes how it infringes on First and Second Amendment rights, in addition to turning women against men. How about calling it the “Violence Against Constitutional Rights Act”?
ISIS Bride Is Not an American Citizen
The case of the ISIS bride, Hoda Muthana, could result in a landmark ruling on what it means to be an American citizen and who has rights to that precious status. After spending five years in Syria with ISIS, the terrorist group also known as the Islamic State, Ms. Muthana wants to come back to the United States.
She was born in New Jersey to parents who had come here from Yemen under diplomatic immunity. Her father had worked for Yemen’s mission to the United States.
Children born in the United States to diplomats from foreign countries are not American citizens, under a longstanding rule of law. Not even advocates of open borders dispute that.
Yet many people mistakenly assume that being born on U.S. soil is enough to become a citizen, which is simply not true. The case of the ISIS bride, who moved to Alabama and from there joined ISIS, confronts this legal issue in a high-profile case.
Raised in the United States, Hoda was 19 when she told her parents she was going on a field trip as part of a college course she was taking. Instead she withdrew from college and used her tuition refund to buy a one-way ticket to Turkey, then somehow made her way to ISIS-held territory in Syria.
While in war-torn Syria she apparently met and married an ISIS fighter, and after he was killed, she married another ISIS fighter. During this period she posted a series of blood-curdling tweets, which have since been deleted by Twitter.
“Americans wake up!” Muthana tweeted in 2015 from ISIS-held territory in Syria. “Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Kill them.”
She witnessed dead bodies lying about in Syrian streets where ISIS had murdered them. She observed heads severed by ISIS and planted on poles in order terrify opponents of ISIS.
When her second husband was killed, leaving her pregnant, Hoda married yet a third ISIS fighter. She left that husband and was captured by Kurdish forces, who placed her and her 18-month-old son in a massive refugee camp in northeast Syria with thousands of other widows and children.
Life is hard in the refugee camp, where women are punished if they step outside their tent without wearing a hijab or burqa. Not long after calling for death to Americans, Hoda has since decided that “I prefer America to anywhere else.”
To President Trump, Hoda’s recent remorse seems a little too convenient. “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Trump tweeted two weeks ago.
The same day Secretary Pompeo declared that “Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”
The following day, a 32-page, 128-paragraph lawsuit against President Trump and Secretary Pompeo was filed by the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America. Yesterday, lawyers pressed their claim before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.
Her lawyers pointed out that Hoda had been issued a U.S. passport in 2014, without which she could not have traveled to Syria. But Judge Walton said that “just because she received a U.S. passport does not mean she is a U.S. citizen,” and he denied her request to expedite her case.
“The government informed Muthana more than three years ago that she is not a citizen and canceled her erroneously issued passport,” Pompeo’s lawyers told the court. “Muthana -- who was at the time a member of ISIS -- failed to act timely in response to that notification, [and] remained in a war zone through hostilities for a period of years.”
“She was born to parents who enjoyed diplomatic-agent-level immunity at that time of her birth, so she did not and could not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth,” Pompeo explained to the court.
“The Man Without a Country” tells the story of a young American who, after renouncing his citizenship, is ordered to spend the rest of his life aboard ships at sea with no hope of ever setting foot on U.S. soil again. One of the most popular literary works of the nineteenth century, it was later adapted for a number of movies, radio and television dramas, and even an opera.
The ISIS bride is a modern version of the same story, except that she is not doomed to roam the seas with no place to go. Perhaps she could settle in her parents’ country of Yemen or remain in Syria, but she has no rights to citizenship in the United States.
Unfair Trans Competition in Girls’ Sports
By John and Andy Schlafly
February 26, 2019
Boys have clear athletic advantages over girls, both on average and among the best. The higher levels of testosterone and muscle mass in boys enable them to run faster and jump higher than girls can.
Martina Navratilova won 18 grand slam titles in women’s tennis, the fifth most ever. She has also been an outspoken supporter of gay rights, but the unfairness of men competing as transgendered women has sparked her ire.
Navratilova recently called it “cheating,” “insane,” and “it would not be fair” to allow transgender women to compete in women’s tennis. Yet the rules of the International Olympic Committee allow men who claim to be transgendered to compete in women’s sports, if their testosterone levels remain below a certain level.
A backlash from the transgender community then resulted despite how she merely stated the obvious. For that she was called “transphobic” and removed from the advisory board of Athlete Ally, which supports transgendered athletes.
Many other women and girls are also crying foul about the unfairness of transgendered athletes in women’s and girls’ sports. There was an outcry in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, when the top finishers in the indoor state championship for the 55-meter dash for high school girls were two transgendered girls, formerly boys.
The “winner” broke the girls’ record, finishing the race in 6.95 seconds. Connecticut is one of 17 states that has no restrictions on boys, who claim to be transgender, competing in girls’ sports.
The same transgendered former boys also finished first and second in the state championship for the 100-meter dash last year. Meanwhile, girls who would have won trophies – and perhaps college scholarships – were unfairly denied them.
The top six 55-yard dash finishers then qualified for the New England regional races. Selina Soule, who would have qualified for the regional races if the transgenders were not counted, lost that opportunity.
“We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing,” Miss Soule said. “They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair,” she added.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would require all 50 states to allow this unfair form of competition, if it ever became part of the Constitution. The Virginia House of Delegates defeated ERA last week, but by only one vote in a 50-50 tie.
Under ERA, no law or governmental entity can make any distinctions based on sex. That means it would become impossible for girls’ sports to keep boys out.
Led by Phyllis Schlafly, conservatives defeated ERA in the 1970s, and its deadline for ratification expired in 1979. Congress improperly attempted to extend the deadline until June 30, 1982, but no states ratified it during the extra three years.
The expiration of the deadline for ERA, however, has not stopped radical feminists from trying to ratify it now, four decades later. ERA would cause more unfairness in girls’ sports, as it has done in Massachusetts where they have a state version of ERA.
There, muscular young men routinely break girls’ records in girls’ sports. In one championship game in Massachusetts a young man caused a concussion to a girls' field hockey goalie while scoring a goal to defeat her team.
Meanwhile, an example of the havoc that ERA would require emanated from a federal court in Houston on February 22. Senior District Judge Gray H. Miller, an appointee of President George W. Bush, declared that the Selective Service system was discriminatory in not requiring women to register for a possible draft.
“Combat roles no longer uniformly require sheer size or muscle,” the Court found. With similar strange arguments the Court declared that there is no justification for Congress to draft men unless women are also drafted.
If ERA were ever ratified, then courts would be required to rule against a men-only draft. As Phyllis Schlafly often argued in the 1970s, ERA would compel drafting women just like men, or forcing women to register for the Selective Service just like men.
Without ERA, the recent federal court decision can be successfully appealed, in this case to the Fifth Circuit. President Trump has placed five conservative judges on that court, which seems almost certain to overturn this decision invalidating our all-male Selective Service system.
Without ERA, the unfair intrusion of transgenders into girls’ sports can be solved by legislation forbidding it. Notice how transgendered former girls are not breaking records in boys’ sports.
Fortunately, ERA is not merely one state away from ratification, as some fake news headlines promote. For ERA to become part of the Constitution, Congress would need to pass it by two-thirds supermajorities, and then 38 states would need to ratify it anew, which should never happen.
The Wall Versus Judicial Supremacy
“We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it’s unacceptable,” President Trump said last Friday. “It’s very simple. We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country.”
It was from the White House Rose Garden that President Trump delivered those remarks, on the eve of the 3-day weekend for Washington’s Birthday. He campaigned for president on securing the southern border of the United States, and he plans to do precisely that for the American people.
Consider just one day’s traffic at a single section of the border that lacks a physical barrier. Among those caught crossing into Texas on February 7 were a Mexican previously convicted in Georgia for child molestation, a Honduran previously convicted in North Carolina for “indecent liberties with child,” and another Honduran who was previously identified in Florida as a member of MS-13.
The federal police agency known as ICE, which stands for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” reports that some 266,000 aliens with criminal records were arrested in the past two years. This agency also arrested 1,500 aliens for human trafficking and deported 10,000 known or suspected gang members in the last fiscal year, yet many Democrats want to abolish this protective agency.
At remote sectors of the border in Arizona and New Mexico, large numbers of Central Americans, mostly from Honduras and Guatemala, are being dropped off by the busload and who then cross on foot. The Border Patrol reports that 242 people were arrested on January 24, while 375 people crossed near Yuma and another 306 entered through New Mexico.
Many of the illegal arrivals were very sick with contagious diseases, and their health problems overwhelmed the facilities available in small towns near the border. The Border Patrol reports that 2,224 migrants, mostly from Central America, had to be driven three hours to the nearest hospital for treatment that could not be provided on site.
The ongoing invasion, as Trump correctly described it, is unacceptable and cannot be allowed to continue. The president is right to declare a national emergency on the border, which permits him to reallocate some additional funds from other parts of the federal budget after the $1.375 billion approved by the Nancy Pelosi Congress runs out.
“Look, I expect to be sued,” Trump said, and within minutes of his speech, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero announced he would be filing a lawsuit this week. The ACLU lawsuit would add to lawsuits already filed by California and something called the Center for Biological Diversity.
“They will sue us in the 9th Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there,” Trump said prophetically, referring to the California-based court. “And we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling. And then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court, and we’ll win.”
The lawsuits ought to be laughed out of court, even in the Ninth Circuit. Presidents have declared 58 national emergencies since 1976, when Congress gave the president that power, and 31 of them are still in effect.
Never before has a judge tried to second-guess a president’s declaration that a national emergency exists, and no court should be allowed to enter those uncharted waters now. Congress gave that power to the president with no limit on the reasons for which an emergency can be declared.
But never before have we had a president willing to stand up to the globalists, the media, and the federal courts. The real showdown between President Trump and the federal judiciary has begun.
President Trump is right that he wants to be before the Supreme Court on this issue, and not be stuck in lower federal courts handpicked by his opponents who forum-shop by choosing where to file their lawsuit. The ordinary appeals process would not enable the Supreme Court to decide this issue until after the next presidential election.
In the meantime, Democrats would campaign against Trump by using lower court rulings that predictably take the liberal side. Trump’s legal strategy should anticipate this, and seek an expedited appeal that bypasses the liberal Second, Fourth, Ninth or D.C. Circuits, which are packed with anti-Trump judges.
To no one’s surprise, sixteen liberal states chose San Francisco as the location for their lawsuit to block Trump. Only one out of 14 active judges on that court was appointed by a Republican president, giving Democrats roughly a 93% chance of having a judge picked by Obama or Clinton decide their case.
But all litigants have the right to appeal a preliminary injunction immediately, and the Department of Justice should start preparing those papers now. The appeal should be straight to the Supreme Court to ensure a decision before the 2020 presidential election.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Liberals Censor Free Speech about Diversity
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 29, 2019
Another day, another innocent person is destroyed by the social media mob for an innocuous expression of free speech. The apostles of diversity police our speech and aggressively enforce a speech code according to “politically correct” liberal dogmas.
First it was Congressman Steve King (R-IA), who was wrongly ostracized by his colleagues for wondering when the term Western Civilization became offensive. A week later it was 15-year-old Nick Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic High School, who was confronted at the March for Life by a “tribal elder” banging a drum.
Next in the hot seat was the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father John I. Jenkins. He kowtowed to the Native American Student Association by agreeing to cover up 12 large murals that depict Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World.
The latest victim of self-appointed guardians of diversity was the 78-year-old liberal journalist Tom Brokaw, the longtime NBC anchor. Brokaw, an icon of television news, is also known for chronicling the “greatest generation” of Americans who won World War II and came home to build the greatest country in the world.
In a rare appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, Brokaw commented that “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. They ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English.”
The response to Brokaw’s good advice was fast and furious, to borrow a phrase from the Mexican gun-running operation approved by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. That improper operation, which was politically motivated to justify gun control, instead resulted in the 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Aura Bogado, who is described as an investigative immigration reporter at Reveal, said Brokaw was “arguing classic white supremacist talking points in a deeply racist rant on national television.” Julio Ricardo Varela, the founder of LatinoRebels.com, said “It really was a punch in the gut to a lot of people.”
“It was not only factually incorrect, it was also xenophobia in action,” Varela added in his criticism of Brokaw. Liberal commentator Maria Cardona called Brokaw “a little out of touch.”
Cardona also insisted, unpersuasively, that “Latinos absolutely assimilate.” If that were really true, Latinos would be speaking English, but many of them aren’t.
Brokaw’s fellow commentator on Meet the Press, PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor, said: “We need to adjust what we think of as America. The idea that Americans can only speak English, as if Spanish and other languages wasn’t always part of America, is in some ways troubling.”
People who cannot speak, understand, read and write English will never be able to advance socially, economically or politically in our country. It’s not true that “Spanish and other languages” were “always part of America,” given that none of the Founding Fathers spoke or wrote in Spanish.
Within a few hours the liberal Brokaw went on an apology tour on Twitter, tweeting that he is “truly sorry” for his remarks, which he said were “offensive to many.” “I never intended to disparage any segment of our rich, diverse society which defines who we are,” Brokaw continued.
Brokaw even apologized to fellow panelist Yamiche Alcindor, saying she’s a “wonderful colleague and an important voice,” despite the fact that Alcindor’s views were directly contradictory to Brokaw’s. Like many Hispanic activists and lobbyists, Alcindor rejected the whole idea of assimilation.
On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera took a different tack, claiming that Hispanics are actually “assimilating at a rate that’s faster than any other ethnic group in our history.” But the official numbers from the Census Bureau show otherwise.
The American Community Survey enables the Census Bureau to track the number of households who self-report that they speak a language other than English at home. The fraction of U.S. households answering yes to that question has risen steadily over the last three decades, reaching 22 percent in 2017 (the last year numbers are available), which is double the 11 percent in 1980.
Most of the non-English speaking households are concentrated in a few areas close to our southern border, plus a few of our largest northern cities. In 39 U.S. counties, a majority of residents report that they speak a language other than English at home.
Many of those who speak another language at home claim they also speak English well or very well, but further studies have shown that is not the case. Nearly half were found to speak English at a level below basic, also known as functional illiteracy.
Spanish is presumed to be the common language south of the border, but among the people who arrived most recently, many did not speak or understand Spanish. They spoke only indigenous languages such as Q’eqchi’, which meant that U.S. officials were required to find translators to provide medical care.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Never-Trumpers Harm Innocent Victims
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 22, 2019
As Democrats announce their plans to run against President Trump next year, the partisan hysteria against the president grows more intense. Opposition to Trump now justifies, in the eyes of some, a vicious drive-by smearing of innocent high-school boys wearing MAGA hats.
The students were attending the 46th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., after riding the bus all night from Covington, Kentucky. Despite the grueling 36-hour trip to D.C. and back, the boys were in high spirits, and their faces were ruddy from a day outside in the winter cold.
As they waited patiently at their designated pick-up location for the overnight bus back to Kentucky, the boys were rudely accosted by a group that even the leftwing Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned as “racist” and “black supremacist.”
The aggressive protesters, who call themselves Black Hebrew Israelites, taunted the boys for nearly an hour with vile insults against them and their Catholic religion. The boys were singled out because they were white, Christian, and wearing President Trump’s favorite hat.
Anti-Catholic taunts peppered the inhumane heckling, which has been underreported but can be found online. Had those same insults been lobbed against any other ethnic or religious group, liberals would have defended the students.
The boys “turned the other cheek” throughout the unexpected encounter. Eventually, they asked their adult chaperones for permission to sing their school cheers as a break from the protesters’ profanity.
Despite the vile insults hurled at them, the young men admirably remained polite and peaceful in response. Then an Indian “elder” invaded their space and began beating his war drum right in the face of one of the high school students, who held the Indian’s gaze with a pleasant, peaceful smile.
To describe the behavior of the drum-beater as impolite would be an understatement. If he was merely trying to defuse the situation, as he claimed later, why didn’t he beat his drum in the face of one of the anti-Trump instigators?
The ultimate injustice was then inflicted by the liberal media, which excoriated the boys nationwide. Anti-Trumpers savaged the boys and their families on social media, to the detriment of the entire Covington Catholic High School including students who were not even there.
Kentucky Republican congressman Tom Massie heroically defended his young constituents from the onslaught, but Democrats and some Republicans were too quick to unjustly criticize the students. Massie’s Democratic colleague John Yarmuth tweeted, “I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of teenagers wearing MAGA hats. They seem to be poisoning young minds.”
Criticized for his call for unconstitutional censorship, Rep. Yarmuth then claimed it was merely a joke. But he continued to pile on against the students from his own state of Kentucky, saying that “I believe these kids acted inappropriately, whether they were provoked or not.”
The full video revealed that the young men had acted properly throughout the afternoon. But if the additional videos had not fortuitously emerged, the lives of these students could have been destroyed by the rush to judgment in the fake news media.
In a since-deleted tweet, Never-Trumper Bill Kristol decried “the behavior of #MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism.” Other Republicans, such as those running the once-conservative National Review, were also incredibly harsh in their criticism of the young men in posts that were later removed.
President Trump was not fooled by the fake news that smeared the young men. He tweeted that “Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be.”
In a refreshing rejection of the guilty-if-the-media-says-so mindset of his critics, President Trump observed that the students “have captivated the attention of the world, and I know they will use it for the good.” He added that this unfair treatment of the students may help “even to bring people together.”
The March for Life leadership disgracefully abandoned these volunteers who attended at significant hardship. The event organizers should have been the first to stand up for their own participants, but instead initially sided against the students.
The Covington high school closed on Tuesday due to a torrent of threats. Meanwhile, the Catholic diocese there fanned the flames of injustice by initially posting a statement threatening expulsion of the boys and even apologizing to the Native American activist who beat his drum relentlessly in a student’s face.
The Mayor of Covington should have stood up for the students from his own area. Instead, he referred to the conduct by the students as somehow being “appalling.”
The contrast is stark between President Trump and the Never-Trumpers. Unlike his critics, President Trump defends those who are unjustly smeared by the media.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Making the Census Great Again
By John and Andy Schlafly
January 15, 2019
“Is this person a citizen of the United States?” This 2020 census question, or something similar, was asked on the decennial census from 1820 through 1950, and afterward on the long-form census through 2000.
Even now, and ever since 2005, a citizenship question has been included in the annual American Community Survey (ACS) by the federal government. Not even President Obama stopped that.
So why all the fuss about this citizenship question now? Apparently opposition to President Trump means opposition to virtually everything he does, and resorting to judicial activism to stymie Trump in every way possible.
The census is used to apportion the Electoral College and representation in Congress, so there is political significance to puffing up the population count for California and other sanctuary states by including illegal aliens as legal residents. Dollars are also at stake because more people in a state mean more federal dollars flowing to it.
The census must count every person living in the United States, but citizens and aliens should be counted separately in every state and electoral district. President Trump, through his Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, restored this question about citizenship to the 2020 census, and a barrage of lawsuits ensued to stop it.
There is nothing racist in asking about citizenship. It may be racist, or at least anti-American, to oppose a citizenship question so that illegal aliens are counted as citizens and sanctuary states unfairly obtain more congressmen and Electoral College votes than they deserve.
It is fictional to pretend that American Hispanics are less likely to respond to a census question about citizenship. Citizenship is something nearly all Americans are proud of, and there is no right of privacy at stake.
There is no reason to expect any American citizen to be hesitant to respond if he is a citizen. Employers and schools ask about citizenship, as does the federal government on application forms.
Yet in a textbook example of legislating from the bench, an Obama-appointed judge held a trial in Manhattan federal court to take this issue away from President Trump and Congress. There are two sets of plaintiffs: 18 States, D.C., 15 cities and counties, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors form one set, and liberal advocacy groups form the other.
Plaintiffs asserted a headline-grabbing claim that asking about American citizenship is invidious racial discrimination in violation of the Constitution. They demanded a right to depose the Commerce Secretary to ask him if he is a racist.
The allegation was absurd, but falsely claiming that Republicans are racists is how the Left advances its agenda. The Supreme Court shut down an unprecedented attempt to depose the Trump Cabinet member Secretary Ross in this case, after it had been ordered by the trial judge.
Plaintiffs also sought to block the citizenship question based on the mundane Administrative Procedure Act. Plaintiffs insisted that it is somehow arbitrary to ask if someone is an American citizen, even though many companies and institutions ask this regularly of new applicants.
On Tuesday, federal Judge Jesse Furman issued a 277-page opinion to prohibit the inclusion of this 9-word citizenship question in the upcoming census. He did not expressly hold that the question was racist, but implied without any support in the record that it might be.
He stated his mission as one to “smoke out” racism, in order to uncover hidden forms of discrimination. He implied his disagreement with the Supreme Court, which prevented Judge Furman from requiring Commerce Secretary Ross to testify about his allegedly hidden motives.
But no such racism could ever be found. Unable to latch onto any testimony by Ross, Judge Furman instead thrashed those who worked for him.
Earl Comstock, who was just doing his job as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy under Ross, became a punching bag for the court’s complaints about a policy change it does not like. Other Trump officials took a beating from the court based on snippets from routine email communications, patched together in the decision as though there was something wrong with them.
This ruling was based on mere procedure, not substance. In 277 pages there is nothing to justify branding President Trump, Secretary Ross, or anyone else as a racist.
The court admitted that the Framers of the Constitution “had a strong constitutional interest in the accuracy of the census.” President Trump and Commerce Secretary Ross fully agree, which is why the traditional question about whether someone is an American citizen is an essential part of the census.
Fortunately, the census case is already scheduled for oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in February. So Tuesday’s ruling against asking about citizenship is not going to be the last word on the issue.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Shutdown Blues Will Grip Democrats
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 31, 2018
Government shutdowns are supposed to favor Democrats, according to conventional wisdom. All they need do, pundits pompously declare, is wait patiently until the Republican President caves into their demands.
That is the mindset that brought us the current shutdown. Senate Democrats dug in and refused to approve the modest $5.7 billion in funding for the border wall as approved by the House of Representatives.
But President Trump’s approval rating has remained steady during the shutdown, according to the respected Hill-HarrisX survey. This is in contrast with how President Clinton’s approval rating plummeted 10 points during the 1995-96 shutdown.
This leaves Democrats in a quandary they did not expect. President Trump, unlike past Republican presidents, may stand his ground and refuse to buckle.
The shutdown disarms the Democrats of their most powerful weapon against Trump: investigations by the House of Representatives, soon to be controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With committee majorities starting in 2019, Democrats could serve subpoenas on anyone they choose, from Trump’s children to his biggest supporters.
Pelosi is lawyering-up with attorneys who want to impeach the president. Fourteen of the nation’s most aggressive and partisan lawyers are already working for Robert Mueller, but there is no shortage of liberal hacks anxious to take on the assignment of trying to bring down a conservative president.
The House Democrats plan to launch many investigations and hold numerous committee hearings against conservatives other than Trump. If someone turns on the lights, heats the buildings, pays the congressional staff, and serves the subpoenas, that is.
The shutdown postpones some of these bad things from happening. Liberals are not interested in working for free in a cold building, and investigations go nowhere if subpoenas cannot be enforced.
As Trump enjoys a rock-solid base of support, he is probably asking himself why he would want to fund Pelosi and the House Democrats to harass him, his family, and his supporters. The spectacle of Pelosi not having funds to accomplish her political mischief should be appealing to the president and all conservatives.
There has already been enough wasteful distraction caused by the funding of Robert Mueller and his search for non-existent crimes. The shutdown prevents a multiplication of that in the House.
The shutdown may even cause unexpected problems for the Mueller investigation itself, despite official denials. The Department of Justice insists that the Mueller probe will be unaffected by the shutdown, but reports are that President Trump thinks otherwise and he may well be right.
Federal district courts around the country are warning attorneys that court funding could run out by mid-January, which would place federal litigation on hold. Several federal courts have already suspended their pending cases involving the United States.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will need to prioritize the urgent cases in the Department of Justice as resources dwindle and dry up in courthouses and in his department. It is difficult to see how Mueller’s searching for imaginary crimes would rank as more important than processing drug kingpins.
Mueller depends on support by the Department of Justice for serving subpoenas, bringing people into custody, and making court appearances. Whitaker could politely decline that support of Mueller due to the shutdown, as there is no reason why Mueller should get special treatment over other investigations.
Mueller has already run aground in his effort to hold a foreign corporation in contempt. Chief Justice John Roberts intervened in that potential abuse of power by Mueller, and has set a briefing scheduling before allowing Mueller to move forward on that front.
But heat and light will be needed at the federal courthouses to resolve that and other pending issues in the Mueller investigation. Staff may not show up unless paid, and Chief Justice Roberts will not be assuming the role of the clerk to accept newly filed briefs.
The Constitution may require keeping the lights on at the Supreme Court, although it is unclear who could enforce this if bills are not paid. The Constitution does not require continued funding for all other federal courts, which exist entirely at the discretion of Congress.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has long been a liberal hangout to interfere with job creation, suffered the same fate that its regulations have caused to many businesses. Last week the EPA furloughed 13,705 employees, telling them to stay home without pay.
That means a slowdown in EPA regulations and enforcement actions, which is good for the economy. It is a temporary hardship on the EPA employees, but far more employees of businesses hurt by EPA regulations have permanently lost their jobs because of it.
So what is the hurry for ending the shutdown? Stand strong, Mr. President, and watch the Democrats beat a path to your door to end the shutdown, on your terms.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Christmas Echoes the One in 1776
by John and Andy Schlafly
December 24, 2018
For the 22nd time since 1975, an impasse between Congress and the President has resulted in a partial shutdown of non-essential government offices. Like the 21-day shutdown in 1995-96, this one is occurring over the Christmas holidays when little government work is done anyway.
Members of Congress went home after failing to approve a modest down-payment on essential border security. Thankfully, President Trump has stood strong for building a wall along our southern border, where over 100,000 people crossed illegally last year.
Of course the Republican Congress should have addressed this long ago, not days before they lose their majority in the House. It should not have required a successful “GoFundMe” fundraising effort for the wall to prod the House to finally authorize $5.7 billion to fund it.
Some Democrats are refusing to support a border wall merely because Trump supports it. As Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said last week, “I talked to four Democrats that said: ‘Look, if you just stop calling it the wall, we’re in.’”
Democrats have thought that a shutdown always works to their advantage, but that calculation changed after Republicans benefited from the Schumer shutdown last January. Trump had generously offered to sign legislation protecting the children of illegal aliens, but his offer was rebuffed by Schumer and Pelosi.
Democrats claim they support “border security,” but what they really mean is money to process thousands of bogus claims of asylum by people hoping to land in the great American safety net while they wait for their claims to be heard. Trump has outfoxed the asylum industry by requiring claimants to remain in Mexico while they wait.
To reinforce his commitment to protect Americans first, the president also announced plans to withdraw troops from Syria, where ISIS has been decimated, along with a reduction of our involvement in the 17-year, no-win war in Afghanistan. He accepted the resignation of the defense secretary who disagreed with these decisions.
Among the D.C. swamp dwellers, many of the same people who resist building a wall on our own border insist that American troops be permanently deployed in faraway countries. They support an endless presence by our soldiers elsewhere, but oppose a wall to protect our own people from the influx of illegal aliens and drugs from Central America.
“We fight for the borders of other countries,” Trump tweeted on December 22, “but we won’t fight for the borders of our own!”
It’s time to recall the first government shutdown in American history, and how a future president won that battle with his bold, decisive action. It was in December of 1776, when General George Washington was camped along the Delaware River in northeastern Pennsylvania.
On December 12, 1776, Congress adjourned without extending the enlistments of American soldiers or approving their pay for the coming year. Members of Congress abandoned Philadelphia, where they had been meeting, because they feared the British troops nearby in New Jersey.
Once the soldiers’ enlistments ran out, the Continental Army would disband and soldiers would return to their farms in the 13 colonies. Some soldiers had already gone home, some were barefoot, food was running short, and winter was coming in.
But Washington was not going to give up the American cause without a fight. In an incredibly bold and risky maneuver, he decided to load his entire army ― men, horses and munitions ― into boats to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas night.
To inspire his men, Washington ordered them to assemble for a public reading of Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet, “The American Crisis,” which had just been published on December 19: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
On December 23 and 24, many boats were collected and secured with the help of experienced seamen. The crossing began at sundown December 25, and lasted all night amid horrendous weather: rain, sleet, snow, ice, and winds that were called a hurricane.
It was daylight on December 26 when troops reassembled on the Jersey shore. They marched 9 miles to Trenton where they surprised and defeated a contingent of British-allied Hessian troops, took them prisoner and captured their food, supplies and horses.
That was the early turning point in the American Revolution, thanks to the leadership of George Washington against all odds. Trump displays the same kind of initiative needed to put our Nation back on the path sought by our Founders.
Amid the current Democrat-caused shutdown, Trump delivers to the People the best Christmas present a president can give: leadership to Make America Great Again
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Entrapment of Flynn Takes Another Dark Turn
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 18, 2018
Life in the Deep State took another dark turn on Tuesday, at the sentencing of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn that did not happen. Instead, he was asked if he had committed treason, which is something not even the partisan Mueller prosecutors ever considered charging him with.
This story would be suitable for Alice in Wonderland if it did not involve an injustice inflicted on an honorable man who risked his life for our Nation. Rather than being able to celebrate Christmas by putting this travesty behind him, Lt. Gen. Flynn is left wondering how his lifelong patriotism was called into question.
In a word, “entrapment” and an unconstitutional independent prosecutor are how the injustice against Lt. Gen. Flynn continues. He was ambushed by an interview that never should have occurred, misled into not having counsel present, and then left helpless against Mueller’s $50 million wrecking machine.
A mere four days after the inauguration of President Trump, then-FBI Director James Comey sent senior agents to ambush Lt. Gen. Flynn with a surprise interview. Comey admits that this was not ordinary procedure, and that proper protocol is to arrange such interviews through attorneys.
It was a setup of Lt. Gen. Flynn, with the since-discredited agents of the Deep State Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok playing their parts. Both have since been fired but as Shakespeare observed, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Lt. Gen. Flynn had been an outspoken supporter of President Trump which liberals consider unforgivable. Outside the federal courthouse on Tuesday, a crowd of Leftists chanted against him.
Flynn never would have been prosecuted by a properly functioning Department of Justice, but the unconstitutional Mueller investigation has spent more than a fortune hunting for crimes. The former National Security Advisor to President Trump would be a trophy for Mueller to justify his prosecutorial crusade, so after Flynn he went.
As a career veteran of the Armed Forces, Flynn lacked the resources to spend millions on attorneys to defend himself. A billionaire could have run multiple appeals of this case up to the Supreme Court, but Flynn’s career does not produce the war chest that businessmen have to dismiss these cases.
This Kafkaesque nightmare was supposed to end Tuesday morning at sentencing before the federal district court in D.C., where Flynn was expected to receive leniency. But instead the hearing unraveled when Judge Emmet G. Sullivan asked if Lt. Gen. Flynn’s conduct “rises to the level of treasonous activity.”
The unexpected question stung for the family of the man who has repeatedly risked his life defending our Nation. Even one of Mueller’s prosecutors then defended Lt. Gen. Flynn by stating that the investigation never considered charging Lt. Flynn with treason.
After a break, Judge Sullivan took back his question about treason, and urged everyone not to read too much into his comments. Judge Sullivan has been tough on prosecutors too, and a common mistake of bystanders is to place too much emphasis on speculative remarks in court.
But the emotional dismay at the injustice became too much at that point. Flynn’s attorneys felt compelled to request postponement of the sentencing, and the court requested a status report by March 13, 2019.
In the meantime, numerous secret filings in this case are not helping anyone except Mueller’s perpetual taxpayer-funded investigations of anyone he wants. Unsealing the records and removing his redactions would serve justice.
Judge Sullivan ordered Mueller to file a “302” report of the fateful interview of Lt. Gen. Flynn, which Mueller had long withheld from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. Mueller ultimately filed a heavily redacted “302” report with the district court on Monday, but he continues to conceal from the public how Flynn was entrapped by the Deep State.
On Tuesday Mueller submitted to the court yet another document under seal, which further withholds from the public what is really going on. All this is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that criminal trials be conducted in open court, and not be based on secret information.
The FBI already knew the answers to the questions it asked of Lt. Gen. Flynn during his fateful interview in January 2017, due to its secret wiretaps of his conversations. But entrapment may have been the goal of the Deep State, the term for the entrenched intelligentsia in D.C. that continued to oppose President Trump after his election by the American People.
We are more than two years past the presidential campaigns of 2016, and there is no plausible justification for Mueller to conceal so much information in his filings from the public that is footing Mueller’s bill. With no end in sight for Mueller’s probe, there should at least be some transparency.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Derails the Marrakech Express
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 11, 2018
A new attempt to impose globalism unfolds in Marrakech, Morocco, under the guise of helping migrants. Most of the 193 countries in the United Nations convened there in order to create new international law to require every participating country to accept vast hordes of foreign migrants, and be subjected to this new form of globalism.
Any other president, Republican or Democrat, would probably welcome and join this undermining of national sovereignty. But in another reminder of how great Trump is, he leads the way in denouncing this virulent strain of globalism.
Called the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, the Marrakech meeting would prevent the American people from deciding immigration policy for ourselves. Trump has posted multiple reasons why the United States and every country should reject this bad idea.
“We believe the Compact and the process that led to its adoption, including the New York Declaration, represent an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of States to manage their immigration systems in accordance with their national laws, policies, and interests.”
That sounds like something Phyllis Schlafly might have written during her lifelong opposition to treaties that undermine American interests. But the above statement was issued by none other than President Trump, and is available on the official usun.state.gov website.
“Decisions about how to secure its borders, and whom to admit for legal residency or to grant citizenship, are among the most important sovereign decisions a State can make, and are not subject to negotiation, or review” by international courts and documents, he explains.
In August, an international tribunal called the European Court of Human Rights commanded that Hungary provide food to migrants and refugees held in detention camps. It is no surprise that Hungary has joined the growing number of countries which are following President Trump’s bold leadership in rejecting the Compact.
Other countries imitating Trump by pulling out of this globalist Compact include Austria, Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Dominican Republic. Notice the immense diversity among nations rejecting this globalism.
Additional countries, including Bulgaria and Israel, are also considering getting out of this deal. The political coalition that rules Belgium has collapsed due to conservative opposition to how her prime minister has pushed that country into joining the Compact.
President Trump, in his official statement on behalf of the United States, properly criticizes the use of the legalistic name “Compact,” rather than the traditional labels of convention or a treaty. “Compact” implies binding legal obligations.
Proponents of global governance look for ways to bypass the Treaty Clause of the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of two-thirds approval by the Senate in order to ratify foreign treaties. Many treaties have been signed by American presidents but thankfully never ratified by the Senate, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Agreement on so-called climate change.
President Obama approved both of those treaties, which were also deceptively named to avoid the use of the word “treaty.” Trump campaigned against them in 2016 and they have never become law.
“The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France,” President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning about the violent protests there which have been the worst in decades.
The Compact on migration includes a “right to privacy” provision that is not recognized by international law, and should be rejected so that it is not misused to become some kind of international right to abortion. Most countries have strong pro-life laws and are subjecting themselves to judicial activism by an international tribunal if they remain in the Compact.
“Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens,” President Trump declared in a statement issued by the White House. He cited the Monroe Doctrine for the principle that we do not accept interference of foreign nations in our hemisphere.
It was nearly 200 years ago, in 1823, when President James Monroe promulgated that famous doctrine against European nations intermeddling in the affairs of the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine was based on the simple observation that the Old and New Worlds have different political systems and it is “dangerous to our peace and safety” to allow the systems to mix.
Likewise, it is dangerous to try to mix our American liberty and prosperity with migrants who may hate us, or at least not respect our culture and values. President Trump proves once again his tremendous leadership in being the first to reject the Compact, thereby setting a model which many other countries are following now.
As other countries are rejecting globalism thanks to President Trump, they are making their own countries great again.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Train Pauses for One Who Missed It
By John and Andy Schlafly
December 4, 2018
Amid well-deserved praise for former President George H.W. Bush, unfortunately he did miss the Trump Train. Yet President Trump is showing his class by paying his respects anyway.
It is difficult to imagine two Republicans who are more different from each other than George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. Bush based his career on the Establishment, while Trump rose by defying it.
Bush pushed for a “New World Order” and entangled us in foreign wars. Trump promotes national sovereignty and seeks to Make American Great Again.
Bush generally pandered to the liberal media, which mostly got its way with him. Trump is not afraid to take on liberals in the media and call them out.
Bush pledged “read my lips: no new taxes,” but then raised taxes anyway. Trump has not caved in on any of his campaign promises despite enormous pressure to do so.
Everything about Bush was a mixed bag, a compromise, and a combination of the bitter with the sweet. Everything about Trump is unambiguous, clear, and sharply defined.
Despite their contrasts and how the Bush family broke with precedent by refusing to support Trump, he has graciously put the federal government at the service of those honoring the 41st president. Now is a good time to observe how much the Republican Party has changed since it was Bush’s party.
The Bush political dynasty began when Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, was elected U.S. Senator from Connecticut in 1952. As a typical liberal Republican of that era, Prescott Bush voted to censure the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and backed his fellow eastern liberal Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s last-ditch effort to stop the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Prescott Bush, who made his money on Wall Street as a partner of the leading Democratic power broker, W. Averell Harriman, was the epitome of the “eastern establishment.” Like his mentor, Nelson Rockefeller, Bush was an internationalist and a fanatical supporter of birth control, both domestically and around the world.
Senator Prescott Bush’s son George H.W. moved to Texas as young man, first Midland and then Houston, but the apple didn’t fall very far from the family tree. During his brief service in Congress, George H.W. Bush sponsored the landmark legislation that made family planning a federal priority, the program known as Title X, which distributes $56 million a year in taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood.
Bush was a supportive acolyte to Ronald Reagan during his eight years as vice president, but as President Bush he seemed to forget the lessons that made Reagan so successful. Reagan was not a globalist, but Bush was.
It was in a high-profile address to Congress on September 11, 1990, that Bush shocked Americans with his proclamation that it was time for a “New World Order.” Ronald Reagan would never have used that kind of language, which Bush kept repeating although he never defined it.
By launching the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Bush changed American foreign policy from focusing on defense of the homeland to engaging in foreign interventionism. Bush’s war was the first of several futile attempts to impose Western values on Middle Easterners who lack the cultural conditions for democratic self-government.
President Trump, by contrast, has reclaimed and rehabilitated nationalism and America First. As he said in his address to the United Nations in September, “America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”
Even when it comes to Planned Parenthood, Trump has turned the corner on Bush. New regulations published by the Trump administration would curtail taxpayer funding of groups like Planned Parenthood which violate federal law by using abortion as a method of family planning.
In remembering Bush 41, we should note his affection for our national pastime, ever since he was captain of his college baseball team. As president, Bush honored the holders of two of the most remarkable records in baseball history, both set in 1941: Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams’ .406 season batting average.
Those records had stood for 50 years when President Bush welcomed the elderly DiMaggio and Williams to the White House in 1991. Another 27 years have gone by since then, but no other baseball player has ever come close to those feats.
Bush set important records of his own, which richly deserve the praise that he is receiving. He was the only president to have received the Distinguished Flying Cross, which he earned for having been shot down during a World War II bombing mission.
Bush also loyally stood by his Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas despite the all-out smear campaign by the Left to stop him. As Bush’s continuing legacy, Thomas has sided with Trump more than Bush did.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Was Right To Rebuke Chief Justice Roberts
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 27, 2018
President Trump rightly rebuked Chief Justice Roberts for criticizing his factual statements about “Obama judges” consistently ruling against the Trump Administration. Liberals are gaming the court system by running to activist judges in San Francisco, Hawaii and Maryland to obstruct the will of the People who elected Trump.
John Roberts is not the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or even the Chief Justice of all the federal courts. His office is the Chief Justice of the United States, which means he should be acting on behalf of all three branches of government, and not provincially defending lower court judges against justified criticism by the President.
As pointed out by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has been wonderful in confirming Trump’s nominees, Chief Justice Roberts was completely silent after the unjustified tongue-lashing given by then-President Obama against Supreme Court Justices during the 2010 State of the Union address. The double-standard in denouncing Trump now is striking.
President Trump was correct in saying that Obama-appointed judges have been unfair in issuing numerous sweeping rulings against the Trump agenda, which has necessitated quickly running those bad decisions up on appeal. Senseless delays and increased taxpayer expense have resulted from Roberts’ own failure to rein in the rampant judicial activism among certain lower courts, which he could curb.
"Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have 'Obama judges,' and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country," Trump tweeted after Roberts chided him. Indeed, nearly all of the high-profile injunctions against Trump have been by “Obama judges.”
Francisco is nowhere near the southern border and there is no valid reason why liberal lawsuits against Trump’s immigration policies are repeatedly filed there. The apparent motivation is this: 11 out of the 14 active judges in that federal district were appointed by Obama, and Trump properly criticized how that one-sided venue has resulted in national injunctions against the President.
Chief Justice Roberts should check with his fellow Supreme Court Justices about how abusive these nationwide injunctions have been. Justice Clarence Thomas persuasively opposed these nationwide injunctions in an opinion that Roberts should have written or at least joined.
San Francisco is a favorite venue of the Resistance to Trump because appeals go from there to the Ninth Circuit, which Obama packed with seven lifetime appointments. The liberal California senators have failed to allow Trump to fill six vacancies on that circuit, which has long been notorious for being reversed, often unanimously, by the Supreme Court.
The Ninth Circuit even issued decisions by activist judge Stephen Reinhardt after he died on March 29th of this year, including a July 24th decision in which the other judges on the panel stated that Reinhardt had agreed with the court opinion even though he had died nearly four months earlier. Perhaps because a party complained, the Ninth Circuit later withdrew that decision.
Trump’s Solicitor General Noel Francisco is doing what he can to combat the judicial supremacy. He has taken the extraordinary step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear certain appeals without first awaiting decisions by the U.S. Circuit Courts that are packed with Obama nominees.
Unlike the President, the Supreme Court decides for itself how much work to do, which controversies to take up, and when to adjourn for its three-month summer vacation. The Court takes far fewer cases than it did a generation ago, and it is shocking how it increasingly fills its docket with easy, non-controversial cases.
A cursory glance at the cases the Court has decided to hear this Term reveals much that is insignificant, while Trump works overtime addressing crisis after crisis. Much of the Court’s time seems to be spent dodging abortion and other hot-button issues; the Court has deferred again and again cases concerning the simple authority of states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Chief Justice Roberts failed to join the dissent by two Justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, to the spectacle of putting the Trump Administration on trial in New York for including a question about citizenship in the census. One would think that the first and most important question in a census by any country, dating back to ancient Rome, would concern citizenship.
But Chief Justice Roberts and a majority of the Court have allowed an Obama-appointed judge – the brother of Obama’s chief economist – to put Trump officials on trial. No court would have put members of the Obama Administration on trial with respect to their policy decisions.
Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts is still smarting from criticisms of him by candidate Trump in 2016. But as the Chief Justice of the United States, Roberts should be defending the President rather than taking cheap shots at him.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Make Tijuana Great Again, and the White House Too
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 20, 2018
The two-thousand-mile trek of migrants from Honduras arrived to an angry reception in Tijuana, just south of the California border. It was not President Donald Trump who shouted down the illegal aliens camped there, but Tijuana’s own mayor, along with many of his Mexican constituents.
“Make Tijuana Great Again” sported the Tijuana mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum, on his bright red hat nearly identical to the one worn by President Trump. Hundreds of Tijuana residents turned out in agreement, chanting “Tijuana First” and similar slogans.
Well, how about that! The false narrative perpetrated by liberals that only extremists who voted for Donald Trump are against illegal immigration is disproven by Mexicans in Tijuana demanding that the migrants return home.
“I would dare say that not all of them are migrants,” Mayor Gastélum observed in Spanish during an interview on the Mexican Milenio television channel. He suggested that some of the migrants are criminals.
Many tough, angry-looking young men can be seen in images of the caravan. In one photo, a construction worker is seen defying the Mexican police with a vulgar gesture at them.
The migrants seem to have been coached, because one of them claimed that he was the victim of racism by the Mexican police. The culprit is not racism but globalism: the assault on national borders, which are essential to maintaining liberty and prosperity.
These migrants should be trying to make Honduras great again rather than crashing through borders to overrun places where they are not wanted. Anyone who can walk (or hitchhike) two thousand miles, like these migrants, can use their pent-up energy to improve their own country, instead of demanding handouts from Mexico or the United States.
Many migrants undoubtedly left behind women and children who depend on the support of the able-bodied young men who comprise the vast majority of the migrant caravan. The United States should not allow these migrants to abandon their responsibilities, but should send them back home to support their families.
But a federal judge in San Francisco just interfered with President Trump’s efforts to do exactly that. Despite how border control is an issue of national security under nearly exclusive presidential authority, Obama-appointed Judge Tigar took it upon himself to issue an injunction against the presidential proclamation that limited asylum applications by Central American migrants.
That leaves Trump with no good option: either appeal to the liberal Ninth Circuit, where the deck is stacked against him, or file an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely interferes in cases pending in lower courts.
Often the immigrants who cross the border illegally from Mexico are not even from Central or South America. Near Laredo, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents recently caught six young men trying to enter the United States illegally from far-away Bangladesh.
Official statistics show that 668 Bangladeshis were caught near our southern border during the twelve months ending on September 30, plus another 75 in October. There is big money in this, with the illegals or their sponsors paying up to $27,000 per person to be smuggled into the United States, as reported by Breitbart.com.
By now President Trump has appointed many judges to the federal bench, but the vetting of those nominees was cast in doubt by the ruling last week against the White House concerning CNN’s Jim Acosta. Despite how a man’s home is his castle under centuries of precedents, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that President Trump cannot promptly exclude a misbehaving reporter from the White House.
Only the most conservative judges should be appointed to federal courts for the District of Columbia, which has no U.S. Senators who might object. President Trump, acting on apparently bad advice, nominated former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Timothy Kelly to that bench.
Kelly was confirmed almost unanimously, and into his courtroom landed the lawsuit by CNN against Trump to reinstate access to the White House by the abrasive Jim Acosta. CNN sued for Acosta to retain his access to the White House grounds even after he disrupted Trump’s post-election news conference with an argumentative non-question.
If a hostile reporter had combatively resisted relinquishing the microphone during a presser held by President Obama, the reporter would have been banned. But in a stark illustration of judicial activism, Judge Kelly ordered President Trump to return Acosta’s highly desirable “hard pass” for full access to the West Wing.
Judges require journalists to treat courthouses and court proceedings with extreme deference, but President Trump has been made powerless to regulate who can roam freely inside his own home. Let’s hope the President makes the White House Great Again by posting a burly security guard next to Jim Acosta with orders to remove him the next time he misbehaves.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Realigns the Political Map
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 13, 2018
After the Republican Party had been declining in strength in the executive and judicial branches, and in the U.S. Senate, Trump’s realignment has brought new life to all three. The Election Day results dismayed those who predicted a massive blue wave, and instead ushered in more evidence that Trump is the real future of the GOP.
Trump’s rallies in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota delivered resounding victories to Republican Senate candidates, in defiance of most polls. Trump also carried congressional candidates to victory in battleground regions of Southern Illinois and Minnesota.
Trump achieved what was thought to be impossible in ousting the entrenched liberal Claire McCaskill from her Senate seat in Missouri, by holding massive rallies that attracted tens of thousands to Trump. No one could have sent the Leftist-funded McCaskill to an early retirement other than Trump.
The Republicans who lost were mostly anti-Trumpers, as the president observed in reviewing the election results. “Mia Love gave me no love,” Trump quipped about the Republican who lost in the deep red state of Utah, and he listed other GOP candidates who drove their own defeat by opposing him.
By securing and even expanding on GOP control of the upper chamber, Trump paves the way for more conservative judges to join the federal bench. Democrats now admit that they lack a realistic chance of retaking the Senate until at least 2022, which means that Trump could have four more years of conservative judicial appointments.
Republican candidates won the governorships in Ohio and Iowa, in a further indication of how well Trump plays in the heartland. And it appears that the Republican senate and governor candidates in Florida also defied the polls and scored impressive wins.
A realignment of politics is taking place in America, greater than any since the 1960s when the South swung to the Republican Party and African Americans switched more heavily to Democrats. Prior to that southerners voted primarily for Democrats and a substantial fraction of blacks voted for the GOP.
Blue-collar America is turning more Republican, while big cities and the Left Coast continue to drift more to the Democrats. Working class men and their wives are shifting to the Republican Party for the first time, while single and divorced women tilt more heavily to the Democrats.
Voters like Republicans in charge in the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most senates, while Democrats made gains in the lower houses of legislatures. This bodes well for re-electing Trump in 2020 and restoring respect for the Constitution to the federal judiciary with senate confirmations of Trump nominees.
Iowa, in some ways a political cross-section of the entire country, displayed the cross-currents in this realignment. Democrats won seven new suburban seats in the House, but lost two blue-collar seats to Republicans.
In the Iowa Senate, the GOP actually had a net gain of two seats from the Democrats, again by racking up surprise victories in blue-collar districts. Trump’s persona and his America First policies resonate so well with working class Americans that Democrats suffered upset losses in those districts.
Conservative Congressman Steve King triumphed once again over vicious late hits and ambushes, which illustrates the tremendous resilience of those who are most principled. The Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, also won reelection.
The Rust Belt state of Ohio elected a Republican governor, re-elected all its Republican congressmen, and re-elected a supermajority of Republican control over its state legislature. This is a state that President Trump has successfully turned from purple to deep red, after Obama had won it in 2008 and 2012.
With only about 15 months left for the Democrats to coalesce around a presidential contender to run against President Trump, they have no one who can compete with him in middle America. Polls said that Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly would win reelection easily in Indiana, but instead he lost to political newcomer Mike Braun by a wide margin of 6 points, which could have even been a 10-point loss in the absence of the Libertarian Party candidate.
Runaway early voting procedures ensured Republican losses in Arizona, California and Nevada, and there is nothing Trump could have done to avert that. But Trump brought victories where none were expected, such as all-important U.S. Senate seats representing middle America.
The campaign for the presidency starts after the midterm elections, and Democratic contenders are already jockeying for position. But Trump appears invincible in the South, most of the Midwest, much of the Rust Belt, and nearly all of flyover country, which doesn’t leave enough Electoral College Votes for the Democrats to regain the White House.
Trump worked harder in campaigning for his supporters than any president in history, Republican or Democrat. Republicans would have done better in the House if more candidates had stood with him, as the Senate candidates did.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
The Mistake of Early Voting
By John and Andy Schlafly
November 6, 2018
More than 38 million ballots were cast before Election Day arrived this year, shattering the midterm election record for early voting. That was nearly double the level of early voting in the last midterm election, in 2014, when 21 million voted early.
Yet few genuinely benefit from this early voting fad, except political machines and the better-funded candidates. That means early voting boosts the Democrats, who held an enormous fundraising advantage this year along with their political machine that has long dominated Chicago and other big cities.
In the traditionally red states of Texas and Florida, early voting causes many races there to be decided prior to Election Day. Both states now have extensive early voting, and as a result both were targeted by massive cash for Democrats this election cycle.
The influx of tens of millions of dollars by liberals to fund Beto O’Rourke in his campaign for U.S. Senate in Texas baffled some, but not those familiar with the circus of extended early voting that is allowed in the Lone Star State. By herding traditionally Democratic constituents to the polls during the two-week period of early voting, well-funded Democrats in Texas have the hope of winning elections they would otherwise lose in that conservative state.
In Texas, early voting increased everywhere, but particularly skyrocketed in heavily Democratic areas such as Austin and Dallas. Casualties could include down-ballot Republicans, including state legislators and local officials.
Similarly, in the other large red state of Florida, more than 5 million votes were cast early this fall. That was 38.4% of the entire Florida electorate, and more than the number that voted on Election Day.
Smart liberal money flowed in a big way against Republican candidates in both States, attracted by the opportunity to herd people to vote early and tip the outcome. The candidate who raises the most money is more likely to win in elections decided by expensive early voting efforts.
The voting this past Sunday morning in Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county, tells the story. A record 40,000 ballots were cast, many bused from churches as part of the Democrats’ “souls to the polls” campaign.
That Sunday burst in voting gave the Democrats in Florida the lead in overall ballots cast early. Meanwhile independent voters, on whom Republicans often rely to get elected, are shut out of the early voting gamesmanship and thereby become less significant, particularly in non-presidential elections.
Last year Hans von Spakovsky released a report for the Heritage Foundation in which he concluded that early voting can increase the cost of campaigns, and actually decrease overall turnout. For example, early voting removes the social pressure to vote on Election Day.
Add to that how early voting has become the new form of machine-style politics that distorts the election process and changes results. The integrity and excitement of Election Day are undermined by the enormous spending to push people to vote early.
The average American in Florida, Texas, and other early voting states would be fine in getting their lives back, without the tiresome robocalls and other efforts to urge them to vote early. The vast majority of early voters would otherwise vote on Election Day, and having both sides spend millions to move those ballots a week or so early is wasteful.
There was no line to vote at many election polling precincts on Tuesday, which detracts from the experience and could result in fewer people voting next time. Early voting undermines the patriotic value of a unified Election Day.
The early voters had less information, including major economic data not released until last Friday. In some states, such as Montana, the libertarian candidate for Senate pulled out of the race and endorsed the Republican candidate after many votes had already been cast early.
In California, its mail-in balloting means that election outcomes can remain uncertain until long after Election Day, when ballots are finally received by election officials. It becomes impossible to check against voter fraud, and there is no place for precinct monitors.
Nevada is a state where elections are decided by early voting, and it has a tight Senate race for a seat held by a Republican. Yet ballots had already been cast by 40% of active voters there prior to Election Day, and Democrats defeated Republicans by a 41-38% margin in early ballots.
Republicans have controlled the Florida and Texas statehouse and governorship for years, so it is baffling why they allow pervasive early voting there, including Sunday voting in Florida which Democrats exploited. Other Republican states, such as Ohio and North Carolina, have sensibly tried to rein in rampant early voting.
There is a constitutional right to vote. But there is no constitutional right to vote early, and it is time to restore integrity and significance to Election Day by reining in early voting.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Ending Birthright Citizenship
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 30, 2018
President Trump, who frequently campaigned against the horrible practice of giving automatic U.S. citizenship to children of illegal aliens, has again startled the media by proving that he really meant what he said. In an interview released this week, Trump said he would issue an executive order stopping birthright citizenship.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump said in an interview for Axios. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
Trump’s blunt talk on the issue of illegal immigration was one of the main reasons Americans elected him in 2016. Yet his opponents pretend to be shocked and horrified that he plans to deliver what the voters expected when we elected him president.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he said, adding that he has run it by legal counsel. “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order,” Trump said.
The media insist that Trump is just “riling up his base” for the midterm election, quoting a tweet from the failed mayor of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel recently announced that he will not seek re-election in the city he has led from crisis to disaster.
Another failed politician, outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, pontificated to reporters, “Well, you obviously cannot do that.” Ryan went on to say, “I think in this case the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process.”
Actually, Ryan is half right: the 14th Amendment is “pretty clear” that birth alone is not enough to guarantee U.S. citizenship. To get automatic birthright citizenship, children must be born to parents who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of our country.
The key phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” means more than the duty to obey our laws, which applies to everyone, citizen and alien alike. It means that to become a citizen a person must owe allegiance to the United States, and not to any other nation or state.
You are a citizen of the country or nation to which you owe your allegiance, and vice versa. Diplomats, visitors, foreign students, temporary workers, and illegal residents -- all these people are citizens of their home countries, the countries they came from, even while they are temporarily inside our borders.
American history familiar to many high school students demonstrates how wrong birthright citizenship is. Indians living on reservations were not American citizens for most of our history, despite being born in our country.
Native Americans were considered members only of their sovereign Indian tribes, until Congress extended blanket citizenship in 1924. Similarly, children born to foreign ambassadors while in the United States are not American citizens, but are citizens of their country of origin.
In their crusade against President Trump, globalists trot out alleged experts claiming that Trump’s proposal is impossible, unconstitutional, or morally wrong. But the hysterical overreaction by his critics proves how right Trump is.
“The president cannot erase the Constitution with an executive order, and the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee is clear,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to fan the flames of anti-immigrant hatred in the days ahead of the midterms.”
In fact, the last time the Supreme Court addressed the issue of birthright citizenship was 120 years ago, in the case of a child born to a lawful permanent resident who had what is now called a green card. The Supreme Court has never decided the citizenship of those born to persons unlawfully present in the United States, or lawfully present on temporary visas for tourism, education, or temporary employment.
The ACLU was also bitterly opposed to Trump’s policy of vetting travelers from countries that are hotbeds of terrorism. Globalists falsely characterized the policy as a Muslim ban, but it was upheld by the Supreme Court last June; Trump’s new executive order should fare just as well when it gets there.
Trump’s announced intention to fulfill his campaign promise caps another week of setbacks for globalism. In Brazil, which is called the second-largest democracy in the Western Hemisphere, the conservative nationalist Jair Bolsonaro won its presidency by a landslide of 55-45%.
That adds Brazil to the United States, Hungary, and the Philippines where conservative nationalists have triumphed on Election Day. Meanwhile, the adversary of President Trump who has led Germany down the wrong path of globalism, Angela Merkel, mercifully announced her plans not to seek reelection in a few years.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Dems Tongue-Tied on Caravan Issue
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 23, 2018
Democrats have not been shy to criticize President Trump on every imaginable issue ranging from the NFL to the First Lady’s choice of footwear. But suddenly nary a word from the Dems about Trump’s criticism of the caravan of illegal aliens headed toward our southern border.
“Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!” Trump tweeted on Monday.
But where is the pervasive pushback by Dems to Trump’s tweets on this issue? Their silence is deafening.
The Senate race in Arizona casts light on why Democrats are suddenly speechless, two weeks before the midterm elections. That seat, vacated by the unelectable anti-Trump Senator Jeff Flake, has long been considered a sure takeaway from the Republican Party in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.
This summer the Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema was ahead in the polls by more than ten points, apparently cruising to a landslide. But Arizona bears the brunt of illegal immigration, and as that issue heats up this race has become too close to call.
Congresswoman and veteran Martha McSally, aided by an overflow rally held by President Trump last week in Phoenix, has surged in the polls for that seat. Ms. Sinema was hurt by the surfacing of a 2003 recording of her saying that “I don’t care” if an American joined the Taliban army, which fights against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
In Missouri, entrenched liberal incumbent Claire McCaskill was so rattled by Republican challenger Josh Hawley’s criticism of her during their recent debate that she left quickly afterward, not even staying for post-debate interviews. Pro-abortion donors have bankrolled McCaskill to a 4-1 fundraising advantage, and yet she trails Hawley.
Meanwhile, voters see photos of thousands of menacing youths approaching our southern border as part of a caravan that stretches for miles. Among them are potential new recruits for the vicious gangs, like MS-13, that plague our cities.
If Sen. McCaskill and her Democratic cohorts had supported building a wall as Trump seeks, then the massive caravan would not be a national crisis. But without a wall, young American soldiers must be put in harm’s way to try to stop these illegals from entering our country.
The presence of children among the migrants makes it even worse. Soldiers are trained to fight and kill, not change diapers for infants carted thousands of miles to cross our border illegally.
“We want to get to the United States,” said a 17-year-old migrant from Honduras, Maria Irias Rodriguez, who brings along her 8-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, plus her husband. “If they stop us now, we’ll just come back a second time.”
That sounds like a family that could help make Honduras great again. If the migrants have American values, and not all do, then they could spread those values in their own country and help it thrive as the United States has.
There is a process for foreigners to apply to enter our country legally. That includes proper vetting of the applicants, and separating those who love America from those who might not.
Amid the caravan of many thousands could be terrorists, as President Trump pointed out while on his way to lead a massive rally in Houston for Senate candidate Ted Cruz. The 19,000-seat Houston Rockets basketball arena was virtually filled with enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s stance against the caravan and illegal immigration.
But Monday was also the first day of an extended two-week early voting period in Texas, which enables the Democratic political machine to stuff the ballot box without any real safeguards against fraud. An enormous spike in the number of early ballots compared to the last midterm election in 2014 is flooding Texas election offices.
In small Midland County, Texas, five times as many people voted on the first day of early voting compared with the same day in 2014. In the immense Harris County, where Houston is located, more than three times as many people voted early on Monday compared with four years ago.
Liberals are counting on rampant early voting in Texas, California, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere to give them an undeserved boost in returns. Trump has joked that the caravan of migrants is coming to the United States to vote for Democrats, and that is not far from the truth.
In traditionally low-turnout midterm elections, stuffing the ballot box can change the outcome in many races. Trump’s spectacular rallies demonstrate the popularity of his positions with the American people, and an honest election would confirm it.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Judicial Supremacy Runs Amok Against Census
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 16, 2018
A stirring rebuke of judicial supremacy is, remarkably, posted on the Department of Justice website. Attorney General Jeff Sessions explains how fed up he is with the continued overreach by federal judges as they repeatedly encroach on Trump and Congress.
The latest outrage cited by General Sessions is a district court order, affirmed on appeal, that compels Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to submit to a deposition about why he wants the census to ask people if they are American citizens. Liberals absurdly claim that it is racist for the census to ask that basic question, and demand that Secretary Ross answer impertinent questions in which he will be falsely accused of secretly harboring a racist motive.
Cabinet officials should not be subjected to rude deposition questioning without any factual basis. Citizenship is not a race and immigrants come in all races, so it cannot be racist to ask people who live here, and who demand entitlements like Medicaid and public schooling, whether they are American citizens.
Before Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed, the Supreme Court seemed fine with allowing the deposition of Secretary Ross, a member of Trump’s Cabinet. But days after Kavanaugh joined the High Court, it put this deposition on hold pending the submission of further briefing on the matter.
President Donald Trump has successfully appointed two Supreme Court justices, 29 circuit judges, and 52 district court judges. But they are mostly in states that voted for him, while fierce pockets of resistance remain in deep blue states like California, New York and Hawaii.
An example is in New York City, where a Barack Obama-appointed federal judge named Jesse Furman is hearing a major case against the Trump Administration. Furman received that prestigious lifetime appointment when he was only 39 years old, and he will probably be elevated to a higher court by a future Democratic president.
In classic judicial activism, Judge Furman is trying to micromanage the government’s planning for the 2020 census, which is already underway. Plaintiffs and apparently Judge Furman are unhappy with how census officials plan to include a question about citizenship in the census.
It should be a no-brainer for the census to ask whether each person residing in our country is a U.S. citizen or not. That basic question was included on the main census questionnaire from 1830 to 1950, but starting in 1960 it was unfortunately demoted to a separate survey that goes to only a sample of Americans.
After the Trump Administration decided to reinstate this question on the questionnaire being sent to every household, a group of leftist organizations and Democratic officials sued Wilbur Ross as the Secretary of the Department of Commerce, which supervises the census bureau.
Only U.S. citizens are supposed to vote here, although there are numerous examples of non-citizens who were improperly placed on the voting rolls when they applied for a driver’s license. The problem is that even when non-citizens don’t vote, they are counted in the census in a way that enhances the voting power of people who do vote.
If non-citizens were evenly distributed across the United States, their presence wouldn’t dilute the voting power of U.S. citizens. But when they are concentrated in a handful of states such as California, whose population includes more than 5 million non-citizens, American citizens who live in other states are disenfranchised.
Non-citizens entitle California to at least 5 extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 5 extra votes in the Electoral College, all taken from states with few non-citizens. Even within California, non-citizens are concentrated in a handful of that state’s 53 congressional districts, such as Maxine Waters’ district where only half the residents are American citizens.
In the 2010 census, which Obama supervised, 6 electoral votes were taken from the states of Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which voted for Trump in 2016. That was on top of 4 electoral votes lost by those states in the 2000 census, plus another 4 lost by four other Trump states: Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are each projected to lose another seat in Congress and the Electoral College after 2020, as are Alabama and West Virginia. States where aliens live will gain seats, and retain the seats they already won in the last two census counts.
General Sessions emphasized in his posted speech that “the Judicial branch must show significant respect for the Executive branch and Congress. I fear, in a variety of ways, that respect has been eroding.”
Calling out the “eroding” deference by the judiciary is an understatement. So is the term “judicial activism,” when the better term is “judicial supremacy” as coined by Phyllis Schlafly to describe judicial interference with good policies like Trump’s census.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Fulfills Phyllis Schlafly’s Vision
By John and Andy Schlafly
October 9, 2018
The thrilling confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court fulfills the vision of Phyllis Schlafly in her early endorsement of Trump. By trouncing the radical feminists in this high-stakes battle for the Supreme Court, President Trump has transformed the Republican Party just as Phyllis wanted.
Kavanaugh’s 50-48 confirmation by the Senate was also a victory for the rule of law over rule by a mob. “You don't hand matches to an arsonist,” Trump declared afterwards, and “you don’t give power to an angry leftwing mob.”
It was a close call, when you consider that one woman on George Soros’ payroll almost succeeded in bringing Kavanaugh down – by screaming at Jeff Flake while he was trapped in an elevator as cameras rolled. Ana Maria Archila, the woman who confronted Senator Flake, reportedly draws a six-figure salary from a Soros-funded outfit called the Center for Popular Democracy, which grew out of the wreckage of the now-defunct ACORN.
But Christine Blasey Ford’s uncorroborated accusations were simply not credible to the fair-minded Senators. Their reigning moderate, Susan Collins, delivered a compelling hour-long speech detailing the many deficiencies.
Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh were worse than being implausible. They were also unworthy of the heightened attention given to them by the liberal media and the 48 Democratic Senators who voted against him.
Even if Ford's accusations had some basis in fact, they were not serious enough to be considered at this late date. The Senate demeaned itself by forcing Kavanaugh to explain what he meant in his writings as a 17-year-old in his personal diary and his high school yearbook.
By her own account, Ford said she attended and drank beer at an unsupervised house party along with older teenage drunken boys. She alleges that at some point she was groped by two of the boys, whose identities remain unknown, but she admitted that everyone was fully clothed at all times.
If such a complaint had been made then, the police would not have even bothered to pursue it. It would have been such a minor, unprovable infraction that criminal charges would never have been brought.
The complete silence by Ford for 29 years afterwards suggests that even if it did happen, it was not particularly significant to her. Most likely it did not happen at all.
Yet while talking to a therapist nearly three decades later, Ford supposedly “recovered” a memory that could easily exaggerate key details and make mistakes of identity. On the basis of her recovered memory, she tried to bring down Brett Kavanaugh’s career, while keeping her own identity secret in order to avoid the risk of cross-examination.
There is a moment when a movement loses its initial credibility with the general public, and this Kavanaugh confirmation may be that moment for the #MeToo movement. The collapse of support for the reelection of Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who ultimately voted against Kavanaugh, illustrates the backlash against doubtful accusations publicized by radical feminists.
Forty years ago, in the 1970s, an earlier wave of feminism called “women’s liberation” was cresting. Led by then-ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the feminists came close to putting their harmful “equal rights” amendment (ERA) into the U.S. Constitution.
But then the feminists also overplayed their hand, much as they just did with Kavanaugh. With a special appropriation of federal tax money in 1977, they held 50 state conventions for women, culminating in a national convention in Houston to promote International Women’s Year.
The nation watched in dismay as a parade of angry liberal women screamed and screeched their demands, primarily about lesbian rights and taxpayer-funded abortions. The public turned away, the ERA never garnered another state, and five states that had hastily ratified it then rescinded their previous ratifications.
A similar fate awaits the overly hyped #MeToo movement, which started a year ago in response to the lurid accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and others. Ostensibly a protest against the proverbial casting couch, which has always existed in Hollywood, the #MeToo movement is a double standard as it does not complain about many women who willingly use sex to advance their show-biz careers.
Meanwhile, our nation benefits from the new respect for ancient legal safeguards against false accusations. These include innocent until proven guilty, the right to confront your accuser, and the need for a short statute of limitations on accusations of sexual assault.
When Phyllis Schlafly met Donald Trump on March 11, 2016, before introducing him to a cheering crowd of thousands of supporters in St. Louis, she asked the candidate to appoint judges who would defend the Constitution. With the seating of Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, President Trump has honored his pledge in a spectacular way.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Call the Vote on Kavanaugh
By John and Andy Schlafly
September 25, 2018
Delaying the Senate vote has not helped anyone except those smearing the good man nominated to the Supreme Court. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have lost his way in supporting delay after delay on an up-or-down vote for Brett Kavanaugh.
McConnell promised that Kavanaugh will be confirmed, but his strategy has kicked away Democrats who might have voted for him. By giving a platform to Kavanaugh’s accusers, he has merely provided political cover for every Democrat in the chamber, such as Claire McCaskill who is in a tight race in Missouri.
McConnell should call the vote on Kavanaugh, and let the chips fall where they may. Delay simply facilitates more false accusations, embellished to an obscene degree.
It was a mistake to pander to Kavanaugh’s accusers by extending the deadline and begging them to show up to tell their coached narratives in the most damaging way that liberals can imagine. No court of law allows a witness to completely take over the scheduling as Kavanaugh’s opponents have.
Kavanaugh would have been confirmed by now if the Senate had simply called the vote. Never-Trump Republicans and even a few Democrats would have fallen in line and voted the right way, or gone down in history as a mob who hangs an innocent man.
But like the failure of a superior army to advance to win a battle, the dilly-dallying by the Republican leadership has led to disarray and lost opportunity. The delay allowed the politically motivated opponents of Kavanaugh to practice and embellish, divide and conquer.
Some hope that vigorous cross-examination of Kavanaugh’s accusers will prove to the world that Kavanaugh has the stellar character that all who know him describe. There are, of course, good questions about political motivation and the orchestration of this smear that should be asked.
But relatively few Americans will watch the hearing, contrary to what the Senators may think, and Abraham Lincoln-style moments on cross-examination are rare. The more that a witness is coached, the less likely a breakthrough at the hearing.
Instead, the vast majority of Americans will see only the headlines and selective sound bites, as spun by a media determined to sink Kavanaugh. The testimony itself is immune from defamation lawsuits, and news outlets will repeat the false accusations without including the cross-examination.
This is fake news in its worst form. Sexually explicit allegations are politically deadly, no matter how false and implausible they are, and the GOP-controlled Senate errs in giving the other side a platform.
“I think it’s horrible what the Democrats have done,” President Trump said on Tuesday. “It is a con game; they really are con artists … playing a con game and they are playing it very well, much better than Republicans.”
President Trump’s instincts have been right on target, as usual, in speaking out against the smear of Kavanaugh. McConnell reportedly telephoned Trump to tell him that his tweets critical of a Kavanaugh accuser were not helpful, but it is McConnell’s delay in the vote that has been unhelpful.
Trump is right that Senate Republicans have given far too many concessions to Kavanaugh’s opponents than they should have. No one was preventing accusers from telling their stories, and the Senate is mistaken to think that its committee hearing procedures will add anything to the equation.
The Senate committee lacks fundamental rules of evidence that any civilized judicial proceeding would have. Unreliable testimony that is more likely to create prejudice than aid in a genuine search for truth is not allowed in most courts of law, but is allowed by the Senate.
Sexually obscene testimony that is uncorroborated should not be allowed and given credibility by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Moreover, false descriptions like “attempted rape” should be ruled out of order and prohibited.
Refreshed recollections about something more than 30 years ago by someone who was drunk at the time, as Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate was, is not evidence that satisfies any reasonable standard of reliability. Most courts of law would prohibit repetition of sexually graphic allegations of such an unreliable nature to a jury.
Instead, advisers have mistakenly relied on administration of an oath as though that will protect Kavanaugh against false accusations. Republicans have underestimated the depth of deceit on the other side, even harboring hope that the accusers will not show up.
Senator Susan Collins and other fence-sitters can sit down to have chit-chats with accusers all they want. No one is interfering with any fact-finding, or falsehood-finding, that any senator wants to engage in.
The U.S. Senate prides itself on open debate, but in every assembly there comes a time when further debate is unproductive. A motion to “call the question,” first used in the British Parliament more than four centuries ago, is overdue to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Too Little, Too Late in Ambushing Kavanaugh
by John and Andy Schlafly
September 18, 2018
Statutes of limitations are necessary, because memories fade and it is pointless to consider a “he said, she said” dispute decades later. No one should give credence to a new accusation about something minor that supposedly occurred more than three decades ago, and the Senate embarrasses itself by holding a hearing to do just that.
Brett Kavanaugh fully denies the allegation of misconduct by him at a party 36 years ago, when he was merely 17 years old, and this issue is not something that Senators should be taking seriously today. On the verge of his confirmation to the Supreme Court, this politically motivated, last-minute smear against him should be laughed off the stage.
Only in the fantasyland of the U.S. Senate, where Clarence Thomas had to endure a similar ordeal in 1991, does fiction replace fact so easily. Accusations about teenage conduct in 1982, even if Kavanaugh was at the party, should not change anyone’s vote concerning his confirmation to the Supreme Court.
The confirmation process for Supreme Court Justices should have sensible limits on irrelevant testimony when considering nominees. It is time to repudiate untestable #MeToo allegations that were never reported within the statute of limitations, and it is time to draw the line before politics descends further into the theater of the absurd.
If Senators fail to establish reasonable rules of evidence, then it becomes a matter of how clever an accuser is at lying. Courts of law do not allow spectacles of irrelevant, unprovable accusations, and the Senate should not have a standard that is lower than that of traffic court.
Supposedly a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, or someone having a similar name, was drunk and had party-like contact with a fully clothed girl who had also been drinking. At the time, no crime was reported, no adult was told, nothing was prosecuted, and no discipline of any kind was ever sought or obtained.
Most schools would not even punish a student for such behavior at a party, even if true, let alone expel someone for it. It is beneath the dignity of the Senate to give credibility to an accusation about silly teenage behavior at a drinking party, as though that has any bearing on the abilities and character of an adult more than three decades later.
President Trump was elected to blow the whistle on this kind of circus that too often dominates D.C. Trump brought some grown-up relief to this crisis on Monday by rejecting a reporter’s question as ridiculous in asking whether Kavanaugh might be replaced as the nominee because of this farcical accusation.
Allowing this ambush of Kavanaugh feeds the chicanery of the Left, and encourages similar antics against future good nominees. Three Republican nominees to the Supreme Court have been confirmed in a row since liberals unsuccessfully attempted their last-minute smear of Clarence Thomas, and the GOP majority should not allow regression to that low point in the history of the Senate.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) probably dislikes allowing a hearing on this smear against Kavanaugh, but the Republican majority in the Senate is hostage to a handful who pander to the media. Never-Trumper Jeff Flake, who is an example of someone who does not belong on the Judiciary Committee, was elected by pretending to be pro-life but spends much of his time trying to defy Trump instead.
In court, scandalous testimony that is irrelevant is excluded without futile attempts to determine its truthfulness. The Senate should likewise exclude testimony by Christine Blasey Ford about isolated teenage partying which has no relevance to the fitness of the nominee Kavanaugh.
The oath does not have a magical effect in converting lies to the truth, and cannot establish relevancy. Long-ago high school partying is irrelevant to the important work the Senate and the Supreme Court should be doing.
Even worse is speculation about what a teenage Kavanaugh, or someone who looked like him, might have wanted to do. Teenagers are wrong about many things, even when trying to tell the truth, and the Senate should not allow such speculative testimony.
The high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas, as he described it, failed when an accusation was discovered to bear an uncanny resemblance to a line in the book The Exorcist. This time the allegations may be inspired by a book by Mark Judge concerning his own drinking binges at the same high school Kavanaugh attended.
But Mark Judge himself described the accusations against his classmate Kavanaugh as “absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way.”
It was a mistake to schedule a special hearing, and delay it by a week, which gives the story-tellers more time to practice and embellish. Allegations about the distant past which lack details are not credible, and the Senate should proceed to vote on Judge Kavanaugh.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Obama’s Tired Rhetoric Is a Flashback to Globalism
By John and Andy Schlafly
September 11, 2018
Barack Obama’s return to the campaign trail is a violation of tradition and common sense. His tired rhetoric on globalism is a powerful reminder of how fortunate we are without him and the Clintons in power.
“Global governance” was the pejorative title of a video produced by Phyllis Schlafly in the ’90s that successfully converted the concept into an object of scorn. Yet here is Obama recycling Bill Clinton’s discredited push for world government at a time which most nations are rejecting it.
Even in the liberal bastion of Sweden, the electorate delivered a mortal blow to globalism there on Sunday by voting in record numbers for an anti-immigration party. In Italy, the globalists were voted out of office earlier this year.
Perhaps it is too much work for Obama to update Bill Clinton’s speeches to keep up with the times. Obama spoke within the safe space of a liberal university campus, where few of the attendees were likely aware of the widespread repudiation of globalism.
The liberal college audience rewarded Obama with applause for every vacuous, anachronistic statement that he made. He flattered his academic sounding board by complaining that “demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems.”
Obama had eight long years to fix the problems of a broken economy, a North Korean dictator with nuclear weapons, ISIS terrorists, and the perpetual war in Afghanistan. He fixed none of those problems, but he did enact an incredibly complex scheme for health care.
Due to Obama’s refusal to support simple solutions, like tax cuts, he was the only president in American history to fail to achieve at least 3% annual growth in GDP. The economy took off like a rocket the day after Trump was elected and hasn’t stopped since.
Obama’s sleep-inducing platitudes tried to rehabilitate the discredited idea of globalism that is in retreat across the world. He praised a “bipartisan leadership” (otherwise known as the Deep State) which developed “norms” and a “consensus” that “extended beyond our borders.”
“From the wreckage of World War II,” Obama continued, despite being born in 1961, “we built a postwar web, architecture, system of alliances and institutions.” He left out how European countries are trying to unwind and disentangle that failed system, and how Europe lags the U.S. economically.
Obama’s backward-looking speech was a rehash of his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Bill Clinton, who spoke of a “web of institutions and arrangements” that set “the international ground rules for the 21st century.” Clinton urged Americans to support what he called “the emerging international system,” such as the International Criminal Court.
Mercifully, the Obama-Clinton claptrap received a rip-roaring response Monday from President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton. In a powerful speech to the Federalist Society, Bolton took aim at “the global governance dogma,” picking up where Phyllis Schlafly left off.
Two decades ago, when few stood up against Bill Clinton on this issue, Phyllis was delivering speeches to packed hotel ballrooms lambasting Clinton’s globalist agenda. With her witty play on Hillary Clinton’s book that it supposedly takes a village to raise a child, Phyllis asked a crowded Louisiana audience in 1998, “Is it the global village that’s supposed to raise your child?”
No, it’s not, and she urged the United States to repudiate the International Criminal Court after Bill Clinton signed us up. In 2002, Bolton persuaded President George W. Bush to unsign what Clinton had signed, to keep us out of that anti-American institution.
In his landmark speech on Monday, Bolton called the repudiation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) his “happiest day in government.” Now he will take steps to prevent American servicemen from being prosecuted by the rogue tribunal masquerading as a court.
Bolton issued a stern warning that judges and prosecutors of the ICC would themselves be prosecuted, sanctioned, and have their travel restricted by the United States if they dare investigate American citizens, particularly our soldiers. For once Americans have an administration protecting them, as Obama and Clinton should have done while they were president.
Bolton spoke to preempt threatened action by the ICC against Americans. With all the good that the United States brings to the rest of the world, it is disgraceful that the ICC would even think about bringing politically motivated charges against American citizens.
Bolton indicated that he may not stop there, but is also considering freedom for the United States from other institutions of global governance, such as the World Trade Organization. President Trump has stated his interest in withdrawing us from that international group, and the sooner the better.
We applaud Bolton's statement that his and the Trump Administration’s “view is that Americans govern Americans. How’s that for a radical thought?” he humorously added as Phyllis Schlafly might have.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
California versus Trump on Phony Net Neutrality
by John and Andy Schlafly
September 4, 2018
As part of its never-ending resistance to the Trump agenda, the California legislature has just passed a bill to reinstate the discredited concept of “net neutrality” for access to the internet. A bill described as the nation’s strongest form of net neutrality awaits the signature of lame duck Governor Jerry Brown.
Net neutrality is as phony as “free trade,” in that both are wonderful only for those getting the better end of the deal. Google, Facebook, and other California companies have been getting a free ride on net neutrality because it enables them to avoid paying their enormous share of internet traffic.
Net neutrality is a fiction invented by Silicon Valley monopolies to stop cable companies from charging them for their huge amounts of traffic. Yet these same monopolies do not believe in neutrality in how they conduct business, by censoring political content they dislike.
The many billions in profits flowing to the Silicon Valley companies is partly due to how they hog traffic on the internet for free, without paying their full costs. They avoid paying, for example, the many billions of dollars needed to bring internet service to people’s homes.
Imagine a toll road where big trucking companies did not have to pay a dime. This would result in overuse of the toll road by trucks, and underfunding of road improvements.
The free market would be far superior to the phony net neutrality that enriches only Silicon Valley, because the free market enables the owner to charge fees based on use of its property. Free enterprise is also better in protecting free speech and preventing censorship.
Once the favoritism is ended, whether on the internet or roads, then better facilities would be built and more efficient usage would occur. The internet could be light years ahead of where it is now, if net neutrality stopped giving billionaire companies a free ride.
Without net neutrality, the public would have far better and faster internet service than we have today, because cable companies could raise money from the traffic hogs to improve the service. Instead, billions of dollars line the wallets of Silicon Valley executives who invest very little of it in improving internet service.
Under the superior, free-market-based approach adopted by President Trump, companies that carry internet traffic would be able to negotiate with the traffic hogs to compel them to pay their fair share of costs rather than freeload off others. Google and Facebook would then no longer be able to discriminate against conservatives and shift their costs to us too.
The public who pays the cable costs could then insist on access to the content that they want, which they cannot do now as Silicon Valley censors it.
The Silicon Valley companies do not want any rules of neutrality to apply to them, of course, as they exclude conservatives to appease their liberal base. They demand net neutrality only when it favors them, and oppose any requirement that they be fair to content with which liberals disagree.
The California legislators know who butters their bread, and their Democrat majority just passed a bill that interferes with President Trump’s better approach of allowing competition to rule the internet. SB 822 is being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, and he has not yet said whether he will sign it by his deadline of September 30.
This new California law would prohibit cable companies and other internet service providers from charging high-traffic users more. This ban is an encroachment on the rights of private property, because the owner of the internet service should be able to require traffic hogs to pay rather than freeload on the private property.
Under the California law, cable companies and their millions of customers could not tell Google and Facebook to stop discriminating against content that people want. The California law inverts the internet by allowing Silicon Valley to dictate content on the internet, when internet users and internet providers should be able to tell Google to stop discriminating against Dennis Prager and other conservatives.
It is Google and Facebook that block access, and they want leverage to continue doing so. That is backwards as Trump and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recognize, and hopefully they will sue in federal court if California Governor Brown signs this ill-advised bill into law.
Meanwhile, Congress is holding a hearing this week to review San Francisco-based Twitter’s bias against conservatives. The FTC could be investigating Google’s unfair business practices, Sen. Orrin Hatch points out.
Internet service providers may sue to overturn the California law, which would establish one system in that State which is different from most other States. California is essentially trying to force its self-interest on the rest of us with respect to the internet, to which California has no special claim of right.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
End NAFTA, Starting with Mexican Trucks
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 28, 2018
President Trump’s bold action in renegotiating NAFTA with Mexico caught his critics and hostile Canadian officials off guard. Short for the “North American Free Trade Agreement,” NAFTA has been a mistake plaguing us ever since the Clinton Administration pushed it into law in 1993.
The Canadian government has been pursuing an anti-Trump agenda, but now they are begging to be included in the new deal with Mexico. Trump has responded that Canada will be allowed into the deal on terms that are good for America, but Canada will get slapped with tariffs if it insists on the favoritism that it received in the past.
Trump is reportedly limiting a massive loophole which has cost us auto manufacturing jobs. He is requiring that 75% of a car’s value be made in North America in order to qualify for the exemption from tariffs, up from the lax 62.5% threshold allowed by NAFTA.
Trump is also properly insisting that cars contain a greater amount of American aluminum, steel and other essential parts. The new deal will require that 40 to 45% of cars be manufactured by workers who are paid at least $16 an hour, which would reduce reliance on cheap foreign labor.
NAFTA has been a scourge on our country perpetrated the globalists, who hide behind the misleading term “free trade” to justify their destruction of American jobs. Real wages in the United States have not improved for workers in many decades, and the offshoring of manufacturing under NAFTA is a big reason why.
It is not “free trade” to export American technology to foreign countries for manufacturing there, and to give away our American trade secrets as many companies have been doing with China. Corporate executives enrich themselves with this approach and create a two-tier society having a massive gap between the rich and poor, as exists in Silicon Valley today.
NAFTA narrowly passed 234–200 in the House of Representatives despite opposition by both liberals and conservatives. NAFTA fell far short of the two-thirds vote needed to ratify a treaty, but President Bill Clinton signed it into law anyway.
Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary for president in 2016 by pointing out that NAFTA and other disastrous trade agreements are what destroyed Detroit. Then Donald Trump defeated Hillary in that same traditionally Democratic state to win the presidency, again by criticizing Hillary’s support of bad trade deals like NAFTA.
NAFTA has been a job-killer and worse. NAFTA has flooded our communities with illegal drugs and illegal aliens, as far away from the southern border as New Hampshire and Iowa.
Due primarily to NAFTA, imports to our country from Mexico increased more than five-fold in the first two decades after NAFTA became law. But it is inevitable that this massive increase in legal imports from the crime-ridden foreign country would bring in much that is illegal and harmful, too.
In 2015, despite the failure of a pilot test program, President Obama extended NAFTA to allow Mexican trucks to carry loads deep into the United States with drivers having only a Mexican, not American, driver’s license. This has harmed towns near the border that had nice businesses to transfer truckloads of Mexican shipments to qualified American drivers for delivery throughout the United States.
President Trump should completely end the invasion of Mexican trucks in the United States, and not merely modify it. Mexican trucks are not as safe as American ones, and Mexican drivers have been involved in horrific crashes possibly caused by their limited English ability.
One can only guess at how much in illegal drugs flows into our Nation from Mexico due to NAFTA, because only a tiny fraction of all incoming containers are actually inspected. Moreover, drugs are cleverly concealed in other shipments such that they can escape detection even when their containers are the subject of inspection.
The rise in vicious drug lords and gangs that render Mexico so dangerous today coincided with NAFTA and the increase in drug importation into the United States. It is a myth perpetrated by globalists in claiming that NAFTA has been beneficial to Mexico, when in fact it has resulted in uncontrollable murders by drug gangs there.
Few remember presidential candidate Ross Perot, but in 1992 he attracted 19% in the presidential election by talking about the “giant sucking sound going south” if NAFTA became law. The loss of manufacturing jobs has indeed resulted, as American companies used NAFTA to move good jobs to Mexico.
Now many of those jobs should be coming back, thanks to President Trump’s tough approach to negotiations with Mexico and Canada. If he can also keep the Mexican trucks off our interstate highways then that will be an added bonus for all Americans.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Social Media Must Stop Censoring Conservatives
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 21, 2018
The biggest threat to what some call “our democracy” is not collusion with Russia, but collusion among high-tech monopolies in Silicon Valley to censor Trump supporters. The strong-arm tactics of the Leftists who control Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple are making the Pravda of the former Soviet Union look like a free speech paradise in comparison.
Shadowbanning conservative users, which consists of blocking or hindering the distribution of their internet content without telling them, is a particularly pernicious form of censorship. The victim sees fewer viewers for his postings but does not know why.
Other tactics to stifle conservatives on the internet have included taking down their YouTube videos, excluding their “apps” from smart phones, and disabling links from Facebook to conservative websites. The problem is so pervasive that it has attracted the attention of House Republicans and President Trump himself.
On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that “Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen.”
The timing of this political censorship less than 60 days from the beginning of early voting in the midterms is no coincidence. Control of the House of Representatives hangs in the balance, and censoring Trump supporters gives Democrat candidates an unfair advantage.
“Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen,” President Trump continued. “Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”
“I won’t mention names,” the president said in an interview with Reuters, “but when they take certain people off of Twitter or Facebook and they’re making that decision, that is really a dangerous thing because that could be you tomorrow.”
The Department of Justice should take Trump’s tweets to heart, and investigate the Silicon Valley monopolies. If DOJ can afford $50 million for Robert Mueller to search for Russian collusion in the last election, then it should have enough money to expose how conservative speech is restricted by the corporations that control our social media.
Competition is a necessary condition of the American free enterprise system, but there is no real competition in social media or Silicon Valley. Instead, a privileged few are abusing their monopoly power to silence an essential segment of political dialog: conservative speech.
The Sherman Act, landmark Republican legislation passed way back in 1890, provides the Trump Administration all the tools it needs to stop the censorship. Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and the other California companies are violating the Sherman Act by restraining trade in the services they offer, as well as by attempting to monopolize the main channels of communication on the internet.
Senator John McCain’s political idol, President Theodore Roosevelt, would be telling Trump to bust up the Silicon Valley monopolies that are censoring conservatives. Not even John D. Rockefeller’s massive oil monopoly, a target of Roosevelt’s trust-busting, ever tried to impose censorship of American political opinion.
Teddy Roosevelt was also very Trump-like on the need for immigrants to assimilate and learn to speak our common English language. In addition to Trump’s positions on securing our borders, the first President Roosevelt would have applauded Trump for recently praising a U.S. Border Patrol agent who “speaks perfect English.”
While the Justice Department is preoccupied with searching for a nonexistent Russia conspiracy, another Trump cabinet member, Dr. Ben Carson, has issued a challenge to one of the social media giants. On Friday, Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) accused Facebook of discriminating against its users, in a Housing Discrimination Complaint.
Facebook makes its enormous profits by extracting demographic information about its users and then delivering that information to advertisers for a price. By doing so, Facebook “invites advertisers to express unlawful preferences by offering discriminatory options, allowing them to effectively limit housing options for these protected classes under the guise of ‘targeted advertising,’” Dr. Carson’s HUD said in a statement.
“The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination including those who might limit or deny housing options with a click of a mouse,” said the HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Anna María Farías. Facebook violates federal law by allowing its advertisers to unlawfully control which users receive housing-related ads based upon the recipient’s race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, and/or zip code.
The Leftist strategy to censor is bound to fail, and gives Republicans a campaign issue for the fall. Defending the right of free speech against censorship is an issue that resonates strongly with young voters, on whom Democrats traditionally rely for their margin of victory.
The political irony is rich. Democrats are making President Trump the new champion of free speech, and deservedly so.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Stephen Miller is our Rock of Gibraltar
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 14, 2018
When the Left resorts to digging up someone’s uncle to smear someone, then you know they are getting desperate. Yet that is the pathetic length to which the Trump-haters are going, to try to stop the most effective adviser in the White House.
Stephen Miller has been the guiding light on President Trump’s agenda to make America safe again after decades of illegal immigration and open borders. He is extraordinary in how he both writes Trump’s speeches on many topics, while also giving him substantive advice on the most important issues.
It has taken the media awhile to recognize that the low-key Miller is the Rock of Gibraltar in the White House amid the storms that fake news repeatedly creates. Miller is the one who stayed strong while House Speaker Paul Ryan and other sellouts on Capitol Hill demanded that Trump cave on DACA and other immigration controversies.
Phyllis Schlafly praised Miller back when he was crafting immigration policy for then-Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Miller authored detailed, highly effective reports against open borders while he worked for Sen. Sessions, which Phyllis then distributed nationwide.
When John McCain ran for president in 2008, Phyllis educated the grassroots in Iowa about the immigration issue and urged them to question McCain at gatherings he attended around the state. He expressed surprise and dismay afterwards about how significant the immigration issue had become in rural Iowa.
Significant indeed. Since then Miller first guided Senator Sessions and then President Trump on the issue, championing the needs of America against those who hate us around the world.
Enter Dr. David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist and Miller’s uncle who wrote a recent article highly critical of his nephew Stephen Miller in Politico.com. It is unclear if Dr. Glosser knows Miller well enough to criticize him on a personal level; instead, Dr. Glosser relies on how Miller’s maternal grandmother immigrated through Ellis Island more than a century ago without being able to speak English.
But those immigrants worked hard to learn English and assimilate fully into American society, and they raised their children to love America. Many of the Ellis Island immigrants, like Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, were highly patriotic and outspokenly supportive of America.
Justice Frankfurter, for example, was so patriotic that he voted against a constitutional right for any schoolchild to refuse to salute the American flag. The Supreme Court ultimately decided that issue in favor of a First Amendment right not to salute, but the immigrant Justice Frankfurter passionately dissented in support of West Virginia and its mandatory salute to the American flag in public school.
Stephen Miller has described how his experiences at his own public high school helped shape his views. He quoted President Teddy Roosevelt in his high school yearbook: "There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country."
Now Stephen Miller is reviving the “public charge” doctrine to reduce public welfare handouts to immigrants. If someone has been milking the taxpayers for Obamacare and other welfare programs, then why should he be granted American citizenship?
We do not have enough resources in the United States to give perpetual handouts to the rest of the world, and we should not be attracting immigrants who want to live on such entitlements here. Miller should take sensible steps to tie citizenship to self-reliance, and he does not need approval by Congress to do so.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the Trump Administration “is committed to enforcing existing immigration law, which is clearly intended to protect the American taxpayer by ensuring that foreign nationals seeking to enter or remain in the U.S are self-sufficient.” The Department added that it “takes the responsibility of being good stewards of taxpayer funds seriously and adjudicates immigration benefit requests in accordance with the law.”
Bravo! But liberals are howling mad, decrying how this could affect one million people in New York City alone.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, explained decades ago that “in a welfare state … the supply of immigrants will become infinite.” In other words, the combination of immigration and the welfare state is a recipe for economic disaster.
For example, liberals want Medicare for All, by which they mean all residents, legal and illegal. That is projected to cost the American taxpayer an astronomical $32.6 trillion over ten years.
President Trump can save us from that by enforcing "public charge" doctrine, by which all participants in such government handouts will be disqualified from obtaining American citizenship. This will advance Trump’s goal of attracting the best from other countries, not those who are least willing to work.
We are grateful to Stephen Miller for his courageous stance on immigration. Not even the welcoming poem at the Statue of Liberty invites those who are coming here for a handout.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Congress AWOL as Courts Derail the Trump Train
by John and Andy Schlafly
August 7, 2018
President Trump’s party controls Congress, but one would never know that by how it has been AWOL (absent without leave) while courts block Trump at every turn. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House who is retiring at the age of only 48, is doing so little that the public might wonder if he is even still in office.
Meanwhile, the judicial war of resistance against Trump continues unabated. In the last few days and weeks, federal courts have issued rulings requiring Trump to restart DACA, fund sanctuary cities, stop asking about citizenship in the census, include transgenders in the interpretation of Title IX, reunite illegal alien “families” even where the adults are criminals who have already been deported, and so on.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement on Monday criticizing the rash of judicial activism against the Trump Administration. “We have recently witnessed a number of decisions in which courts have improperly used judicial power to steer, enjoin, modify, and direct executive policy,” General Sessions explained.
“This ignores the wisdom of our Founders and transfers policy making questions from the constitutionally empowered and politically accountable branches to the judicial branch,” he said. General Sessions vowed that the “Trump Administration and this Department of Justice will continue to aggressively defend the executive branch’s lawful authority and duty to ensure a lawful system of immigration for our country.”
New lawsuits against policies Trump campaigned on are being filed by the Left nearly every day. Last week four liberal-controlled cities – Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Columbus – asked a federal court to force Trump to support Obamacare.
Imitating a familiar pattern pursued by liberals in other cases, the new lawsuit for Obamacare quotes out-of-court statements by President Trump as though they were evidence. For example, the lawsuit demands relief because Trump has said that “essentially, we have gotten rid of” Obamacare.
The power vacuum on Capitol Hill encourages judicial supremacy, as courts see that Congress is not providing any check or balance to the overreach by the judicial branch. Like unsupervised kids in a candy store, judges will grab as much power as they can until Congress checks their conduct.
The Supreme Court does too little, too late to rein in lower courts that legislate from the bench. Deciding only 58 argued cases during its recently ended term, the Supreme Court has been barely more than a remote outpost that takes far too long to protect our Constitutional rights.
In the last year the Supreme Court has ducked issues and declined to accept appeals on anti-Second Amendment rulings upholding gun control, and an anti-First Amendment ruling censoring videos taken by pro-life David Daleiden. This renders liberal Courts of Appeals the last word on key issues.
In a tactic known as forum shopping, Trump’s opponents file their lawsuits in courts where Democratic trial judges will likely rule in their favor at the district court level. Then, a year or two later at the appellate level, the overwhelmingly Democrat-nominated judges in the Fourth and Ninth Circuits predictably affirm.
Trump ultimately prevailed when the Supreme Court reinstated his temporary, so-called travel ban from several hostile nations, but it took nearly a year-and-a-half to do so, even with the expedited attention that case received. That wasteful litigation consumed more than a third of Trump’s entire first term in office, and far too much of his personal time, allowing uncertainty to persist and undermine other actions that Trump could have been taking for our country.
The Ninth Circuit presides over a fifth of our nation’s population – more than 64 million people – and more than two-thirds of its active judges were appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. Despite seven vacancies on that Circuit for Trump to fill, the Senate has so far confirmed only one, a compromise nominee opposed by more than half the Republican senators due to his weakness on the Second Amendment.
More than a decade ago, Congress did take an important step to curb judicial hostility to the Second Amendment. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) prohibits all courts, both federal and state, from entertaining lawsuits against gun manufacturers for crimes committed by their products.
This good law stands as a model of what Congress should also be doing to rein in the courts on additional issues where they are out of control. Despite the resounding success of the PLCAA in achieving its stated goal to “preserve a citizen’s access to a supply of firearms and ammunition,” Congress has not yet expanded this approach to eliminate other judicial activism.
Immigration policy is an issue uniquely within the domain of the President and Congress, and courts should have little say in the matter. Congress should take heed of Attorney General Sessions’ criticisms of judicial overreach on immigration, and withdraw the issue from the courts.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Revoke the Deep State’s Security Clearances
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 24, 2018
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, our wonderful White House Press Secretary, sent liberals into a tizzy on Monday with her announcement that President Trump is considering revoking the security clearances of several Deep State leaders. John Brennan, a liberal mouthpiece who became Obama’s CIA director after having once voted for the Communist Party for president, would be among the first to lose his security clearance.
Oh my. The Left has not panicked so much since the Election Night returns put Donald Trump into the White House.
Another candidate for revocation is Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser thought to have improperly obtained the identity of General Michael Flynn on a wiretap. The since-replaced national security adviser H.R. McMaster allowed Rice to retain her security clearance, waiving the customary “need-to-know” requirement to allow Rice unlimited access to anything she ever reviewed or received when in office.
In addition to Brennan and Rice, revocation is being considered for the discredited FBI officials James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, and the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. It was Clapper who famously lied under oath to Congress about his secret surveillance program of Americans.
“They’ve politicized, and in some cases, monetized their public service,” explained Sanders to the media on Monday. “Making baseless accusations of an improper relationship with Russia is inappropriate,” Sanders added.
Sanders is precisely right that “the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.” Those who repeatedly make false accusations against our Commander-in-Chief are unfit to be trusted with confidential information about our national security.
The Never-Trumpers will always enjoy their First Amendment rights, but they should not have access to our national secrets while they are writing books and profiting from their irresponsible, false claims about our president. Some of them respond by saying their ability to see classified information has already been terminated, but those security clearances could be easily reinstated unless Trump revokes them.
Americans voted for a new direction for our country under President Trump, in repudiation of the path that Obama was taking us, so why are the losers still around pretending to speak with authority? Many Americans are probably wondering why the security clearances of these acolytes of Obama were not fully revoked long ago.
Phyllis Schlafly often criticized past Republican presidents who failed to “clean house” and replace the supporters of their defeated opponents. She extracted a promise from President Ronald Reagan that he would never appoint a Deep Stater from the Nixon-Ford era, Henry Kissinger, to anything of significance, and Reagan kept his promise.
Tossing out the entrenched insiders who are so determined to defeat President Trump requires, at a minimum, taking away the special authority they unjustifiably continue to enjoy. John Brennan and James Clapper would still be able to pontificate all they like on television, but they should not be able to do so with the implied authority of an active security clearance.
Late last Friday, in a delayed release to avoid the news cycle, the Deep State finally partially complied with a court order to hand over its FISA application for wiretaps of a former adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016, Carter Page. The heavily redacted, secret application was for repeated wiretaps of Carter Page’s phone, in an unsuccessful attempt by the Deep State to catch Trump in a misstep on a secretly recorded line.
FISA stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which authorizes secret proceedings to order wiretaps that would not ordinarily be allowed. This shadow system enabling investigators to obtain wiretaps from a secret court has grown ever since, with no meaningful check or balance.
The FISA application to wiretap the Trump adviser is filled with innuendo and false allegations that came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Wiretaps of someone connected with a presidential campaign, on such a flimsy basis, bring new meaning to the term “rubber stamp” in describing how the FISA court grants whatever the Deep State demands.
Allies of Brennan, Clapper, and the others, protest that President Trump may lack the authority to revoke their security clearances, but the power of the president to do so can hardly be doubted. They may run to court to enjoin the president on this, but hardly any Supreme Court Justice would rule against the presidential power to decide, in his own discretion, who should not have a security clearance.
“Mr. Strzok — as I understand — has lost his security clearance,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared last month about the disgraced FBI official Peter Strzok who stated he would “stop” Trump from becoming president. Trump should take similar action to ensure that others like him do not continue to have special access to our nation’s most confidential information.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Remarkable Press Conference
July 17, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
President Trump’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was remarkable in how Trump refused to pay homage to liberal fiction about hackers stealing the last election. Instead, Trump went on the offensive and laid blame for deteriorating relations with Russia where blame is due: at the doorstep of Mueller’s delusional investigation.
Many on the Left dislike Russia now because it is an increasingly Christian country that changed the name of Leningrad to Saint Petersburg and even enacts pro-life laws. Communism was overthrown in Russia more than a quarter-century ago, and its trend toward conservative values today angers Leftists immensely.
President Trump batted away the anti-Russian questions at the presser in Helsinki, and explained that there was “zero collusion” between hackers and his “clean” campaign that trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016. After more than a year of looking for collusion and not finding any, Mueller’s investigation should be winding down rather than winding up.
But last week, in a transparent attempt to disrupt the Trump-Putin summit, Mueller indicted the equivalent of 12 more ham sandwiches. Elusive hackers, a high-tech counterpart to witches of yesteryear, supposedly entered the Democratic National Committee’s computers when no one was looking and had no discernible impact on any election results.
Mueller was never given a blank check to investigate thousands of hackers, who may merely be teenage boys engaging in mischief on the internet from the basement of their parents’ homes. Mueller was authorized to investigate alleged collusion by the Trump campaign, of which there was no evidence, and tens of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars later, there is still no such evidence.
So far Mueller has indicted 25 Russian individuals and three Russian companies on charges that Mueller knows he will never have to prove in a court of law. At one hearing an attorney pointed out to the judge how one of the companies did not even exist at the time it was alleged to have done wrongdoing.
Senator Rand Paul stands with President Trump in repeatedly criticizing Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt,” pointing out that Trump’s alleged nefarious ties with Russia are a “hoax.” On Sunday, Senator Paul explained that it is a “waste of time” to attempt to penalize Putin for alleged interference by Russian hackers in American elections.
Meanwhile, Never-Trumpers came out of the woodwork once again to try to find fault with Trump. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, an ally of the Koch brothers and other Never-Trumpers, declared from the Senate floor that “everyone in this body should be disgusted by what happened in Helsinki.”
Sen. Sasse himself has an abysmal approval rating in the strongly conservative state of Nebraska, as Never-Trumper Sen. Jeff Flake has in Arizona. Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, a Trump supporter, is being urged to run against Sasse in two years but so far Ricketts has declined in order to focus first on another term as governor.
Retiring congressman Trey Gowdy, a rising star until he opposed Trump, has apparently also fallen for Mueller’s indictment stunts. Gowdy absurdly suggested that Trump should ask Putin where the 25 Russian witches, that is, hackers, can be picked up.
Gowdy has given Mueller more job security than anyone else in D.C., by implicitly inviting him to spend years indicting more ham sandwiches. No problem, the American taxpayer will be stuck with the tab of tens of millions of dollars.
President Trump’s takedown of the media concerning Mueller is an encore to draining the swamp of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). That entrenched bureaucracy has been bilking the American taxpayer for years while we get nothing in return.
NATO developed as a counterweight to the communist Soviet Union, but with Russia becoming more conservative than Europe it is unclear why we are still spending billions on NATO. Its largest country, Germany, is dependent on Russia for natural gas and no amount of American troops in Europe can force Russia to turn that pipeline on if she were one day to shut it off.
“Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting between 60 and 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline,” observed Trump at the opening of the recent NATO summit. “It’s a very bad thing for NATO, and I don’t think it should have happened,” he properly explained.
NATO member Poland, also a formerly communist country that is increasingly conservative, immediately praised Trump’s criticisms of Germany’s self-defeating globalism. Poland is buying natural gas from the United States and President Andrzej Duda astutely observed that “one of the most important goals for the European Union in the energy sector” should be to avoid dependency on any particular foreign country.
Globalists are not pleased by President Trump’s one-two punch abroad. But standing against globalism plays well with the American voter, as it should.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Cements Legacy with SCOTUS Pick
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 10, 2018
With his second conservative nomination to the Supreme Court, President Trump has already exceeded Ronald Reagan. Brett Kavanaugh is stellar on immigration and sovereignty, the life issue, and the Second Amendment.
Trump made this look easy, but liberals did everything they could to dissuade him from selecting Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacancy left by Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. A coordinated, sophisticated campaign to criticize Kavanaugh from the right was both insincere and deceptive.
The tiny Never-Trump wing of the Republican Party does not like how Kavanaugh has long agreed with Trump on core issues. Unlike Kavanaugh’s liberal rivals for nomination to the Supreme Court, he has participated in more than 3,800 cases and unflinchingly defended principles loathed by liberals.
How refreshing it is to actually have a Supreme Court nominee who supports American sovereignty, and does not defer to international law! Writing alone as he has often had to do on the liberal D.C. Circuit, Judge Kavanaugh has explained that the War Powers Clause is not restricted by international law.
That was in a 2016 decision which considered a challenge to a military commission by Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman Al Bahlul, who was convicted as the personal assistant to Osama bin Laden. Judge Kavanaugh stood strong against the lawsuit, as the entire Court of Appeals should have.
In another case that began in 2007, Judge Kavanaugh dissented from a decision that gave illegal aliens the same rights as American workers in forming unions for collective bargaining. Kavanaugh explained in dissent that “an illegal immigrant worker is not an ’employee’ under the NLRA for the simple reason that, ever since 1986, an illegal immigrant worker is not a lawful ’employee’ in the United States.”
On the Second Amendment, Judge Kavanaugh was on the panel that heard a challenge to DC's strict gun controls after the Supreme Court established an individual right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms. The majority of that panel then upheld the gun control as courts do across the country now.
Judge Kavanaugh strongly dissented from that pro-gun-control decision, and wrote in favor of a Second Amendment that should be defended as strongly by courts as the First Amendment is. Justice Clarence Thomas will have a strong ally on the Supreme Court for the Second Amendment once Kavanaugh is confirmed.
None of the other eight justices on the Supreme Court, including Neil Gorsuch, would join Justice Thomas’s dissent in February decrying how gun control laws are being upheld by Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court is refusing to accept those cases to review and reverse. The stark reality is that the Supreme Court has not taken a real Second Amendment case in years, and lower courts have gotten the message that they can uphold gun control laws without fear of being reversed.
Trump’s brilliant nomination of Kavanaugh to the High Court changes that. We can expect Kavanaugh to call out his colleagues if they continue to duck Second Amendment appeals, and his strong legal reasoning should help protect that fundamental right against further erosion.
On the life issue, liberals are of course sharpening their knives to try to block Kavanaugh from confirmation by insisting that he might overturn Roe v. Wade. But that is a very tough sell by the Left, as young people are increasingly pro-life and nearly a half-dozen Democratic Senators are running for reelection in pro-life states that Trump carried by a landslide.
The issue of Roe v. Wade has never sunk a nominee in the Senate, despite all the hoopla by pro-abortion feminists pretending that they can block a nominee on that issue. They failed in trying to block Justice Clarence Thomas on that issue, and were unable to block the confirmation of John Roberts or Samuel Alito, either.
We hope that Kavanaugh does not grovel to pro-abortion senators as they demand reassurances that the fallacy of Roe v. Wade be enshrined forever even though it has absolutely no basis in the Constitution. Kavanaugh need not answer questions about the issue, just as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set the precedent herself for declining to answer specific questions about cases.
The isolated criticisms of Kavanaugh by the Never-Trump crowd have been unjustified. His ruling to uphold a narrow part of a campaign finance law relating to political parties is not a core issue to the conservative movement, and certainly not a basis for opposing his nomination.
Justice Anthony Kennedy turned to the right in his final year on the bench, both in his decisions and in allowing Trump to fill his vacancy. It is unlikely that Justice Kennedy would find anything to criticize in this nomination of Kavanaugh for the seat that Kennedy is leaving, and neither should any Republican or moderate Democrat.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Can Surpass Reagan with His Pick
by John and Andy Schlafly
July 2, 2018
President Trump has a golden opportunity to surpass Reagan on the all-important issue of the Supreme Court. With a good pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump can achieve what Reagan could not.
As good as Reagan was, two out of his three Supreme Court Justices were disappointments. Reagan’s first selection was his worst, and Trump’s advisors should take care not to allow history to repeat that mistake.
Reagan chose Sandra Day O’Connor after she was inadequately vetted as to her liberal positions on abortion, the Establishment Clause, and feminism. Reagan erred by picking her because she was the first he interviewed for the job, without Reagan bothering to interview the other candidates.
Immediately it was obvious that Reagan and his advisors had blundered. Although Reagan had promised to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, his more important promise was to appoint pro-life judges and yet he broke that pledge with his first nominee.
Let’s do as Reagan said when he urged a “trust but verify” approach. Whether by mistake or design, there are several candidates on Trump’s list who should not be nominated for Kennedy’s seat.
One candidate would fail to honor Trump’s pro-life pledge, and another would violate Trump’s Second Amendment pledge. The selection of either would be a devastating setback to the Trump agenda.
Ms. Joan Larsen was a volunteer for Joe Biden for president in 1987, where she helped with mailings and telephoning for Biden's campaign as she admitted on her Senate questionnaire. That political work for Biden is not something a pro-lifer would do.
Ms. Larsen has claimed there is sexism in the career of law, a common refrain by those who support abortion under the guise of equal rights for women. She has encountered Roe v. Wade often, without criticizing it.
Ms. Larsen, who kept her last name after marrying a law professor, is touted by her supporters as having been a law professor herself at the liberal University of Michigan law school. But in fact she never obtained a tenured chair, and her writings are not up to the level of real law professors.
The other candidate on the short list who should not be picked is Raymond Kethledge, whose selection would violate Trump’s pledge on the Second Amendment. Judge Kethledge notably failed to support the “strict scrutiny” standard for the Second Amendment that is essential to safeguarding the right to keep and bear arms.
Sixteen years of court-packing by Presidents Clinton and Obama have left most of our Nation’s population under pro-gun-control Courts of Appeals. The population-heavy 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 9th, 11th, and D.C. Circuits are all dominated by judges who refuse to treat the Second Amendment with the same respect they give to the First Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas laments how gun control laws are being upheld by the Courts of Appeals, and then petitions to the Supreme Court to review those decisions are being denied. Justice Thomas explained in February, in his dissent from one of those denials of cert, that the strict scrutiny standard of review used for the First Amendment is not being applied as it should be to the Second Amendment.
Yet there Judge Kethledge was in 2016, refusing to join an opinion by conservative judge Danny Boggs to adopt the strict scrutiny standard of review for the Second Amendment in the Sixth Circuit. Kethledge typifies the problem that Justice Thomas subsequently highlighted in explaining why gun control laws are not being overturned.
In Sherlock Holmes’ classic “Silver Blaze,” the compelling evidence overlooked by Scotland Yard was the failure of a dog to bark when a midnight visitor stole a prized racehorse away from his stall. That meant the dog knew the criminal, and the compelling evidence of silence should be a criterion in vetting the replacement for Justice Kennedy.
Many important decisions are made by the Supreme Court in refusing to grant a petition for cert, as it did earlier this year in denying David Daleiden’s petition concerning the infringement on his rights by the Ninth Circuit. By denying that petition and others like it, the Supreme Court allows anti-life, and anti-Second Amendment, rulings by liberal appellate courts to stand.
We do not need justices who are timid about speaking out or reviewing and reversing liberal decisions that come out of the Ninth and other Circuits. Similarly, we do not want a nominee who is unwilling to overturn prior mistakes of the Supreme Court itself.
Of all the pitiful clamor by Democrats and a few liberal Republicans, the most preposterous is their demand that the nominee refuse to overrule Court precedent. Every year the Supreme Court overturns its own mistakes, as it should, including its recent overruling of its own precedent of 41 years ago that wrongly imposed mandatory dues on government employees.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Triumphant Trump Vindicated Again
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 26, 2018
Only Donald Trump wins as comfortably in the hushed halls of the Supreme Court as on the backroads of rural America. In the past few days he has triumphed before the Supreme Court, leads by 51-36% in the latest approval poll concerning his economic policies, and prevailed by an incalculable margin in rebuking the restaurant that denied service to his press secretary and her family.
The new liberal strategy of harassing Trump officials is backfiring. As leading Democrats themselves recognize in unsuccessfully trying to rein in their extremists, it is un-American to harass fellow Americans for their political views.
Time magazine piled on with a ridiculous cover image of President Trump standing stubbornly over a little girl detained at our border. Yanela Hernandez was supposed to become the poster child for family separation, after she was brought here by her mother all the way from Honduras.
But it is the facts that are stubbornly ruining the anti-Trump script. The girl was actually separated from her father not by Trump but by her own mother, who took the child on a dangerous 3-week, 1,600-mile journey without telling her husband (the girl’s father).
Nearly 20 years ago, a 5-year-old Cuban boy named Elián González was brought by his mother on a dangerous journey to Florida. Elián was placed with relatives in the United States after his mother drowned, but as demanded by liberals President Clinton ordered him seized him at gunpoint and returned to communist Cuba.
Illegal immigration is what is separating families, not President Trump. Yanela Hernandez would not have been taken away from her family in Honduras if we had sensible border control.
Referring to the deprivation of his little girl from him by her mother in Honduras, her father Denis Hernandez told a reporter for the Daily Mail, “I do think it was irresponsible of her to take the baby with her, because we don’t know what could happen.”
“I thank God I have a good job here,” Mr. Hernandez said from his home in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, which is safe enough to be a tourist destination. “I would never risk my life making that journey.”
This case illustrates someone who should be sent back immediately without a judicial hearing, since the Hernandez family has no basis for claiming asylum or refugee status. When Trump suggested that, a news story in the New York Times declared it was “an escalation of his attacks on the judicial system.”
That criticism of Trump is ironic in light of the Supreme Court ruling in his favor on Tuesday, for which he patiently waited for nearly a year-and-a-half. Far from attacking the judicial system, Trump fully complied with all its procedures and prevailed as the Court upheld his so-called travel ban from nations hostile to us.
Let’s hope lower federal courts take a cue from the Supreme Court in deferring to presidential authority in these matters. But earlier this month, on June 6, a federal judge in San Diego allowed the ACLU to continue its lawsuit against the “practice” of separating migrant children from their parents without showing that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.
On June 5, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement blasting the Trump administration’s policy of zero tolerance for illegal entry into the United States. The statement ordered our government to “stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense — that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S.”
The UN human rights office accused our government of committing “a serious violation of the rights of the child,” before complaining that the U.S. “is the only country in the world not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.” That’s right, the United States has wisely refused to ratify that dangerous UN treaty since the 1990s, when it was pushed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and properly opposed by Phyllis Schlafly.
On June 19, the U.S. formally withdrew from a related UN agency called the Human Rights Council, whose members include some of the most repressive regimes on earth. Ambassador Nikki Haley denounced the council, which has passed more resolutions to condemn Israel specifically than to condemn Syria, Iran and North Korea combined, as “an organization that is unworthy of its name.”
Another globalist tribunal which our country declined to join more than 15 years ago is the international criminal court, located in the Hague. That did not stop a clueless protester from shouting at Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, that “you belong in the Hague!”
As hard as the Left smears and harasses him and his team, the stronger Trump becomes. “Triumphant Trump” emerges victorious again and again.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Should Stand Firm Against Illegals
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 19, 2018
The push for amnesty for illegal aliens is turbo-charged by stories of separating children from their parents at the southern border. But children are often separated from lawbreaking and even law-abiding American parents, so it is curious why liberals and others would suddenly complain when it happens to families for entering our country illegally.
The critics do not provide an alternative to the current policy of prosecuting lawbreaking parents while allowing their children to go free. If we had a border wall then these separations would not occur, and the critics of Trump are the same ones who oppose building the wall.
Migrant camps would be needed to keep all families together as the adults break the law, but that is a European rather than American approach. There is no crisis in Central America that justifies establishing refugee camps.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp,” President Trump rightly declared, “and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Not on my watch!”
The timing is suspicious for this media campaign about separating children from parents. The push for an amnesty bill has reached a fever pitch for more than a million young adults, who are euphemistically called “childhood arrivals” because many of them crossed our border illegally while teenagers.
These migrants would be wonderful assets to their homelands, and they have more relatives back home than they do here. Amnesty would merely encourage more illegality.
Lobbying groups in D.C. are turning up the heat on congressmen to get this amnesty passed, and the Koch donor network is demanding it, too. Big business benefits from cheap labor that crosses our borders illegally.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law an immigration bill that granted amnesty and created the incentive for more illegal immigration. Far from solving a problem, amnesty induces more illegal immigration in the future.
So to attract support by President Trump, the House compromise amnesty bill includes funding for construction of a border wall, to the tune of $25 billion. But funding a wall is not the same as building a wall, because liberals run to court to block almost anything Trump does related to immigration.
Before the ink could dry on such a bill, even if it were to pass the Senate intact, liberals would file suit to obtain injunctions blocking the construction of a wall. They would sue in predictably activist jurisdictions such as San Francisco and Hawaii, where multiple injunctions have already been issued to block Trump’s executive orders that were tame compared with a border wall.
Congress has the authority to “strip” federal courts of jurisdiction, and has done so on many occasions. As explained by Phyllis Schlafly in her classic book The Supremacists, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) once stripped jurisdiction from federal courts over challenges to brush-clearing in his home state.
Before President Trump signs any immigration bill, he should insist on broad jurisdiction-stripping provisions. He should demand that Congress remove federal court jurisdiction over his executive orders limiting travel from hostile nations.
If federal courts are allowed to wield authority over the construction of a border wall, then multiple Clinton – or Obama – appointed judges will surely enjoin its construction. Reasons given will range from environmentalism to non-existent prejudice.
Fortunately, few Republicans who want to win reelection will cross President Trump at this point, after his tweet sunk Never-Trumper Congressman Mark Sanford in his own primary in South Carolina. There is no reason for Trump to cave into Republicans now.
Lame duck House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is stepping down at the age of only 48 rather than fight for the Trump agenda, has long given priority to the agenda of the pro-illegal immigration lobbyists. But their goals are not those of the American people who elected Trump as president.
Trump announced that he is not going to sign the Ryan immigration bill, which reminds us again why Trump is so much better than any other Republican presidential candidate. Anyone else would have capitulated to the pressure from Republican mega-donors and lobbyists to sign into law an amnesty bill.
No immigration bill can become law without the support of President Trump, and House leaders are meeting with him on Tuesday to seek a compromise. Trump should adhere to non-negotiable requirements, including a withdrawal of jurisdiction from the courts over issues relating to construction of the wall, Trump’s executive orders concerning immigration, and challenges to deportation.
Congressmen Steve King and Lou Barletta, who is a candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania against a Democrat incumbent, have long been leaders on this all-important issue of immigration. Both oppose the compromise bill being pushed on President Trump, and no bill on immigration is worth supporting unless Representatives King and Barletta are on board.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump’s Winning Economic Positions
by John and Andy Schlafly
June 12, 2018
President Trump reasserted American leadership on trade and security in the last week, sending his doubters into disarray. Trump’s historic performance at the G-7 meeting in Canada, followed quickly by his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, left no doubt that America is indeed great again on the world stage.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s leftwing prime minister, was unnecessarily belligerent to Trump at the end of the G-7 summit, and Never-Trump Republicans should not have piled on. Lame duck Republican senator Jeff Flake, who is so unpopular in Arizona that he decided not to run for reelection, once again lashed out at Trump, as did other globalist Republicans.
But American workers are behind Trump, and the stock market shows no harmful effects of Trump’s pro-American, pro-tariff trade policies. The G-7 summit, a gathering of the leaders of seven large economies, demonstrated that it has become a farce.
It held a breakfast meeting devoted to “gender equality,” and we applaud how Trump showed up late for such an unproductive attempt at political correctness. The politicians at the G-7 summit are in denial about how voters throughout Europe, as in the United States and more recently in Italy, are rejecting the business-as-usual approach of the Establishment.
Meanwhile, although Trump’s pro-tariff positions receive all the attention, a little-noticed appointment back home may be nearly as important. Makan Delrahim, Trump’s handpicked leader of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, is working hard to ensure more competition domestically and Silicon Valley monopolies are nervous about this.
Small businesses create far more jobs than big business does, a fact lost on the pre-Trump Republican Party. President George W. Bush pursued policies favorable to big business and it all cratered in 2008, handling the election to Obama.
Once the home of countless tech start-ups, Silicon Valley has devolved into a two-tier society of haves and have-nots, and little real competition. A mere handful of giant companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google have exploited the H-1B visa program and failed to compete with each other for labor, such that salaries have not kept up with the cost of living there.
The latest average salary increase of tech workers in Silicon Valley — the region between San Francisco and San Jose that is the birthplace of many familiar technology behemoths — is only 0.4% per year. That is because there is not real competition there, but merely large companies that fight to maintain the status quo with them on top.
The cost of living goes up there, but real wages do not. The result is a large homeless population of people who simply cannot earn enough, even working multiple jobs, to afford housing.
Worn-out RVs line one edge of Stanford University, and homeless camps of families litter the landscape close to wealth centers like Google’s headquarters. Monopolies interfere with a healthy distribution of wealth, creating enormous disparities more familiar in countries like Mexico, where a few people control much of the property.
Big companies rarely innovate, and in fact often stifle inventions that threaten their dominance. The largest Silicon Valley companies have been most responsible for changing our patent system from one that rewarded the inventor to one that favors big business.
Trump’s outspoken criticism of Amazon.com has led others in his Administration and the Republican Party to look more critically at Silicon Valley monopolies like Facebook. The scrutiny is long overdue, and some antitrust enforcement may be just what the doctor ordered.
This is welcome relief from the failed policies of the administration of President George W. Bush, which rolled over for the Microsoft monopoly and got nothing for the American public in return. Bill Gates then poured some of his wealth into promoting Common Core and other liberal goals, which conservatives have fought ever since.
Many of these tech monopolies are too anxious to give away American trade secrets to China in exchange for making a few bucks in that market. Already China is manufacturing cheap smart phones, but where did it acquire the secrets to do so?
Apple itself did not invent the smart phone, as the Blackberry deserves more credit for that. But then Apple embarked on a business plan of selling in China, which typically requires giving China technology secrets to do so.
The profits Apple made on those sales have been mostly kept outside the United States, so they have not helped Americans at all. The long-term effect of Apple’s sales in China may simply be to transfer secret technology developed here to a foreign power hostile to the United States.
A strong antitrust policy against the monopolistic technology companies will complement Trump’s principled support of fair trade. Trump was right to reject the globalism of the G-7 summit, and to send a long-overdue message that the United States will no longer be taken for granted on trade.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Media Smear of Trump Backfires
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 29, 2018
Social media had a field day with a photo which appears to show that the Trump administration is keeping migrant children penned in cages along the U.S.-Mexican border. A photo that went viral shows two Hispanic children sleeping on a concrete floor behind a chain-link fence.
A news report that confirms what you already believe to be true is said to be “too good to check.” In this case, the photo seemed to corroborate what the media falsely believe about our President.
“Look at these pictures,” tweeted former President Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau. “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.”
The picture was retweeted by other anti-Trump personalities including Shaun King, an activist who supported Black Lives Matter. “Take a look at these pictures,” tweeted Linda Sarsour, the radical Muslim activist who co-founded the Women’s March.
Donald Trump, as usual, had the last laugh on his critics. The photo was actually taken in June 2014, when Barack Obama was President. The picture was one of 10 photos published by a Phoenix newspaper, the Arizona Republic, under the headline: “Immigrant children flood detention center.”
The children, about 900 in all, had crossed the border illegally in Texas without their parents. They were shipped to Nogales, Arizona where the U.S. government set up a makeshift processing center bigger than a football field.
“The children, mostly of high-school and junior-high-school age, are housed behind 18-foot-high chain-link fences topped with razor wire,” said the reporter who was allowed to visit the facility. “They pass the day sitting on benches or lying side by side on tiny blue mattresses pressed up against each other on nearly every square inch of the floor in the fenced areas.”
“Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages,” President Trump tweeted on the day after Memorial Day. “They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires.”
“Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country.” Once again, Donald Trump emerges the winner while his critics, like Linda Sarsour, debase themselves.
“Our immigration system was a disaster long before Trump came along,” Sarsour insisted after her gaffe was exposed. “Now it will become increasingly worse under this White Supremacist Administration.”
It’s all very frustrating to George Lakoff, a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California Berkeley. Lakoff has made a second career trying to teach Democrats how to communicate the progressive agenda to ordinary Americans.
“When you repeat Trump, you help Trump,” Professor Lakoff wrote in an exasperated post to his friends on the left. “You do this by spreading his message wide and far.
“Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. “Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them.
“Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate” wrote the distinguished professor, who published a whole book on how to frame the debate.
“When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.”
The 900 children who were pictured in Nogales were among the tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who flooded across the southern border in 2014. Under the Obama administration, most UACs were placed with relatives living illegally in the United States, instead of being returned to their parents in Honduras or Guatemala, as they should have been.
President Trump is determined to change the system that allows UACs from countries other than Mexico (OTM) to remain here indefinitely. When the number of UACs spiked this spring, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions took several steps to stem the flow.
Meanwhile, pro-immigration Republicans are pressuring Trump to cave by extending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) without building a border wall. A pro-immigration group funded in part by the Koch brothers, LIBRE, is running ads urging Congress to pass “a permanent solution for Dreamers.”
In the pro-amnesty Koch orbit is Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, who complained about Attorney General Sessions considering enforcement of federal laws against marijuana sales. Legalizing marijuana is another hobby horse of the Koch network of donors, to the detriment of average Americans.
President Trump is welcome relief from politicians who care more about donors than voters. Trump should continue to be a “choice, not an echo” on immigration, and stand firm for a border wall.
Phyllis Schlafly Report
Santa Fe School Was Victimized by Censorship of Prayer
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 22, 2018
Another tragic shooting at a public school leads to another round of liberal demands for gun control. But missing from their clamor is how this shooting by a former football player occurred at the very same high school where the Supreme Court censored prayer at football games in a ruling in 2000.
The ACLU insisted that student-led prayer be banned at this same high school, and the Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the ACLU and against the school in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. Ever since, prayer has not been allowed over the loudspeakers at games, prayer that the shooter would have heard because he played in many football games there.
Liberals are notably quiet in commenting on how prayer was eliminated at this same school by judicial activism from the Supreme Court. The gun control typically proposed would not have stopped this crime, because it was perpetrated by a shotgun, which is not semi-automatic, and a revolver.
The student killer should have attracted immediate scrutiny for how he would wear a black trench coat on hot Texan days, and had postings on Facebook that included a “Born to Kill” t-shirt and images of Satan and atheistic communism. Likewise, the former student who shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was widely known to be a risk for violence, and multiple complaints about him to law enforcement fell on deaf ears before he massacred 17.
Had either student been profiled based on his public behavior, then both tragedies might have been averted, or at least curtailed. A reasonable dress code would have prevented hiding a shotgun in a black trench coat on a hot day, or at least allowed immediate preventive action to be taken.
Nobody wants airport-style security at every entrance to a public school, but no one wants more carnage either. Yet rather than suggest workable approaches to prevent copycat incidents, senseless attempts to blame President Trump fill the airwaves.
Entering stage left is Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night comedian who broke the record for the lowest Oscars audience ever when he hosted it in March. He insisted that Trump and the GOP are somehow “cowardly” because they supposedly “care more about the support of the NRA than they do about children.”
But none of the usual liberal remedies such as banning assault rifles, a ban on high capacity magazines, stricter background checks, tougher mental health screening, or closing the so-called gun show loophole would have prevented this tragedy. Yet that hasn’t stopped gun controllers from proposing the same litany of legislation.
Knee-jerk appeals to political correctness might boost Kimmel’s career after tanking in his Oscars performance. In his record-setting ratings failure for the annual show, Kimmel paid homage to the feminist Me Too movement without challenging the industry for the hypersexual content of so many of its movies.
“The only way we can make a meaningful impact,” Kimmel pontificated, “is if we vote for politicians who will do something,” without saying what that “something” might be. If he meant banning shotguns and revolvers in Texas, perhaps Kimmel himself was too “cowardly” to propose something so absurd.
An assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration suggested that parents keep their kids out of school until Congress passes “background checks for all gun purchases, a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, and funding for gun research.”
His former boss Arne Duncan, who was Obama’s longest-serving Cabinet member, tweeted: “This is brilliant. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?”
Not attending public school is something some conservatives have been saying for years, after witnessing the rapid deterioration in culture and values there. It is ironic that Obama’s Secretary of Education might finally be right for the wrong reason.
But missing from the script is any criticism of Facebook for how it has been the common denominator for many of these school shootings. The killers use Facebook to publicize their wanton desires in seeking their “15 minutes of fame,” to paraphrase Andy Warhol.
Meanwhile, if anyone hoped that the courts would defend the Second Amendment based on Justice Scalia’s 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller, that optimism has proven to be unfounded. Only one Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, defends the Second Amendment there, and he alone dissented in criticizing his colleagues’ refusal to review a pro-gun control decision from the Ninth Circuit.
Make no mistake: if the Democrats take control of Congress and have the votes to block Trump’s nominees for judges, courts will toss out the Second Amendment by permitting severe restrictions on gun ownership, and mandatory gun registration to be followed by gun confiscation. This has already happened in Great Britain and Australia, followed by predictable rises in non-gun crimes.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Floodgate Opens to Sports Gambling
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 15, 2018
The $250 billion domestic gambling industry gains access to a new $150 billion market, thanks to the Supreme Court. The 6-3 decision by the Court in Murphy v. NCAA opens the floodgates to sports gambling, while naively inviting Congress to clean up the mess that the Court just created.
Gambling wrecks families with a vengeance. The suicide rate among gamblers is higher than for any other addiction, and estimates are that a wagering habit pulls down ten people associated with the addict.
A family can lose its entire savings in one gambling binge, and many do. Gambling also corrupts our political system more than other addictions, as casino owners toss donations to candidates who then return the favors in spades after their election.
Gambling afflicts the poor more than the rich, and the uneducated more than the college graduates. Minorities and youth are particularly exploited by gambling.
Congress and most states have repeatedly expressed the strong public policy against gambling, which was illegal nationwide at the turn of the 20th century but expanded during the Great Depression.
Today 60% of Americans are sports fans, most of whom rearrange their schedules to watch their favorite teams. Until now, it has generally been illegal to target those sports fans with solicitations to bet on games.
But the Court dealt the gambling industry a royal flush on Monday, when the Court held that Congress was wrong, the Trump Administration was wrong, and conservative groups (including these authors) were wrong in urging the Court to uphold the federal law against sports gambling.
Justice Sam Alito wrote this decision that struck down an Act of Congress, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which has worked well for 26 years in limiting sports gambling. This ruling illustrates that when the Court makes headlines, it is almost never in a good way.
As a result, the task of defending against the scourge of sports gambling falls on state legislatures and the Department of Justice. Families will need to be more vigilant to keep their sports-fan children from getting pulled into the dark underworld of gambling that will destroy their lives.
Professional sports leagues, from the NFL to Major League Baseball, are making a colossal mistake if they think gambling will boost their declining attendance. Changing Yankee Stadium from “The House that Ruth Built” to “The Casino that Gamers Built” is not a way to fill seats in a ballpark.
It was nearly a century ago when professional baseball saved its sport by taking a strong stance against betting on the World Series, and college basketball did likewise in the 1950s. But future scandals seem inevitable under the Court’s decision allowing nationwide wagering on sports.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions should beef up enforcement of the Wire Act, which is a federal law enacted in 1961 to limit interstate betting. Professional and amateur sports are inherently interstate, and the Department of Justice should announce that it will enforce the Wire Act to shut down all attempts to ramp up betting on interstate sports.
State legislatures should pass strong laws prohibiting betting in their states, and can do even more than that. States should require all the teams based in their jurisdictions to take affirmative steps to discourage wagering on games by fans.
Perhaps Justices on the Supreme Court thought they were doing something good for states’ rights, but what about states wanting to be free from the plague of gambling? Texas has long stood strong against gambling, but soon its beloved Dallas Cowboys football team could become the object of multi-million-dollar gambling schemes nationwide.
Absent from the 49 pages of opinions of the Court was any observation that gambling is a vice, for which there is voluminous evidence about the enormous harm it causes to individuals and communities. Instead, the Court did selective research on the internet to paint an illusion that gambling somehow has a respectable history in our country.
The Court espoused euphemisms like “Americans have never been of one mind about gambling,” which is a vacuous statement that could be said about anything. Three hundred million Americans, of course, are not “of one mind” about anything, and that is a meaningless cliché.
The Court’s opinion epitomizes a “law without values” judicial philosophy, which is as morally bankrupt as it sounds. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was a famous advocate of this approach a century ago, and it led to some dreadful rulings such as upholding the forced sterilization of a woman because she supposedly had a very low I.Q.
Hopefully Attorney General Sessions, state legislatures, and families themselves will stand up now against gambling. They have trump cards of their own they can play to halt sports gambling.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Standing Up to Globalism
by John and Andy Schlafly
May 8, 2018
President Trump’s stand against world pressure for him to continue the one-sided deal with Iran is a defining moment in world history. His announcement at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to terminate the agreement is a watershed as the end of globalism.
One small event for man, one big moment for mankind, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong’s words when he landed on the Moon. It is not the interaction between the United States and Iran that is so significant here, but the rejection of the world order that has reigned supreme since World War II.
The wrong path of globalism will no longer be the road for our country, as President Trump wisely charts a new course in which international deals must be as fair to the United States as they are to foreign countries. Just as important is how the United States will no longer bow to pressure from Western Europe or anyone else about how we manage our foreign policy.
A few days earlier, the use of the word “Orwellian” from the White House in rebuking China for trying to boss around our airlines likewise signaled the dawn of this new era. Communist China insisted that airlines stop referring to Taiwan because China is in denial about the independence and freedom of that island nation, which was formed by those who fled the communist Chinese revolution in 1949.
In 1971, globalists seeking to appease communist China arranged for the United Nations to expel Taiwan, whose real name is the Republic of China. Early the following year, globalist Henry Kissinger persuaded President Richard Nixon to turn his back on Taiwan by visiting communist China and giving it legitimacy.
Then, in over-the-top bravado by Nixon that would have made Trump blush, Nixon declared that his trip to China was “the week that changed the world.” Eight months earlier Phyllis Schlafly published her P.S. Report warning that Nixon could lose the confidence of the grassroots, and the subsequent Watergate operation that got him in trouble arose from doubts about his winning reelection.
China and globalists have been trying to ostracize Taiwan ever since. They have even prevented Taiwan from competing in the Olympics as the independent country that it is, since 1976.
But the sentiment on the island of Taiwan is increasingly independent, as globalism is being rejected there like almost everywhere else. Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is more willing to assert the nationalism that Trump asserts for Americans.
Recently China demanded that businesses stop referring to Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong as countries. Quickly Marriott, the hotel chain associated with globalist Mitt Romney, caved in and pandered to communist China by apologizing to it.
China made its demand on 36 foreign airlines, insisting that they stop referring to Taiwan as a country. Many of these airlines are American carriers, such as Delta which has already apologized.
But President Trump, more so than any president since World War II, rejects globalist pressure like China’s demand. Trump will “stand up for Americans resisting efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose Chinese political correctness on American companies and citizens,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced.
Sarah Sanders declared that the Trump Administration is telling China “to stop threatening and coercing American carriers and citizens.” That’s right: China has no authority to push around our citizens and our businesses.
Then Sanders used the “O” and the “C” words, which not even past Republican presidents were willing to do enough. “This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies,” Sanders observed.
George Orwell was a visionary in criticizing the communist mindset, as a former Leftist himself. It is doubtful that any press secretary has ever applied Orwell’s truths so properly to the communist attempts at mind control, as Sarah Sanders just did.
Meanwhile, the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is up for renegotiation, and Trump’s rejection of globalism bodes us well for this issue also. Far from seeking to renew that deal, Trump should look to terminate as much of it as possible.
Economically, NAFTA has been far more harmful to the American economy than the Iran deal was. Trump’s criticism of the Iran deal as one-sided applies with greater force to NAFTA.
The flood of illegal drugs into our country, along with illegal aliens, has been facilitated by NAFTA. The loss of manufacturing jobs to south of the border is the result of NAFTA, too.
NAFTA was never properly ratified as a treaty because it never had the necessary support in the Senate. The agreement should be terminated and any replacement should only be considered under the 2/3rds ratification requirement of the Treaty Clause, which is the provision that globalists hate most about the Constitution.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
The ‘Caravans’ Are Coming
by John and Andy Schlafly
April 3, 2018
During the Easter weekend, when many Americans were watching the college basketball championships, President Donald Trump kept his eye on America’s southern border. It’s long overdue for a president to defend our borders.
“Getting more dangerous,” Trump tweeted on Easter Sunday before attending church with his wife, Melania, in Palm Beach. “‘Caravans’ coming.”
The president was referring to the “caravan” (their word) of some 1,200 men, women and children who were spotted in southern Mexico, heading toward the United States. Photographs showed a massive column of people walking north, herded by a few vehicles alongside.
A “caravan” is a group of migrants traveling together with all their belongings, often on foot or with covered wagons, stopping at makeshift camps along the way to eat and sleep. The word originated in the Middle East centuries ago when crossing the desert by caravan was a common sight.
In the frontier era of the 19th century, Americans traveled west by covered wagon for mutual protection as they crossed through hostile Indian country. Caravans are rarely seen in modern America, but it’s a different world south of the border, where millions of people live in primitive conditions that would have challenged our ancestors.
In this case, a caravan consisting of hundreds of men, women and children from Central America, mostly Honduras, crossed into Mexico on March 25, heading north. By April 1 they had traveled 140 miles to the town of Matías Romero.
A thousand people do not embark on a journey of over 1,000 miles without organization and financial support. The caravan now making its way through Mexico is being coordinated by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which means Town Without Borders (or People Without Borders).
The New York Times describes Pueblo Sin Fronteras as a “transnational advocacy group” whose leader, Irineo Mujica, is a “Mexican-American who holds dual citizenship.” There are so many things wrong with those phrases that it’s difficult to know where to start.
To begin with, the United States does not recognize dual citizenship, except in rare cases. A person from Mexico or anywhere else who goes through the process of becoming a U.S. citizen is required to take an oath swearing to totally renounce his previous allegiances.
Similarly, a “transnational” group is not allowed to exist in many countries without first registering to do business or conduct its activities legally in that country. We have enough problems with the outlaw transnational group called MS-13, which has committed murders of incredible savagery, primarily in areas populated by recent immigrants from Central America.
The caravan’s next stop is the town of Puebla, near Mexico City, which the migrants hope to reach by April 5. There they expect to attend two days of “workshops, led by volunteer lawyers” to learn about “their options for legal protections in the United States.”
During the Obama administration, lawyers would coach illegal migrants, who do not speak English, how to keep repeating the English phrase “credible fear.” When people show up at the border claiming a credible fear of persecution in their home country, they are treated as refugees with a right to stay here indefinitely until their claims are adjudicated.
“As ridiculous as it sounds,” Trump tweeted on Monday, “the laws of our country do not easily allow us to send those crossing our Southern Border back where they came from. A whole big wasted procedure must take place.”
If those people truly have a credible fear in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador, why don’t they apply for asylum right where they are, in Mexico? Under international law, according to a ruling of the European Court of Justice last year, migrants must seek refuge or claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, which in this case is Mexico.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has tightened the requirements for would-be refugees and expedited the processing of their claims. But there’s still a huge backlog of refugee cases from the Obama administration, so we need to pressure Mexico to cut off the caravan before it gets here.
The renegotiation of NAFTA gives Trump leverage, as he tweeted on Tuesday: “Mexico is making a fortune on NAFTA. With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours, at least until Congress changes our immigration laws!”
The alleged rights of illegal aliens know no bounds. Last week an Obama-appointed federal judge entered a sweeping order that teenage girls who illegally crossed our southern border without their parents have a constitutional right to an abortion in the United States.
An American teenage girl cannot ordinarily obtain an abortion in Texas without parental consent. But according to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was born in Jamaica, an illegal alien teenage girl can get an abortion here without parental notice or consent, even though abortions are illegal in her home country.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Trump Eradicates the Deep State
March 20, 2018
By John and Andy Schlafly
A whopping 74% of Americans recognize the problem of the “Deep State” – the entrenched bureaucrats in D.C. who control our government. This was confirmed by a remarkable poll released on Monday by Monmouth University.
The FBI’s own disciplinary office recommended the firing of its disgraced former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled the trigger. But former Deep Staters sprang to the defense of McCabe, as if on cue, and tweeted invective at the people’s leader they hate, President Trump.
Chief among the chorus of former bureaucrats was John Brennan, who ran the CIA during Obama’s second term. Brennan admitted he voted for the Communist Party in 1976, so it is unsurprising that he would rant against Trump’s efforts to clean house.
Quickly McCabe received multiple job offers from Democrat politicians, which would be at additional taxpayer expense. He could also garner big bucks from a lecture tour at liberal universities, or like his mentor James Comey write a self-serving book with a hefty advance royalty.
Better yet, McCabe could form a band with Brennan, Comey, and James Clapper, all of whom are gone from their official positions but still dominate the news. They could call their band the “Deep State Blues,” and perform to empty houses across middle America.
Trump played to a packed house in western Pennsylvania ten days ago, delivering a magnificent speech that was decried by the media but loved by the grassroots. Trump laid out how he is trying to exorcise the evil that permeates D.C., which is fighting back like a trapped rabid dog.
The refreshing firing of McCabe was another shot across the bow in this comic-book-like struggle between the American people, led by Trump, and the dug-in Establishment. This illustrates what Phyllis Schlafly wrote about in her bestselling classic A Choice Not An Echo, which describes the long-running battle between the grassroots and the insiders who control government no matter who is elected.
Robert Mueller, or his superior Rod Rosenstein who fails to rein him in, should be next on the chopping block, and Trump needs to strike while the iron is hot. And Trump should fire any advisers who stand in his way on this.
Republican impediments such as Sen. Lindsey Graham are probably still bitter about how Trump humiliated them in the 2016 presidential contest. To this day Trump has a higher approval rating than Graham in South Carolina, which is Graham’s home state.
Mueller has already wasted far more than ten million dollars in taxpayer money while proving nothing of significance. Instead, Mueller has intimidated those loyal to Trump, which may be the real goal.
If the only thing President Trump achieves is to loosen the grip by the power-brokers on D.C., then he will have accomplished more than his four predecessors combined. But the fierce resistance by both political parties makes the outcome far from clear.
Fortunately, Trump does have some allies on Capitol Hill on this issue. Senator Rand Paul rebuked Brennan for his attack on Trump, pointing out that what is really disgraceful is how Brennan “had the power to search every American’s records without a warrant” and how that is an attack on “the freedom of every American.”
The Deep State has control of all the federal agencies in D.C., so it is a steep climb to triumph over it. Some might wonder if it is even impossible to return the power to the American people that is rightfully ours.
For example, in behavior typical of the Swamp, the IRS refuses to stop the use of 1.3 million stolen or bogus Social Security numbers of employed illegal aliens. It would be a simple matter to pull the plug on the employers of those illegals, yet the IRS as a matter of policy refuses to take action.
This conduct by the IRS has compelled the valiant Tom Homan of ICE to risk the lives of his agents by conducting three raids in the sanctuary state of California. The public overwhelmingly opposes employers hiring illegal aliens, jobs that could be going to Americans, and the IRS could easily stop the illegal employment without putting the lives of any enforcement agents at risk.
The Monmouth University survey was mostly of Democrats and Independents, with Republicans comprising only 27% of the respondents, so its results are even more extraordinary. When asked about the possible existence of “a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy,” known as the Deep State, 47% said it “probably exists” and 27% said it “definitely exists.”
With unusual consistency across Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, about 60% said that unelected or unappointed officials hold too much power in government. If Trump can end that, then Americans will be forever grateful.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Victimized High School Triumphed where Olympics Failed
February 27, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
After the poor showing by the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Winter Olympics, it was inspiring that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas boys’ hockey team captured the state championship on Sunday and will represent Florida at the national championship next month. The sister of one of the team’s hockey players was among the recent shooting victims at the high school in Parkland, Florida.
Boys’ hockey is thriving at the high school level, and this remarkable victory by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas team brings welcome relief amid the tragedy. Medals from this championship team were added to the memorial site of the shooting victims.
But boys’ hockey stars will find limited opportunities to play when they get to college. There are only a few dozen competitive college men’s hockey teams, not enough to develop the talent needed to compete with the rest of the world.
As a result, a ragtag team of Russians humiliated the U.S. men’s hockey team with a 4-0 drubbing in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The American team fared slightly better for its final game prior to its elimination in an overtime shootout against Slovenia, but NBC failed even to broadcast that exciting finish.
When the U.S. women’s hockey team won the gold in a victory against Canada, there was praise but none of the national excitement that occurred when our men’s hockey players defeated the Soviet Union at Lake Placid in 1980. Men’s hockey is far more popular than women’s hockey, for both men and women spectators.
Unfortunately, federal regulators who implement Title IX against college sports refuse to recognize this fundamental difference between men’s and women’s sports. Regulators require colleges to provide more athletic opportunities for women than for men, simply because there are now more women than men attending college.
Under the so-called proportionality test, which ignores the greater interest in men’s sports than in women’s, colleges have eliminated hundreds of men’s sports teams, many in Olympic sports. This hurts our national competitiveness and induces many young men to opt out of going to college where they are prevented from competing in the sport they love.
The Title IX regulators’ quota that limits men’s sports to their proportional enrollment in the college is senseless and not part of the law that Congress enacted in 1972. It’s based on a regulatory interpretation first imposed by President Jimmy Carter to appease the feminists, and President Trump could repeal it along with the many others he has been properly rescinding.
Many colleges have been unjustly sued when they do not comply with the feminists’ distorted view of Title IX. To avoid costly litigation, colleges have repeatedly eliminated men’s sports programs while adding women’s programs that they then have difficulty filling.
The Title IX regulations created a vicious cycle, discouraging men from matriculating to colleges that eliminated their sport. In 1980, equal numbers of men and women obtained college degrees, but now nearly 60% of college degrees are awarded to women and only 40% to men.
The hockey competition won by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas team in the Sunshine State of Florida illustrates how much boys’ hockey has grown in popularity. Colleges, however, are generally forbidden from having more sports teams for men than women, so if there is not enough interest in women’s hockey or another large team sport for women, the college is not likely to start a men’s hockey team.
In the traditional Olympic events of alpine and cross-country skiing, the United States men won a grand total of zero medals. Today there are more college women’s ski teams than there are men’s, perhaps again due to the impact of the proportionality test under Title IX.
Olympic sports themselves have been emasculated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which even tried to eliminate men’s wrestling from the 2020 Olympics. The IOC reinstated wrestling after an uproar but cut 56 positions, replacing them with events that “include more women” in the summer games.
Women’s figure skating remains popular to watch, but in a continuation of political correctness the public heard more about the men’s figure skating instead. Despite this, a large crowd did stay up past midnight on the East Coast to watch the exciting finale of the women’s figure skating competition.
Downplaying the overall nosedive in interest in the Olympics, some commentators say this is merely part of a more general trend. But the decline in viewership of football, still as masculine as ever, has been small compared with the bottom falling out for the Olympics.
When Phyllis Schlafly spoke for her last time at Harvard, she was greeted afterwards by Professor Harvey Mansfield, author of a book entitled “Manliness.” If NBC executives hope to recoup the billions they invested in exclusive rights for the Olympics then they might pick up a copy, and the Title IX regulators would also benefit from recognizing the greater demand for men’s sports.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
Social Media Monopolies Advance Leftist Agenda
by John and Andy Schlafly
February 20, 2018
Despite his headline-grabbing indictment of Russian nationals for interfering with the U.S. election, special counsel Robert Mueller has still found no evidence of collusion between any Russians and the Trump campaign. Mueller indicted 13 Russians who apparently operated a “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, purchasing ads on Facebook and sending provocative messages to Americans through Twitter and other forms of social media.
According to the indictment, the Russian effort to sow turmoil, confusion and division started in 2014, well before Trump announced he was running for president. Even after the 2016 election was over, the Russian trolls promoted a “not my president” rally featuring Michael Moore in New York City on November 12.
The 13 Russians will never be extradited to face trial in the United States; the indictments are apparently merely a political ploy by Mueller. The bigger question is whether our social media services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter will respond to the indictments by ramping up their own censoring of political speech on their platforms.
Already Facebook has announced it will hire 10,000 employees tasked with policing “hate speech” on its pages. But the toxic label “hate speech” is likely to be used as a pretext to impose a politically correct ideology on millions of unsuspecting users.
No one denies that Facebook, Google and Twitter are among the most liberal corporations in America. Virtually all their executives and most of their senior staff were avid supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, and detested Donald Trump.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chairs a pro-amnesty lobbying group called Fwd.us whose primary mission is to oppose Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border. Facebook’s number two executive, Sheryl Sandberg, was spotted in John Podesta’s leaked emails writing that “I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can.”
The only prominent figure in tech who is known to have supported Trump for president is Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and a member of its board of directors. After beating back an effort to remove him from Facebook’s board for the heresy of supporting Trump, Peter Thiel announced he is moving both his home and his investment company to Los Angeles because he can no longer tolerate the suffocating politics of the Bay Area.
Google fired one of its highly paid engineers, James Damore, merely for raising questions about his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programs and policies. In a thoughtful essay he shared with fellow Googlers last year, Damore slammed the Silicon Valley “monoculture” with its “ideological echo chamber” where contrary viewpoints are shamed into silence.
Other tech workers have told the Wall Street Journal that the echo chamber extends beyond Google to the entire industry whose “groupthink and homogeneity” make it a worse place to live and work. Among tech workers polled in a survey quoted in the Journal, 59 percent of conservative respondents said they know someone who left the industry because they felt conservative views were unwelcome.
Two of the devious ways a social media platform can penalize conservatives are demonetizing and shadow banning. Demonetizing a site means that it is prevented from carrying the advertising it needs to defray its costs, while shadow banning means that the service provider is throttling back access to recent posts or systematically hiding them from viewers.
Cartoonist Scott Adams, a Trump supporter who draws the Dilbert comic strip, wrote last year that “hundreds of my Twitter followers have reported that I am being shadow banned on Twitter.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey denied it, but Scott Adams insisted that “anecdotally, the evidence is overwhelming” and that “a number of other high-profile Twitter users report the same problem.”
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, pointed out last year that Twitter “appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or deverifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users.” He cited the case of U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn whose campaign announcement was blocked because it featured a pro-life message.
The highest-profile Twitter user, of course, is Donald Trump, whose account was blocked (supposedly by accident) and threatened with deactivation for his politically incorrect tweets. The company finally said it would allow Trump to continue using Twitter, not because Twitter believes in free speech but merely because Trump is a world leader whose statements are inherently newsworthy.
Facebook and Google dominate their industries just as Standard Oil and AT&T once did, which were broken up under the antitrust laws. Why are Facebook and Google being given preferential treatment while they monopolize the market?
More than half of all advertising spending is now collected by Facebook and Google, which exceeds that of newspapers, television channels and other media combined. Competition and accountability are badly needed for these social media monopolies.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
The Right and Wrong Approaches to Immigration
by John and Andy Schlafly
February 13, 2018
“This will be our last chance, there will never be another opportunity!” to protect Dreamers, President Trump properly tweeted as the U.S. Senate plunged into a debate about immigration policy. The Left wants amnesty for Dreamers, who are illegal aliens who entered our country many as teenagers.
President Trump is right to insist on funding for a border wall, which would cost less than 1% of our national budget, and an end to chain migration whereby relatives of immigrants are brought in with little or no screening. President Trump’s approach is welcome relief to the failed, open-door policies of the prior Republican leadership.
Meanwhile, an unexpected voice weighed in from the other side of the world. In Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich emirate in the Persian Gulf, former President George W. Bush was speaking at a conference organized by Michael Milken, the junk bond king of the 1980s.
“Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees,” Bush said in response to a question, “but there are people who want to put food on their family’s tables and are willing to do that. We ought to say thank you and welcome them.”
Bush was right that Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees, as we can tell you from personal experience. But he was wrong to say we ought to welcome people from other lands so poor that they are willing to do that kind of work to put food on their family’s tables.
When we were teenagers, we spent a memorable summer vacation working on a cotton farm in the Mississippi delta east of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It was a miserable experience, but fortunately for us, it lasted only about two weeks.
It was too early to pick the cotton when we were there around the Fourth of July, but we learned how to chop it. Chopping cotton means chopping weeds with a hoe without damaging the cotton plant.
After awhile, we wondered why we saw no one else doing this backbreaking work in the 100-degree heat of the Mississippi delta, where cotton fields extend as far as the eye can see. That’s when we realized that chopping and picking cotton were already being done by machines, and the people who used to do it by hand had moved on to better jobs.
Once upon a time, more than 200 years ago, Americans imported African slaves to do the unpleasant work of cultivating cotton. Slavery was abolished in 1865, but African Americans continued to toil on cotton farms in conditions of extreme poverty that prevailed in the defeated Southern states.
About 75 years after the Civil War, some inventors finally made a successful cotton-picking machine. This invention came years later than the famous harvester invented by Cyrus McCormick, because cotton is so much harder to pick than wheat, corn or soybeans.
During the same period in which mechanization swept the cotton fields of the South, millions of African Americans moved north in search of economic opportunity and greater freedom. During this period known as the “great migration,” many black Americans found higher paying jobs in the factories of Chicago and Detroit, while others achieved success and fame in sports and entertainment.
Thanks to a legal and economic system that rewards invention and innovation, our high standard of living means that no American of any race has to chop or pick cotton at 105 degrees anymore. Bush grew up in Texas, which grows more cotton than any other state, and he should know that.
Bush’s foolish comment combined two of the worst slogans of the pro-amnesty movement, the myth of “jobs Americans won’t do” and the myth of “crops rotting in the fields.” On the contrary, the enormous growth of computer-aided automation, robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless vehicles is eliminating whatever opportunity there used to be for poor people from other countries to earn a living here.
While the debate rages in Washington, another debate is roiling the state of California, which has more immigrants (10 million) and more illegal aliens (2.4 million) than any other state. California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, is warning that state’s employers not to cooperate with the federal government.
“Businesses are increasingly caught between California and Washington,” the Wall Street Journal reports. A new state law imposes fines of up to $10,000 on employers who provide information about their employees to federal immigration officials.
In the last presidential election, California went in a markedly different direction from the rest of our Nation. But the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution requires that California obey the same federal laws on immigration with which the other 49 states must comply in protecting American workers against illegal aliens.
In the end, Californians might thank President Trump for taking a strong stand against illegal immigration, which is estimated to be costing that state about $30 billion per year. That’s far more than the costs of building a border wall to permanently solve the problem.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Marijuana Lights Up the Wrong Way
January 9, 2018
by John and Andy Schlafly
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being attacked on both sides of the aisle for rescinding the Obama policy that opened the floodgates to marijuana addiction. Funded by libertarian billionaires such as the Koch brothers, pro-pot senators like Cory Gardner are demanding that AG Sessions stand down and continue Obama’s misguided policy.
Sessions rescinded Obama’s command that the Department of Justice ignore federal law against marijuana production and sales, and instead Sessions instructed U.S. Attorneys to begin enforcing well-established federal statutes against large-scale cultivation and distribution of marijuana. These federal laws preempt state law, particularly in Colorado and California where a culture of pot addiction has virtually taken over.
Sessions wrote on January 4th that “today’s memo on federal marijuana enforcement simply directs all U.S. Attorneys to use previously established prosecutorial principles that provide them all the necessary tools to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country.”
That hardly seems controversial, but money talks and politicians beholden to mega-donors went ballistic in response. Senator Cory Gardner, who heads the misguided fundraising arm of Republican senators, even took to the Senate floor to rant against Sessions for wanting to enforce the law.
Sen. Gardner is the same guy who is pushing the agenda of the same mega-donors to enact amnesty for certain illegal aliens, wanted for their cheap labor. Yet every time Gardner opens his mouth he makes it more difficult for Republicans in Congress to hold onto their majority in the upcoming midterm elections, because American voters reject Republican candidates who support either amnesty or legalized pot.
New Year’s Day rang in the sale of pot in retail stores in California, which expands the hazards it poses to the public there. In addition, anyone over the age of 21 may smoke pot on private property now in California, simply to get high over and over again.
This push for pot is not really coming from the freedom-loving culture of rock music. Instead, like gambling, legalizing pot is driven by a multi-decade campaign of investors seeking to profit from cannabis, as it’s now being advertised for marketing purposes.
First it was sold to the American people under the guise of “medical marijuana,” and predictably anyone with a little back or joint pain was obtaining prescriptions to get high. The strategy was to open the door to the inevitable recreational use by anyone, which is occurring now in eight states.
This is too much even for rock fans, as California's popular Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival recently responded to the legalization of marijuana by banning it at its concerts: “Sorry bro. Marijuana and marijuana products aren’t allowed inside the … Festival. Even in 2018 and beyond.”
If concerts won’t allow smoking pot, why do the rest of us have to put up with its pungent odor and harmful consequences? Costly emergency room visits by “potheads” and deadly car accidents are just two of the burdens that rampant marijuana addiction brings to our society.
Among traffic fatalities in Colorado when operators were tested for marijuana, 25% of those crashes had an operator who tested positive for the drug. This is a sharp increase since marijuana was legalized there, and the real number may be higher because unlike alcohol there is no close correlation between impairment and tissue levels.
Although supposedly limited to adults, marijuana use by youths between 12 and 17 years old, and college-age adults between 18 and 25, has risen sharply in Colorado since pot was legalized there four years ago. Now Colorado has the highest rate of marijuana use by youths in the country, according to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
Meanwhile, the town of Pueblo, Colorado, is buckling under the expense of “marijuana migrants,” attracted to the town’s pro-marijuana publicity. Instead of finding real work, however, these marijuana migrants live mostly in boxes, resorting to buckets as toilets.
Billionaire George Soros has been behind the push to legalize marijuana around the country, but the problem now is that he has been joined by a few billionaires associated with the right side of the political spectrum. They are misleading GOP politicians to make the colossal mistake of embracing this leftist agenda item.
Starved for money to finance their campaigns for office in 2018, hopeful Republican candidates will feel the pressure to cave in to pro-pot demands of mega-donors. But while Democrats can get away with that, Republican candidates surely cannot.
The vast majority of our country, and particularly working-class Republicans, reject the legalization of marijuana with all of its harmful consequences. Republican candidates for office who go along with the demands of billionaire donors to endorse their pro-pot agenda will see their own candidacies go up in smoke among voters.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Dream on, Establishment
by John and Andy Schlafly
December 19, 2017
If money talks, the loudest noise in America would be an article published last Thursday entitled “Congress must act on the dreamers.” Legislation to protect the 690,000 illegal aliens known as Dreamers, the article insists, “is a political, economic and moral imperative.”
A movement is afoot either to slip this into a final 2017 bill when few are watching, or to make it a litmus test for candidates seeking to raise campaign cash for races next year.
“Delay is not an option,” the authors wrote, ignoring the backlog of unfinished business in Washington. “Congress must act before the end of the year.”
The op-ed was signed by Charles Koch, who shares a $97 billion fortune with his brother David. The Koch brothers are aligned with the “never Trump” Republicans who have undermined much of President Trump’s agenda.
Charles Koch is a businessman, and he likes to get his money’s-worth when he spends it. After striking out the past two years with their political agenda, the Koch network of mega-donors could be making support of DACA a litmus test for Republican primary candidates in the 2018 election cycle.
Republican candidates would be wise to decline, just as candidate Trump declined support by the Koch network last year, and won anyway on a platform of opposing illegal immigration.
Koch was joined by co-author Tim Cook, who succeeded the late Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple. Cook supports many liberal causes, and was criticized by candidate Trump for how Apple would not cooperate in unlocking the iPhone of a terrorist who went on the killing rampage in San Bernardino about two years ago.
Cook’s corporate practices at Apple hardly commend him to lecture about what is best for America. Apple stashes hundreds of billions of dollars – that’s billions, not millions – of its profits overseas in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States, and thereby avoid investing it in American workers here.
Moreover, Apple’s claim of employing a few hundred Dreamers – far less than 1% of its workforce – in mostly low-skill jobs would not ordinarily attract the attention of a CEO. But Cook and Koch are not just in favor of entitlements for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, but also for many millions of other illegal aliens.
Cook and Koch declare in supporting DACA, “If ever there were an occasion to come together to help people improve their lives, this is it.” But where is the compassion for helping Americans improve their lives, which ending benefits for illegal aliens would do?
Senator Jeff Flake was a frequent attendee at the Koch conferences of donors, and he has remained anti-Trump to this day. All that got him was a disapproval rating so high in his home state of Arizona that he resigned at a young age rather than even try for reelection.
Now Senator Flake is leading a group of other anti-Trump senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-SC), to try to forge a deal with Democrats to protect these illegal aliens.
The day after the Koch-Cook article appeared in the Washington Post, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report throwing cold water on the bum’s rush to protect the Dreamers. The CBO estimates that legalizing Dreamers would cost taxpayers $25.9 billion over the next decade.
The CBO explains why the costs of Dreamers would far exceed any benefit that Americans would ever see. Once legalized, the Dreamers would become eligible for the full array of benefits for the working poor including Obamacare, Medicaid, food stamps, and much more.
Dreamers would consume more benefits and pay less taxes than the average American because their skills and education are so much lower. Even though most Dreamers are now in their twenties or thirties, for example, more than half of them never finished high school.
Part of the skills gap is because Dreamers were never required to demonstrate English fluency, and many are functionally illiterate. Of those who signed up for DACA, many required the help of a translator to fill out the form.
The CBO estimates the cost of all those federal benefits at $27 billion over 10 years, while only $1 billion of new tax revenue would be generated from Dreamers moving “out of the shadows” to regular employment. Combining those two amounts produces a net cost of $26 billion.
Even in Washington, where the federal budget is measured in trillions, $26 billion is real money. And that number almost surely understates the true cost by a wide margin.
Democrats are acutely aware of the value of $26 billion, whether or not they are willing to admit it where the Dreamers are concerned. Trump's border wall, which Democrats consider exorbitantly expensive, would cost only $21.6 billion according to a study conducted by the Department of Homeland Security in February of this year.
Rather than spending $26 billion on keeping illegal immigrants here, perhaps we should be spending that money to build the wall and keep illegals out.
The Phyllis Schlafly Report
Small Business Needed for Economic Growth
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 28, 2017
While large corporations dominate the news and the lobbying in D.C., economists have long known that small business is the real engine to drive economic growth. Headlines about big business are more likely to mention “massive layoffs” than any hiring plans.
Small business and innovation by small inventors are essential to our economy, as some of them will become the big employers of tomorrow. Kodak and Xerox were just two of the successful businesses founded on an idea of a small inventor, and a patent that secured for him the fruits of his labor.
Yet today 80% of challenged patents are invalidated in some way by the Patent and Trademark Office, without the patent owner ever getting his day in court. Imagine the outrage if homes or other property were taken away by an administrative agency without a court hearing.
On Monday, in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy, the Supreme Court held lively oral argument in a challenge supported by small inventors to how the federal government is taking away their property in deprivation of their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Several Justices expressed dismay at how our patent system, once the envy of the world, has denigrated into a victim of the administrative state.
Due to a federal law enacted in 2011, the America Invents Act, the Patent Office changes its mind and tosses out most of the patents that it previously issued, if someone asks it to. Anyone – a competitor, a disgruntled employee, or even a stranger – can ask the Patent Office to strike down a previously issued patent, without the right of the patent-holder to have a trial in court.
During the one-hour hearing before the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer expressed alarm at how a patent can be in existence for 10 years, with $40 billion invested in developing it, and “then suddenly somebody comes in and says: Oh, oh, we want it reexamined, not in court but by the Patent Office.” Phyllis Schlafly opposed this bad law at the time, but corporate lobbyists pushed it through.
Our economy depends heavily on new inventions to grow, because cheaper labor will always be available in other countries. Our competitors, such as China, recognize how important innovation is, and they force American companies to share the secrets of our inventions with them.
The result has been devastating to the real elements of economic growth: jobs and wages. Neither has improved in years.
Only 63% of potential workers are actually working in the United States. This labor participation rate is near its 38-year record low, set during the Obama Administration.
Likewise, real wages actually decreased in October, and over the past year wages have barely kept up with inflation. This is in sharp contrast with nearly two decades ago, when hourly pay was increasing at a much healthier rate of 4%.
When the Governor of Virginia issues a press release to brag about a company in his State creating merely 15 new jobs, as Democratic Governor McAuliffe did on Monday, it underscores how scarce good jobs are. Pandering to lobbyists of big corporations, as Congress does, will not help.
The American economy grew fastest when the incentives of our unique patent system existed for small inventors. Buoyed by the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, our economy boomed in the late 1800s.
Thomas Edison obtained more than a thousand American patents, which enabled him to attract large investments. With such funding Edison was able to light up New York City in September of 1882, using his new electricity-generating power plant.
Raymond P. Niro explained how important the rights of small inventors are to a prosperous future, in an article available on the helpful website IPWatchdog.com. He listed nearly three-dozen inventions that have changed the world, all by “individual inventors who ultimately formed companies to exploit their ideas, but who initially manufactured nothing.”
Justice Sotomayor asked rhetorically during oral argument on Monday, “If I own something, … how can a government agency take that right away without due process of law at all? Isn’t that the whole idea of Article III, that only a court can adjudicate that issue?”
Indeed, and it is ironic that while Congress talks about boosting our economy with a tax bill, it is actually the Supreme Court that may do more for job and wage growth if it rules in favor of small inventors in the Oil States case. Congress seems uninterested in helping small investors and small business, but the Court might.
THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
No Thanksgiving at the Border
by John and Andy Schlafly
November 21, 2017
On the first day of Thanksgiving week, U.S. Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez died and an unidentified second agent was seriously injured as they patrolled a lonely stretch of Interstate 10 in west Texas, near the Mexican border. The agents’ injuries were apparently caused by grapefruit-sized rocks thrown by men who had illegally crossed the border in an area where, as the New York Times reports, “drug and human trafficking are common.”
The U.S. Border Patrol has tallied 720 assaults on border officers in the last fiscal year, and 38 agents have been killed in the line of duty since 2003. You’d think the dangerous assaults on federal agents would have given pause to the federal judge in San Francisco who was considering a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities, but no.
Judge William Orrick went right ahead on Monday night with his 28-page order declaring a nationwide permanent injunction against the president’s effort to punish sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funds. Judge Orrick was named to the federal bench in 2013 after he bundled at least $200,000 for Obama and donated another $30,800 to groups supporting him.
As U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week in his address to the Federalist Society, “an increasing number of district courts are taking the dramatic step of issuing nationwide injunctions that block the entire U.S. government from enforcing a statute nationwide. In effect, single judges are making themselves super-legislators for the entire United States.”
“The Supreme Court has consistently and repeatedly made clear that courts should limit relief to the parties before them,” General Sessions continued. “So if lower courts continue to ignore that precedent, then the Supreme Court should send that message again.”
Last month California became a sanctuary state when Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that limits what state and local officials can say to federal immigration officers about people detained by police or awaiting trial. It also prohibits law enforcement from inquiring about a person's immigration status.
The law, known as SB 54, was championed by state senate president pro tem Kevin de Leon, who is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate. If elected, he would represent a state that is home to more than 2.3 million illegal aliens – a state where 45 percent of the population told the Census Bureau that a language other than English is spoken at home.
The harm of sanctuary policies is illustrated by the case of Nery Israel Estrada-Margos, who was arrested by Santa Rosa, California police on August 18 after allegedly beating his girlfriend, Veronica Cabrera Ramirez, to death. The illegal alien had been arrested two weeks earlier, on August 2, for domestic violence, but released because he had no prior convictions.
The sheriff of Santa Rosa county, which has its own sanctuary policy, defended the prior release by claiming he gave a heads-up to agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In fact, local officials gave ICE only 16 minutes to travel over 60 miles, and the man was gone by the time ICE got there.
Similar atrocities have occurred in other sanctuary jurisdictions, which are mostly found in the 20 so-called blue states that voted for Hillary Clinton for president. In Maryland near Washington, D.C., Montgomery County officials ignored a detainer from ICE in order to release Mario Granados-Alvarado, who broke into an unmarked police car and stole an AR-15 and ammunition from the officer’s trunk.
Near the town of Brentwood on New York’s Long Island, three more young bodies were found bearing the marks of ritual killing by the gang called MS-13. They were Angel Soler, 15, from Honduras, who had been hacked to death with a machete; Javier Castillo, 16, from El Salvador; and Kerin Pineda, 19, from Honduras.
In Massachusetts, the popular columnist and talk-show host Howie Carr identified an assortment of violent crimes recently committed by “Third World illegal-alien criminals.” In just the last few weeks a Cambodian, an African, a Salvadoran, a Dominican, a Vietnamese, a Chinese, and a Liberian were charged or convicted of murder, assault, drug trafficking, identity fraud and resisting a federal officer.
The tax reform bill moving through Congress plugs one of the ways in which illegal aliens have been supporting themselves with federal tax credits. The bill requires a valid Social Security number to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit, under which $4.2 billion a year has been paid out to illegal aliens who lack a valid number.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but child tax credits should require a valid ID from both parents, not just one. An even better reform, which is not currently in the bill, would be to prohibit employers from getting a business tax deduction from wages paid to unauthorized alien workers.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, $165 billion a year in deductible wages is currently being paid to illegal workers, thereby saving their employers about $25.4 billion a year in federal taxes. Plugging that gap would yield $254 billion over 10 years which could support additional tax cuts for law-abiding Americans.
