Biden continues to make himself an international spectacle

Biden’s Democrat machine weaponizes the judicial system

In a movement that did not exist before, Biden has enabled “America last” as an international movement

The Wall Street Journal reports on the banana republic judicial system created by Joe Biden’s Democrat party. You know, the same one that delivered 4 a.m. surges of ballots across multiple states.

Exact charges against former president aren’t known; case centers on hush-money payments to porn star

Donald Trump was indicted for his role in paying hush-money to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election, marking the first time in American history that a former president has faced criminal charges.

The grand jury returned the indictment of Mr. Trump after a vote on Thursday, kicking off a process in which the former president is expected to come to New York to face the charges. The indictment, sought by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, isn’t public.

(Read as much as you can afford at the Wall Street Journal)

Thanks to Matt Taibbi, we know Biden has used the FBI to rig the “instant press” (Twitter and other social media). We know the main stream media ignores big stories for Biden

We know the judicial system now is under Democrat control. Thugs get out by bending a knee to BLM, Antifa, or just the judge. However, Biden started his political prisoner system with the 6 January 2021 persecution and now has his prize.

Considering that Biden already crippled the social media (which should be considered an “instant press”) by using his FBI to push them into their already liberal tendencies, this is sad.

Knowing that Biden has killed two banks by allowing a “woke” group to go more-or-less unregulated, maybe we should expect Democrat mindlessness. Knowing that Biden then dumps the bailout of the billionaire Chinese and billionaire American investors on common American bank account holders, we know to expect Democrat selectiveness. Equity? That’s just a Democrat catch phrase for the weak-minded.

And seeing that Biden has sent his IRS to intimidate journalists like Taibbi, we know we have re-entered a banana republic. Hopefully, Dementia Joe hasn’t learned too much from the oppressive ways of Obama and Lois Lerner.

One thing that I wonder: are the Democrats setting us (or the more easily angered among us) up for another 6 January riot?

Biden and Harris funded the bails of Antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs who burned blocks of businesses during 2020. But who cares for capitalists among the Democrats? That wsa only the life savings of those capitalists.

But when 6 January came and a few people broke windows and a greater number of people walked between the ropes set up in the Capitol — that was a “real” insurrection.

What has me wondering is this: since the Democrats would rather investigate common people who did not burn down cities, are they going to do more of the same with this trial of President Trump?

Does anyone care to retweet this?

Soros - backed "King of Woke" Alvin Bragg is trying to turn the United States into a third world Banana Republic.
Retweet if you agree! pic.twitter.com/uRFH7IyXRK

— 🇺🇸🇺🇸Josh Dunlap🇺🇲🇺🇲 ULTRA-MAGA (@JDunlap1974) March 31, 2023

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Due to Biden’s weakness, Russia has built a large and growing following

In a movement that did not exist before, Biden has enabled “America last” as an international movement

The Wall Street Journal exposes Biden’s method of restricting money to banks dealing in a perfectly legal (but currently uncontrolled by government) market: cryptocurrency.

Some financial regulators appear to have seized on a series of high-profile meltdowns to go around Congress and try to freeze an entire industry out of banking services.

I spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor on some of the worst threats our country faces—organized crime, the opioid epidemic, political corruption and terrorism. In my final years at the Justice Department, I shifted to cases involving emerging technology, including the then-nascent crypto category, from the Mt. Gox hack to the corrupt Silk Road agents. Years later, the space continues to attract crime and fraud, but it has also drawn some of the brightest engineering talent in the world. Public blockchains, the foundational technology of the ecosystem, are an important set of tools that reflect breakthroughs in cryptography and distributed computing. In addition to early financial-use cases, this sector provides new ways to develop, monetize and govern all kinds of software.

(Read as much as you can afford at the Wall Street Journal)

If BRICS follows the way that Russia has planned, our dollar is sunk

All becuase of Democrat weakness, specifically Dementia Joe’s weakness, we might see the end of the petrodollar. That would mean the end of the dollar as the reserve currency for most of the world. That would mean much of the money being held across the world would be traded in for other currency. That would mean that our inflation woes have only begun.

Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Democrats that have us set for a multi-trillion dollar debt. Thanks, Democrats who prioritize the nebulous “climate change” agenda over jobs.

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After almost a decade of seeing Obama’s tricks and over two years of practicing tricks on oil and gas, Biden branches out

Biden threatens to withhold money from banks dealing in crypto just as Obama withheld finances from banks dealing with gun manufacturers

Bloomberg quotes Jim O’Neill as he urges the anti-American alliance BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) to expand and throw off American dominance (and Saudi Arabia, Iran, and numerous Middle Eastern countries have since joined).

Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist who coined the acronym BRIC, said the bloc of nations that later adopted the name should expand and work to counter the dollar’s dominance.

In a paper published in the Global Policy journal on March 26, O’Neill called on the group to apply strict criteria to ensure the addition of any new members to its ranks helps further its aims and urged it to focus on climate finance, improving healthcare and boosting trade.

(Read more at a cost if you pay up at Bloomberg)

Crypto does not interest me because it does not have anything to back its worth; however, it also does not fall under government control

Since there is a chance to park money into a venue that escapes the intrusive eye of the government, it seems to have the Biden regime riled up. It seems that Biden has embraced his inner dictator.

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Biden upgrades to gaffes after entertaining us with his up-the-stairs trips

Canadian lawmakers laugh after Biden accidentally applauds China: “You can tell what I’m thinking”

Fox News reports on Biden’s gaffe of applauding China in front of the Canadian Parliament and those politicians’ resulting laughter.

President Biden accidentally commended China instead of Canada while praising the nation’s stance on migration on Friday.

Biden made the gaffe during a speech at the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa while he was discussing U.S. immigration policies.

“In the United States, we’re expanding legal pathways for migration, to seek safety and humanitarian…humanitarian basis, while discouraging unlawful migration that feeds exploitation and human trafficking,” the president began.

“So today, I applaud China for stepping out…excuse me, I applaud Canada,” Biden stumbled while Canadian Members of Parliament laughed.

(Read more at Fox News)

Biden must have been thinking on to the next payment to the “Big Guy”

We now have the bank records in Congress for a few of the transactions. When will we start with impeachment?

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In a bizarre shell game of shuffling illegal aliens to a Red state that has bussed illegals out, Biden keeps up a petty show

Biden flies illegals caught at Canada border to Texas

VOA News touches on the issue of Biden flying illegal aliens (who have chosen to detour through Canada) into Texas. Although VOA News takes the stance that this act constitutes a deterrance to illegals, I think it to be a slap in the face of Texas (whose governor has been busing illegals to Blue States for years, now).

U.S. authorities have been flying migrants caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Canada border to Texas as part of a deterrence effort to tackle a rise in crossings, according to authorities, flight records and a Reuters witness.

U.S. Border Patrol has quietly transported about 100 migrants this month on two charter flights from Plattsburgh, New York, near the border with Canada, to the Texas cities of Harlingen and El Paso.

The southbound flights from the northern border are a break from past practice as the United States deals with a sharp rise in migrants crossing illegally from Canada, current and former officials told Reuters.

At the same time, asylum-seekers have been crossing from the United States into Canada in record numbers, straining resources. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to raise migration issues with U.S. President Joe Biden during meetings in Ottawa on Thursday and Friday.

U.S. Border Patrol apprehended nearly 2,900 people crossing illegally from Canada into the United States in the five months since October, more than all of fiscal year 2022. About half of those were Mexicans, who do not need a visa to travel to Canada.

Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency, said he could not recall the agency using charter flights for migrants caught crossing from Canada.

“The whole northern border issue wasn’t nearly as much on the radar,” he said.

(Read the Biden line at VOA News)

Surely, part of this is a poke in the eye for Governor Abbott for having bussed illegals to points liberal

Certainly, part of Joe’s reasoning for sending illegals to Texas rests in payback. Otherwise, if he wanted to present a deterent to the illegals, he would drop them off in the downtown districts of Democrat hell-holes of crime like New York City (where 4-year-old girls are shot in Times Square) or Chicago (where we are up to 161 shot during the first three months of 2023).

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Biden’s is not the normal cross-border illegals

Biden has allowed in illegals from 147 nations between October 2022 and February 2023

Fox News informs us of the illegal aliens from 147 nations that entered America between October 2022 and February 2023.

Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said this week that his agents have encountered hundreds of thousands of migrants from more than 140 countries — in the same week he told lawmakers that DHS does not have “operational control” of the southern border.

“So far, in FY23, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 900,590 individuals from 147 countries,” Ortiz said. FY 2023 began in October.

The top five countries for apprehensions were Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia and Guatemala.

Ortiz’s announcement came as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that there were 154,998 migrant encounters overall at the southern border in February, down from the 166,010 encountered in February 2022 and down slightly from the 156,770 encountered in January 2023. In February 2021, there were 101,099 encounters and 36,687 encounters in February 2020.

So far, in FY23, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 900,590 individuals from 147 countries. The top 5 nationalities Border Patrol Agents encountered are listed below. pic.twitter.com/GqawsZjee5

— Chief Raul Ortiz (@USBPChief) March 15, 2023

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Don’t forget the people and contraband we never saw

Thank Biden for all of the fentanyl and other contraband (drugs, human, terrorist, and other) that made it over the border and into your city.

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Eight ways of illustrating the importance of the shaping of the Supreme Court

 

1. Mike Pence on Supreme Court: ‘May Be No Issue More Important to the Life of the Nation than the Destiny’ of SCOTUS

Breitbart quoted Vice President Mike Pence in an 11 July 2020 article on the importance of the shaping of the Supreme Court.

Vice President Mike Pence told Breitbart News exclusively that he and President Donald Trump consider the U.S. Supreme Court one of, if not the most, important issue in the upcoming presidential election, saying there may be nothing that rises to the level of appointing justices to the highest court in the land.

Asked during an exclusive interview on Thursday that aired on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel about the possibility of several vacancies in the next presidential term, Pence said he and Trump know how important this is to many Americans.

“There may be no issue more important to the life of the nation than the destiny of the Supreme Court,” Pence said. “As we learned in the recent disappointing decision on the right to life, I hear conservatives around the country understand now more than ever that we need four more years of President Donald Trump in the White House. We’ve confirmed more than 200 judges to our federal courts, and that includes two justices to the Supreme Court, and I can tell you that each and every one of them are exactly the kind of conservative jurists that President Trump promised to appoint in the election of 2016.”

In recent weeks, retirement rumors have circulated regarding conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Concerns about the health of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts have also been made public. Then questions about the health of liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both in their 80s now, linger as well. Breyer is 81 now and will be 82 by election day. Ginsburg is 87 years old now and will be 88 early next year. That means the next president could appoint as many as five or perhaps even more justices to the Supreme Court in the next term, a level of impact on the country not seen in generations.

(Read more at Breitbart)

While we may have to endure the likes of Neil “Benedict Arnold” Gorsuch, establishing a conservative majority should drive us to the polls

Republicans and conservatives (who are not always one in the same) must combine into one group of hope. Rather than falling into the Democrats’ model and:

• Becoming agents of lawlessness (refer to the months of rioting in Seattle and Portland) and
• Messengers of hopelessness (look to the months of complaints by Pelosi and Nadler over the coronavirus response without any alternative provided),

we must:

• Be the party of law and order (which must include nominating and having approved justices who interpret the Constitution as it was written),
• Be messengers of truth and hope (who speak that truth even when it benefits other parties), and
• the party who seeks the face of God (and allows those who do not seek God to seek their own path, just as God does not force Himself on the unbelieving).

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2. Supreme Court strikes down Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics, reasserting commitment to abortion rights

The Associated Press gives us the flip side to the ruling on Justice Roberts’ most recent flop.

A divided Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics, reasserting a commitment to abortion rights over fierce opposition from dissenting conservative justices in the first big abortion case of the Trump era.

Chief Justice John Roberts and his four more liberal colleagues ruled that a law that requires doctors who perform abortions must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals violates abortion rights the court first announced in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

The outcome is far from the last word on the decades-long fight over abortion with dozens of state-imposed restrictions winding their way through the courts. But the decision was a surprising defeat for abortion opponents, who thought that a new conservative majority with two of President Donald Trump’s appointees on board would start chipping away at abortion access.

The key vote belonged to Roberts, who had always voted against abortion rights before, including in a 2016 case in which the court struck down a Texas law that was virtually identical to the one in Louisiana.

The chief justice explained that he continues to think the Texas case was wrongly decided, but believes it’s important for the court to stand by its prior decisions.

“The result in this case is controlled by our decision four years ago invalidating a nearly identical Texas law,” Roberts wrote. He did not join the opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer for the other liberals in Monday’s decision, and his position left abortion-rights supporters more relieved than elated.

The case was the third in two weeks in which Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, joined the court’s liberals in the majority. One of the earlier decisions preserved the legal protections and work authorization for 650,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. The other extended federal employment-discrimination protections to LGBT Americans, a decision that Justice Neil Gorsuch also joined and wrote.

In dissent on Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “Today a majority of the Court perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction.”

Trump’s two high-court picks, Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were in dissent, along with Samuel Alito. The presence of the new justices is what had fueled hopes among abortion opponents, and fears on the other side, that the Supreme Court would be more likely to uphold restrictions.

(Read more at the Associated Press)

This is insane that Roberts should state that the Texas law was incorrectly judged, but that the court must be consistent

Think on this: if the law from Texas on which Roberts initially wrote his majority opinion was (as he said) wrongly decided, what is the benefit of the court remaining consistent? The only benefit is that the court remains consistently wrong. Under Roberts’ line of thinking, we would still have the Dred Scott decision on the books.

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3. Chief Justice John Roberts sides with liberal Justices as Supreme Court rules in favor of restrictions on religious services

Breitbart reported on 29 May 2020 how the Supreme Court voted to restrict religious freedom despite the ongoing riots.

The Supreme Court on Friday night ruled in favor of coronavirus restrictions on religious services in California in a 5-4 decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberal justices to side with California’s legal argument that they had the right to shut down or limit religious services.

The decision came as thousands of protesters around the country gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, after a police officer in Minneapolis subdued him by kneeling on his neck for several minutes.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh voted against.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh argued that “comparable secular businesses” such as supermarkets, stores, hair salons, and marijuana dispensaries were not subject to the same restrictions as churches.

“The church and its congregants simply want to be treated equally to comparable secular businesses,” Kavanaugh wrote. “California already trusts its residents and any number of businesses to adhere to proper social distancing and hygiene practices.”

The case was brought to the Supreme Court by the South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, Ca

California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered that in-church gatherings can only reach 25 percent of capacity and under 100 people.

(Read more at Breitbart)

This decision illustrates the danger of a liberal judiciary to our rights

While you may not be religious, the liberals could just as easily abridge your right to bear arms. Likewise, they could (and have) limited our free-speech rights, free-association rights, and other God-given rights.

Of course, while God-given rights cannot fully be taken away, they can be made difficult to access through Marxist influences like BLM and liberal judges.

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4. Gorsuch and Roberts join liberals in Supreme Court ruling to protect LGBTQ+ workers

The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports on how the ruling benefits transsexuals.

In a landmark victory for LGBTQ rights, the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that employers can’t legally fire people because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

In a 6-3 opinion, the court ruled that employers who fire individuals “merely for being gay transgender” violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex and other characteristics — but not specifically gender identity or sexual orientation.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first appointee to the high court, and Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal justices in the case. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh filed dissenting opinions.

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” wrote Gorsuch, who authored the majority opinion. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

The ruling will have a profound effect on millions of LGBTQ people and their families. Nearly 5% of U.S. adults — more than 11 million people — identify as LGBTQ, according to Reuters, and large percentages report workplace discrimination. More than 40% of lesbian, bisexual and gay people — and 90% of transgender people — have faced employment discrimination based on their sexual orientation, according to court documents.

President Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, hailed the “historic” decision Monday. “No one should be denied a job or fired simply because of who they are or whom they love,” he said in a statement.

But he said more work remains. The high court legalized gay marriage in 2015, but about half of states lack statutes protecting LGBTQ people from workplace discrimination.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed.

She pointed to legislation passed last year by the U.S. House that would amend existing civil rights law to explicitly cover sexual orientation and gender identity and make other changes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “must end his partisan obstruction and allow the Senate to vote on this critical legislation,” she said in a statement.

Justices heard cases last fall involving plaintiffs who argued they were wrongfully fired because of their gender orientation and sexual identity.

(Read more at the Iowa Capital Dispatch)

Not only has this ruling invalidated Title 9, it has ensured lawsuits

By ruling “for” transgenders, Gorsuch and Roberts have invalidated the Title 9 protections for girls. Now, separate programs for girls at universities, colleges, and high schools have officially become part of the past. There is only the formality of waiting for the lawsuits that will end the programs.

Speaking of lawsuits, though, this ruling has ensured many of them. They will come as transgenders sue private schools for employment. They will come as transgenders sue churches for positions of leadership.

Just as the LGBTQ activists have sued Sweet Cakes by Melissa and Barronnelle Stutzman into bankruptcy and have repeatedly taken Masterpiece Cakeshop to court, the transgender activists will sue some Christian business or church out of existence.

Remember, though, that they only want a place at the table. They only want to come out of the closet.

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5. John Roberts writes law again

Although Obama created DACA in a format that could not receive judicial review, John Roberts and the other liberal justices are reported by ABC News as having ruled that Trump did not follow correct procedures to end DACA.

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major defeat Thursday, blocking his 2017 decision to immediately end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, rejects Trump’s rationale for canceling the program as “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of federal law.

Roberts said there’s no question the president has the power to end DACA, but that the issue was with how he did it — leaving the door open for the administration to make another attempt at cancelling the program.

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,” Roberts wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed.”

By a 5-4 vote, Roberts joined the court’s liberals in faulting the Department of Homeland Security for ignoring “conspicuous issues” of “hardship” that ending DACA would have on recipients, especially those serving in the U.S. military, undergoing medical treatments or studying in school.

“Today’s decision is completely monumental,” said Krissia Rivera, a 27-year-old DACA recipient and fourth-year medical school student at Brown University. “This decision means that I will be able to apply to residency programs and hopefully achieve my dream of becoming a surgeon”

DACA began under President Barack Obama in 2012 and allows young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the country and work without being deported on a two-year, renewable term. As of March 31, 2020, 640,000 people have active DACA status, and since 2012, more than 825,000 people have utilized the program.

(Read more at ABC News)

A liberal judiciary, if allowed to grow, will unequally apply the law

As they did in the instance cited above, the judges would allow a President to create a program while disallow the next President from stopping that program. They would allow certain groups (like the Tea Party) to be persecuted through the workings of the Internal Revenue Service. However, in the next administration, similar private information brought through a similarly out-of-control bureaucracy came through fraudulently-obtained FISA warrants and was allowed into the Mueller investigation (though that produced nothing but exoneration).

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6. In 2019, Roberts joined in keeping aborting in Louisiana with a 5-4 ruling

NBC News reports that Roberts joined the liberal justices to save abortion in Louisiana in a 2019 decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked Louisiana from enforcing a law that women’s groups said would leave only a single doctor legally allowed to perform abortions in the state.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said the restrictions must remain on hold while challengers appeal a lower court decision in favor of the law. Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the court’s liberal members.

It was the Supreme Court’s first significant action on the hot-button issue of abortion since Donald Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, replaced Anthony Kennedy, who generally voted with the court’s liberals to uphold abortion rights.

In Thursday’s ruling, Kavanaugh voted with the conservatives — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

Kavanaugh filed a dissent, writing only for himself. He said he would have allowed the law to take effect in order to see whether it would impose a burden on women’s access to abortion in the state.

Abortion-rights advocates applauded the court ruling, while opponents expressed disappointment.

“The Supreme Court has stepped in under the wire to protect the rights of Louisiana women,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The three clinics left in Louisiana can stay open while we ask the Supreme Court to hear our case. This should be an easy case — all that’s needed is a straightforward application of the court’s own precedent.”

Benjamin Clapper, executive director for Louisiana Right to Life, said he was disappointed that the law remains on hold. He said supporters of abortion rights have fought “against every common-sense health standard. This is just another example of the extreme lengths the abortion industry pursues to protect abortion-on-demand.”

The high court’s decision Thursday was not a ruling on the legal merits of the Louisiana restriction. But the decision to keep the law on hold signals that a majority of the justices have doubts about its constitutionality.

Passed by the state legislature in 2014, the measure requires any doctor offering abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Two Louisiana doctors and a clinic filed a legal challenge, arguing that it was identical to a Texas law the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. In that ruling, joined by Justice Kennedy, the court said Texas imposed an obstacle on women seeking access to abortion services without providing them any medical benefits.

(Read more at NBC News)

To reiterate the information previously provided on the liberal decision, we must act

Since it seems that liberals have problems with using cases to equally apply the law and with reading both the Constitution and law, we need to install more justices who can consistently apply both the Constitution and the law.

We need, again, to become a nation of laws and not a respecter of persons. We do not need to bow the knee to the royal Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Jerry Nadler, and Nancy Pelosi.

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7. An activist Supreme Court overruled the votes of numerous states

As noted by Red State, the Supreme Court has become a threat to democracy through its rulings.

In the span of two days the Supreme Court of these United States became a “threat to demomcracy” as the great Justice Antino Scalia wrote in one of his dissents.  In the Courts three rulings King v Burwel upholding Obamacare subsides for the federal exchange, Texas Housing v Inclusive Communities which found that discrimination in housing can happen simply by statistics, and Obergefell v. Hodges which nationalized gay marriage, a serious blow was dealt to the foundations of our nation, our system of government, society itself, and to the Constitution.

In Burwell, Chief Justice John Roberts once again rewrote Obamacare so as to keep the law intact rather than do the right and legally required thing and strike it down, in this case the subsides for the federal exchange, twisting the meaning of words to suit an outcome.

In Texas v Inclusive Communities the Court found that discrimination can now happen by statistical anoymally.  Even  in the abscense of overt, planned/pattern, or documentable evidence of discrimination that disctinction can be so applied just by the appearance of it in statistical analysis.  We all know what Mark Twain said about statistics. This will be used by the progressive left, and the bureacruats Obama has been putting in place at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to force communities to build low-income and government housing for poor and minorities soley to change the ethnic and racial make-up of a community because it doesn’t fit into the master plan of a centralized government planner.

In Hodges, the Court, lead by Justice Anthony Kennedy, bastardized the 14th amendment to nationalize same sex marriage. Making 5 Judges in black robes superior and more knowledgeable than thousands of years of human history, culture, and tradition, not to mention centuries of legal precedent that has defined marriage as being between one man and one woman.

Worse this decision makes the erasure of the 9th and 10th amendments, which on their faces should have made the question of marriage that of the sole juristiction of the seperate states of the union, complete. And forget about the founding precept of Federalism.

The Supreme Court has indeed become a threat to our Democracy and to the Constiution it is sworn to protect and uphold.

Therefore we must use the best tool available to use to fix a broke Court and that is Article V’s Convention of the States process to amend the Constitution.

Over a year ago Mark Levin worte in his best seller The Liberty Amendments that the Convention process needed to be used to place term limits on the Supreme Court(as well as Congress) and that Supreme Court rulings needed to have a veto measure over them.  Levin called for giving Congress and state legislatures each their three-fifths override authority they could enact on Supreme Court rulings within 24 months of their issuance.

In the wake of the rulings Texas Senator and GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has offered an amendment that would create retention elections for Supreme Court Justices as is done in some 20 other states currently.

On the Senate floor Cruz blasted the Courts judicial activism and suggested that if Chief Justice Roberts and others wanted to be legislators they should resign from the bench and run for Congress.

Fellow GOP presidential candidate Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has his own constitutional fix to the Supreme Courts abuse of its power, an amendment affirming marriage as a states issue only.

Any amendment to the Constitution affecting the Supreme Court or its terrible rulings would require three-fourths votes of each chamber of Congress and the ratification of three-fourths of the states, or under the Convention process two-thirds of the state legislatures calling for a Convention with three-fourths of the states required for ratification.

The Supreme Court has greatly stepped outside its bounds and has begun issuing rulings, that are new pieces of legislation(see both rewrites by Roberts of Obamacare) or fundamentally alter historical institutions, like marriage, that owe their origins to the days before we fully established systems of government or codes of law.  This lawlessness and judicial tyranny needs to come to an end.

(Read more at Red State)

Prior to the kritocratic decision on marriage, __

Not only had our U.S. Representatives and Senators worked with the President of the time to pass the Defense of Marriage Act, politicians in 13 states (as late as February 2015) had worked to represent their constituents who believed marriage should only be between a man and a woman. The “justices” of the Supreme Court overruled the votes of those politicians and those voters.

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8. Even the New York Times was surprised by Roberts’ save of Obamacare

Even the New York Times found it hard to explain how John Roberts could re-write Obamacare from the bench to make it constitutional.

LIBERALS and conservatives were exercised and confused by the combination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s tax subsidies on Thursday and his dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision recognizing a constitutional right of same-sex marriage on Friday. Both sides accused him of voting politically: On Thursday he was taken to task by the right, and on Friday by the left.

In fact, the chief justice’s votes in both cases were entirely consistent and constitutionally principled. He embraced a bipartisan vision of judicial restraint based on the idea that the Supreme Court should generally defer to the choices of Congress and state legislatures. His insistence that the court should hesitate to second-guess the political branches regardless of whether liberals or conservatives win is based on his conception of the limited institutional role of the court in relation to the president, Congress and the states.

On Thursday, when Chief Justice Roberts wrote a 6-to-3 decision preserving a key part of the Affordable Care Act (for the second time), Justice Antonin Scalia accused him once again of engaging in liberal judicial activism. “The somersaults of statutory interpretation” the chief justice had performed in both health care cases, Justice Scalia wrote, signaled to America “the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

(Read more at the New York Times)

It is sad when you can surprise the New York Times with the liberality of a Supreme Court Justice

However, rule by the courts should surprise (and revolt) every American.

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Anti-Trump to the Extreme or Just Pointlessly Partisan Democrat?

Anti-Trump Extremes in the Judiciary

Do These Cases Prove Scalia Right?

Through the lens of a 15 May 2017 The Weekly Standard article by Marc O. DeGirolami, the effects of Trump-hatred within the courts starts to come into focus. Nonetheless, I added emphasis by bolding the key phrases.

“Something ugly is happening to the First Amendment. It is being contorted to enable judges to protest Donald Trump’s presidency. The perennial impulse of judges to manipulate the law to achieve morally and politically desirable ends has only been exacerbated by the felt necessity to ‘resist’ Trump. The result: Legal tests concerning the freedoms of speech and religion that in some cases were already highly dubious are being further deformed and twisted.

Welcome to the rise of fake law. Just as fake news spreads ideologically motivated misinformation with a newsy veneer, fake law brings us judicial posturing, virtue signaling, and opinionating masquerading as jurisprudence. And just as fake news augurs the end of authoritative reporting, fake law portends the diminution of law’s legitimacy and the warping of judges’ self-understanding of their constitutional role.

Those who try to police the relentlessly transformational projects of constitutional progressives had much to dread from the Obama administration, an inveterate ally of the legal left that did what it could to graft the aspirations of progressives onto the Constitution. But Trump’s presidency may be even worse, because too many judges now feel called to ‘resist’ Trump and all his works—no matter the cost to the law’s authority and to the integrity of the judicial role.

In one recent deformation, Trump was sued for incitement to riot and assault and battery when, at a campaign rally before he became president, he said ‘Get ’em out of here’ in response to protesters in the audience. Several of these protesters were subsequently pushed and struck by others in the crowd. A Kentucky federal district judge ruled that the case against Trump could proceed because ‘Get ’em out of here’ could reasonably be interpreted as an exhortation to attack the protesters.

…

It is not possible to explain this jaw-dropping ruling—one that flies in the face of binding Supreme Court precedent—without reference to extra-legal factors: the desire to embarrass the president, for example, or to create mischief for him, or to signal opposition to him. That Trump had previously ‘condoned violence’ is irrelevant to whether he incited a riot at this rally. It is highly relevant, however, if one’s purpose is grandstanding to injure a political opponent.

An even more appalling specimen of fake law has been generated by Trump’s executive order restricting entry into the country by nationals of six foreign countries for 90 days and suspending refugee admission for 120 days. In one court order, a Hawaii federal district judge rejected the government’s claim that the six nations posed special security threats (on this, the Trump and Obama administrations are aligned) and concluded that the order violated the establishment clause. Relying principally on obscure dicta from Justice David Souter’s opinion for the Supreme Court in McCreary County v. ACLU (2005), the court held that the ‘unique,’ ‘remarkable’ ‘historical context’ of the order, ‘full of religious animus, invective, and obvious pretext,’ tainted it with anti-Muslim bias and therefore evidenced a purpose to make a law respecting an establishment of religion.

The court pointed to campaign statements by Trump that ‘Islam hates us’ and by his ‘surrogate’ (a media term appropriated by the judge) Rudy Giuliani’s description of a campaign conversation with Trump about a ‘Muslim ban’ to justify its holding. This executive order was narrower than its predecessor—but somehow that counted against the government. In reaffirming its decision in a preliminary injunction, the court erupted in sanctimonious disgust: ‘The Court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has.’

…

And unreasonable observers have unreasonable ones. Put to one side that the Supreme Court has never yet applied the establishment clause to foreign claims—a fact not even acknowledged by this judge. What makes the Hawaii court ruling so absurd—and such a clear example of fake law—is the district judge’s use of campaign statements by people without any lawmaking power when they were made to identify the order’s purpose.

…

A large part of the blame for this abomination falls on the Supreme Court. It was only a matter of time before the hollowness of its favored establishment clause test—which focuses on impure motivations, perceived slights, and the hurt feelings of political exclusion—would be exposed in the patently unreasonable use of irrelevant and illimitable ‘context.’ The reasonable observer, it seems, is not the judge who faithfully applies the law but the politically motivated judge who swells the scope of the establishment clause and wears his contempt for the president like a medal.“

…

(Read more at The Weekly Standard)

While the judicial rulings regarding the immigration pause from lands nearly impossible to vet and the enforcement of existing immigration law provided good examples of the whimsical (rather than precedent-based) nature of the judges’ decisions, they seem to illustrate even more that we all have been living in a kritarchy for quite a while.  To further illustrate that, we might consider the cumulative 50 million who voted across multiple states to support the traditional view of marriage and then the 5 lawyers in black robes overrule the 50 million votes.  After mulling over that massive example of judicial overreach, consider the overreach involved in redefining Obamacare into its tax status (rather than the penalty Obama insisted the ACA had at its heart).

Would it then be an overreach to think that Justice Antonin Scalia might have had a prescient moment when he wrote in the dissenting opinion to Obergefell v. Hodges:

“I … call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.”

Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners

Reaction Against Enforcing Immigration Law or Reaction Against Republicans?

In a 6 May 2017 OneNewsNow article, the extents to which some liberals will go to thwart the rule of law using taxpayer funds in the effort. From a county that wants to provide taypayer-funded legal representation to illegal aliens to governors who want to establish sanctuary states to members of the Muslim Brotherhood in American government, this article pieces together a frightening tapestry.

“In a reported attempt to spite President Donald Trump for being tough on immigration, officials in Washtenaw County gave their initial approval to forward new immigration policies designed to welcome criminal aliens, illegal migrants and other immigrants through resolutions – one of which gives taxpayer-funded legal aid to illegals facing deportation … for free.

The leftist county – which is home to the University of Michigan – is looking to become the ultimate sanctuary of sanctuaries for illegals.

‘Washtenaw and its main city of Ann Arbor are already sanctuary jurisdictions, but now they are expanding and codifying their policies that give all sorts of favorable treatment to refugees and immigrants – regardless of legal status,’ WND reported.

Payback for Trump … at taxpayers’ expense

The motivation behind the aggressive immigration reform move is reportedly payback to Trump for seeking to increase deportations and augment law enforcement’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

‘As an act of resistance to President Donald Trump’s agenda and in solidarity with the county’s immigrant community, the County Board of Commissioners voted 5–2 at its Ways and Means Committee meeting Wednesday night, May 3, to give initial approval to new immigration policies,’ Mlive.com announced regarding the three-resolution package, which could receive its final approval on May 17 – the date of the next full board meeting.

Through the use of inclusive rhetoric, the various pro-immigration reform policies seek to manufacture new rights for illegal immigrants at taxpayers’ expense – while paying no heed to the increased risks incurred by legal residents who could suffer the deleterious economic and safety effects of having criminal aliens in their communities.

‘One resolution asserts the county’s support for the immigrant community, another affirms the county as a welcoming community that respects the innate dignity of all people and the final resolution adopts a policy governing the solicitation of immigration status by Washtenaw County public servants,’ the local Michigan news outlet informed.

It is anticipated that the resolutions introduced by Commissioner Conan Smith (D-Ann Arbor) allocate an exorbitant amount of taxpayer funds toward helping illegal immigrants continue to break the law by staying in the country illegally – money that is reportedly needed by law-abiding and legal county residents.

‘There’s an expectation the county will be putting taxpayer money toward programs to aid immigrants – including undocumented immigrants facing deportation or otherwise affected by federal immigration enforcement,’ Mlive.com’s Ryan Stanton explained. ‘Commissioners decided against including specific dollar amounts in the resolutions, though a memo accompanying the package states the board’s actions would result in appropriations of about $135,200 from the general fund’s cash reserves for one-time expenses.’

Forget sanctuary cities … let’s talk ‘sanctuary state’

In his bid to make history and become the United States’ first Muslim governor in the 2018 election, Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is working to make Michigan a ‘sanctuary state’ for undocumented immigrants in a reported act of retaliation against Trump for his push to deport illegals and increase the enforcement of immigration laws.

‘El-Sayed pitched the ‘sanctuary state’ concept in a new policy platform outline his campaign released Monday,’ The Detroit News reported. ‘The former Detroit health director and son of Egyptian immigrants also proposed a public health insurance program for Michigan residents, a minimum wage increase and universal pre-school access.’

The Muslim politician claims that no national reform exists to give illegal immigrants any viable path to citizenship, insisting that illegal immigrant families should be protected by the state, which should recognize the role illegals play in the economy – by providing farmers with cheap illegal labor.

‘This is a bold, progressive approach to the very real and very serious problems that our state faces right now,’ El-Sayed told The Detroit News while on the campaign trail in Grand Rapids, Michigan. ‘[Sanctuary status would mean] the state is not going to invest its own dollars, its own police force, its own corrections money equipping and empowering what seems to be questionable – and often dispassionate – enforcement of laws and policies that are unclear at best.’

More red flags …

Heightening the national security threat even further, it is noted that El-Sayed has ties with an internationally identified Islamic terrorist group – the Muslim Brotherhood.

‘He is the former health director for the city of Detroit and graduated from University of Michigan, serving during his time on campus as the president of the Muslim Student Association,’ WND’s Leo Hohmann divulged. ‘The MSA is a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, as documented by the FBI in evidence presented at the terror-financing trial prosecuted in 2008 against the Holy Land Foundation.’

El-Sayed is reportedly on board with the global agenda to Islamize the West – a movement championed by an ardent backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, former President Barack Obama.

‘There are more than 300 sanctuary cities and counties now operating in the U.S., following the dictates of the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda, which is the implementation plan for the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,’ Hohmann continued. ‘The document incorporates for the first time the rights of migrants into U.N.’s 17-point plan for global development, which was adopted by 193 heads of state, including President Obama and Pope Francis, at the U.N. in New York in September 2015.’ “

…

(Read the rest at OneNewsNow)

So, according to the liberal side of this story — even though laws that liberals don’t like have been passed and though politicians that liberals don’t like have been elected — liberals can

• Just ignore those pesky laws, 
• Fund their actions out of the public coffers, and 
• Set up groups supported by ousted liberal leaders in ways that those groups can discriminate in favor of the small (but growing) group.

However, as known by many conservatives, when a liberal sets up a bureaucracy or creates a law — those rules and laws must be observed. Just ask Baronelle Stutzman, Melissa Klein, Elaine Huguenin, Cynthia Gifford, Jack Phillips, Crystal Dixon, Mary O’Reilly, or Betty Odgaard. Additionally, if you want to know about the intolerant left, talk to Kevin O’Connor, Trish McGrath, or  Edie Delorme.

As you review all the linked cases of intolerance, do these liberal bureaucracies and unchecked liberal campaigns only seem to target Christians? They do. However, we couldn’t expect a gay baker to create a cake covered with Bible verses, could we?

Anti-Religious Left – Will They Allow Religious Freedom?

Of the commentaries that I have read on president’s executive order concerning religious freedom, the following 11 May 2017 assessment by the National Catholic Register provides the best overall review of all sides of the issues involved. (Ellipses mark sections where I removed text. Except for the headings in this article, the emphasized text was bolded by me.)

“When President Donald Trump introduced his May 4 executive order on religious freedom, members of various groups were on hand at the White House, including prominent Catholic leaders.

…

Cardinal Wuerl’s assessment explained why Church leaders attended the White House event. After years of battling the Health and Human Services’ contraceptive mandate and other rules that compromised religious freedom, Trump signaled a fresh approach to church-state relations.

Yet Cardinal Wuerl did not suggest that the executive order had resolved all the religious-liberty issues that stirred alarm during the Obama years, such as rules that barred federal contractors from discrimination on the basis of gender identity or weak enforcement of conscience protections for opponents of abortion.

Rather, he pointed to the likelihood of incremental change that would steadily ease the pressure on religious believers and church-affiliated institutions.

‘Once you start moving in the right direction, there is more you can correct,’ he said.

Other religious leaders and commentators have echoed the Washington archbishop’s positive, nuanced reaction to the release of Trump’s long-awaited executive order, and they say their position reflects a clear-eyed judgment of the weakened status of religious freedom.

Concerns

But the document has also prompted anger and concern from social conservatives who describe its language as ‘vague’ and ‘woefully inadequate.’

The executive order directs federal agencies to consider issuing new rules to address conscience-based objections to the HHS mandate, which requires employers to offer health insurance plans that fund contraception, sterilizations and some drugs that can cause early abortions.

It also calls for a relaxation of the IRS’ enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits ministers from endorsing political candidates from the pulpit to retain their church’s tax-exempt status.

Some prominent evangelical Protestant pastors, like Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, welcomed Trump’s stance on the Johnson Amendment. Franklin has said that his organizations were audited by the IRS after he spoke out against same-sex ‘marriage.’

But the repeal of the Johnson Amendment has never been a top priority for most Christian or Catholic churches. In contrast, faith-based resistance to same-sex ‘marriage’ and to accommodations for gender-identity issues has sparked litigation. Yet the executive order offered no reprieve on such matters — in contrast to provisions that appeared in an early draft of the executive order leaked in February.

‘The president’s order is a huge disappointment,’ Gerard Bradley, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told the Register.

‘The first part, which is directed at the so-called Johnson Amendment and the tax-based limits upon political expression by churches, is already rarely enforced.’

‘The second, which was probably aimed most of all at the HHS ‘contraception’ mandate, promises nothing concrete. Besides, the Supreme Court has already directed the federal government to negotiate a new approach to that mandate,’ said Bradley, in a reference to the high court’s order in Zubik v. Burwell, a consolidated HHS mandate case that includes the Little Sisters’ lawsuit.

‘The president has retreated, massively, from the positions his administration staked out in a leaked and widely disseminated draft of the order. Most pointedly, it surely appears that the Trump administration is unwilling to help believers beat back imposition of the ‘LGBT’ agenda upon them.’

HHS Mandate Commitment

Legal scholars say that two key Trump appointees — U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions and HHS Secretary Tom Price — both strong advocates of religious freedom, will likely approve rule changes that will benefit plaintiffs in legal challenges to the contraceptive mandate.

But analysts still argued that the executive order lacked teeth.

‘The attorney general’s guidance is likely to be pretty religion-friendly, but … this order in itself does nothing,’ said Douglas Laycock, a specialist on religious freedom at the University of Virginia Law School. ‘[There is] nothing here about gay rights, about federal contractors or about federal employees. ‘

Some commentators have gone further, dismissing the executive order as a shallow political ploy that delivers nothing of value to beleaguered churches under pressure to conform to new sexual orthodoxies.

…

‘Moved in the Right Direction’

Yet, even as Dreher vented his fury at the Trump White House, he also admitted that things could be much worse if the real estate mogul had lost the presidential election.

‘[W]e would have seen active attacks on religious liberty by President Hillary Clinton. If Trump is doing no good for us, at least he’s not doing active harm,’ said Dreher. ‘There’s something to be said for that. I’m not kidding.’

…

R.R. ‘Rusty’ Reno, the editor of First Things, suggested that Catholics should not be surprised by the limited scope of the executive order.

‘During his campaign, Trump made it clear that he was not interested in challenging the sexual revolution and gay movement,’ Reno told the Register. ‘The executive order reflects that stance. At this point, the Trump administration is offering religious believers a stance of non-aggression rather than laying down firm principles to protect religious freedom.’

‘This is an obvious improvement on the approach taken by the Obama administration, but falls short of a clear affirmation of religious freedom,’ he added.

Judicial Appointments

Reno, the author of Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, wants religious believers to push hard for a more comprehensive White House policy on religious freedom.

‘These efforts need to include ensuring that Trump’s judicial appointments inject a First Amendment rigor into the courts,’ he said.

Earlier this week, the White House announced 10 nominees to fill openings on the lower courts, with more needed for an additional 110 empty seats. Carrie Severino, a conservative activist and a veteran of Supreme Court confirmation battles, welcomed Trump’s choices.

The news offers further evidence that Trump intends to fulfill his campaign pledge ‘to appoint strong and principled jurists to the federal bench who will enforce the Constitution’s limits on federal power and protect the liberty of all Americans,’ Donald McGahn II, the White House senior counsel, told the New York Times.

…

Legislative Action

Looking ahead, Trump’s nominees could help secure protections for religious freedom as an increasingly secular culture parts ways with organized religion and biblical teachings on marriage and sexual ethics.

At the same time, the heated debate over Trump’s religious-liberty executive order has also deflected attention from legislative action that could either beef up conscience rights, or, say some, strike a balance between religious freedom and ‘LGBT’ rights.

‘When it comes to LGBT and marriage-related issues, there are those who want Trump to do something quite aggressive and are disappointed that he did not,’ said Schultz. ‘Others would say, ‘No, better to save our political capital for future legislative engagement.’’

‘An executive order is, by definition, a short-term policy change,’ he added. ‘If the choice is between short-term and nothing, short-term might be preferable, but most would like to see policy changes that will outlast this administration, and that is going to involve legislation of some kind.’

Cardinal Wuerl

As the debate over the executive order and the evolving priorities of the Trump White House continues to simmer, Church leaders acknowledge that churches must also do more to register their own support for ‘the first freedom.’

…

Cardinal Wuerl said he also has found inspiration in Pope Francis’ ability to bypass the secular filter of global media and bring Jesus Christ and his teachings to ordinary people.

The New Evangelization asks each ‘follower of Christ to become an evangelizing disciple,’ the cardinal said.

‘Statements from the bishops’ conference or pastoral letters won’t touch individual believers’ hearts. You have to be the voice for those values.’ “

On the whole, I have to agree with the author on several accounts:

1. This is not the best executive order in regard to protecting our religious freedoms; however, conditions would have been much worse under Clinton or Obama.
2. This executive order does not protect Christians from the ongoing onslaught from the LGBT community. However, in light of the judicial activism tying the travel pause and sanctuary city executive orders, perhaps we should consider the entire legal landscape as we move forward.
3. Of course, we should try to secure greater protections of our freedoms since they have been so completely eroded during the Obama administration.
4. We need to fill the judicial landscape (both the Supreme Court and all the lower courts) with as many conservative jurists as we can.
5. We should always be ready to give an answer for the hope that we hold. While we must challenge the wrong that appears around us, we also don’t need to act offensively when offended.

The Johnson Amendment Not Applied to Democrat Strongholds

As pointed out in an August 2016 post in this blog, Democrats have ignored the requirements of the Johnson Amendment since it was created. However, that should not be a surprise since the law was forced through Congress by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson after conservative churches almost cost him an election.

In light of this inequal application of the law, why don’t we just get rid of it?