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The story of America is scrappy, daring, and revolutionary. Our Founding Fathers took an idea—democracy—that had been dead for centuries and revived it with little more than an amateur militia and a dream for a better world.
The great American experiment has been led by consequential presidents. They were warriors, leaders, and titans. Some of them, like Abraham Lincoln, literally stood above the crowds with imposing height. Military heroes such as Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt had the kind of courage you only read about today.
Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Ronald Reagan, an actor before entering the political sphere, pioneered conservative policies and paved the way for the modern conservative movement.
From innovators, thinkers and writers to generals, orators, and businessmen, the presidency of the United States used to be a job that attracted the best of the best.
Fast-forward to 2024. America’s president is the butt of jokes around the world. President Joe Biden gets lost on stage, forgets what he’s saying in the middle of a sentence, and bears little resemblance to the charming “Uncle Joe” that many Americans admired during the Obama administration.
Adding insult to injury, the Biden administration makes wrong decision after disastrously wrong decision. It’s been four years of failure and intentionally destructive policies.
To put it plainly, Biden does not measure up to the legendary presidents of American history.
Just this week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted from the podium that the Biden administration could take executive action to fix the border crisis, but it won’t. In fact, she bragged about the executive actions Biden took early in his presidency to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump‘s administration.
Biden stumbled through nine errors in a recent speech that White House staff had to clean up afterward.
Biden’s White House issued condolences for the death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi—a man nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his human rights abuses and whose leadership led to a rise in terrorism and instability in the Middle East.
In another gaffe, Biden claimed to have been vice president during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also gave some bizarre marital advice: Marry a woman with a lot of sisters. He incorrectly announced that a person being held hostage by Hamas terrorists since Oct. 7 was in the crowd at an event.
He repeatedly stumbles up the stairs of Air Force One. He slips and falls on stage. He crashed his bike while riding at a slow pace. He reads aloud, with squinting eyes, the speech cues on his teleprompter.
He tells strange, inconsistent, and false stories about vague family members and friends.
Rather than cause alarm, Biden’s gaffes have become a punch line for late-night television. Hollywood brushes it off. Mainstream media happily provides him cover.
Unlike the media elites, the American people are horrified. They don’t think that Biden is truly capable of running the country. The chaos erupting around the world—in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, and Taiwan, to name a few—doesn’t calm any of those fears.
Biden is a liability on the campaign trail—and his team knows it. That’s why they’re trying so hard to keep Trump tied up in court, because when you put these two side by side, there’s no comparison.
The president shouldn’t be a punch line. He’s the most powerful person on the planet and leader of the free world. Presidents are supposed to inspire hope; they don’t hide in a basement.
The upcoming debates between Biden and Trump will make the choice explicitly clear.
When Americans head to the polls on Nov. 5, they will be reminded of the American presidents who have changed the course of history, some for better and others for worse.
Our great American revival can only happen when we embrace true leadership and put America first. Our next president must bring us closer to the promise of “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Many Ways Biden Doesn’t Measure Up appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In what is being termed a “dark day for America,” Republican officials are expressing outrage after a New York jury found former U.S. President Donald Trump guilty in his hush-money trial, accusing the Biden administration of using “lawfare seen in third world countries” while warning that if political opponents can target a former president, “they can do it to anyone.”
The post GOP Expresses Outrage Over Trump ‘Sham’ Conviction: ‘Dark Day for America’ — Threatens ‘Very Fabric of our Republic’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration publicly thanked the government of Mexico for extraditing a prominent lieutenant with the Sinaloa Cartel who had been in Mexican custody since November 2023. However, the administration has remained silent about more than a dozen other pending extraditions and the blocking of visas for U.S. agents to work in Mexico. The acknowledgment comes at a time when Biden is relying on Mexico’s efforts to slow down the ongoing migrant crisis at the border.
The post Biden Thanks Mexican President for Extraditing Narco Boss, Silent About Blocking DEA in Mexico appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden makes no speech without mentioning the importance of democracy in our nation.
We would like to believe this comes from deep ideals about human liberty lodged within our president.
But more accurate is that Biden, a politician all his adult life, is defined by just that—politics. No word, no act emanates from our president that does not emerge from some political calculation.
In the case of the ongoing reminders about the importance of democracy, the subliminal message Biden wishes to convey is to always remind us of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and to brand Donald Trump as an anti-democratic autocrat.
But let’s go beyond this and examine Biden’s premise about democracy itself.
In Biden’s latest speech, on Memorial Day, he said, “Our democracy is more than just a system of government. It is the very soul of America.”
Hanging on a wall in my offices in Washington, D.C., is a picture of Booker T. Washington, with his quote saying, “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it is accepted by the majority.”
An important reminder from Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee University, is that there is good and evil in this world, and they are transmitted to us through the Bible and our faith.
Democracy can only be the means through which a nation accepts or does not accept these eternal truths. But democracy does not invent them.
We should recall, again, the words of President George Washington in his farewell speech in 1796.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. … Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
In the 1850s, Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed to use democracy to solve the problem of whether slavery would be permitted in new states entering the union.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act provided that new states would determine by the vote whether it would be a slave state.
Abraham Lincoln rejected this proposition.
Per Lincoln, “Judge Douglas interrupted me to say that the principle of the Nebraska bill was very old, that it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.”
“The facts of this proposition are not true as stated,” said Lincoln. “God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him that there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death.”
What really interests Biden is growing government to advance his left-wing agenda, thereby diminishing individual freedom.
In 1950, shortly after World War II, federal government spending accounted for 14.1% of gross domestic product.
Per the Congressional Budget Office, in 2024, federal government spending will consume 23.1% of GDP; in 2034, 24.1%; in 2044, 25.7%; and in 2054, 27.3%.
Social Security trustees now project bankruptcy of the system by 2033. Revenues will fall short by 21%. Why doesn’t Biden support letting every American choose to opt out and instead invest in their own private retirement account?
Why doesn’t Biden support the right of parents to send their child to whatever K-12 school they choose?
The only place where Biden wants more choice is to hide behind his religion and give women the right to destroy their unborn child until the final moments of her pregnancy.
The founders of our country conceived of a nation rooted in core truths, which, by limiting government, would enable individual liberty.
They would not recognize our politicized nation today under Joe Biden.
Distributed by Creators.com
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Biden’s Democracy Smoke Screen appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An article written by the Washington Examiner states in its headline that the "Border Patrol has lost a quarter of [its] workforce since 2020 election." While the headline and article appear to be technically correct, they leave the impression that there are significantly fewer agents patrolling the border -- a conclusion that is not accurate.
The post FACT CHECK: Did Border Patrol Lose 25 Percent of Agents Under Biden appeared first on Breitbart.
This is the last in my series on “Three Reasons the Left Wants Open Borders.” I’ve covered ideology and electoral politics; now, let’s turn to extortion.
By turning on the taps of illegal immigration, open-borders proponents hope to create bargaining chips to negotiate amnesties and increased immigration flows. Since he took office, Joe Biden has paroled a million and a half inadmissible aliens under bogus premises, caught and quickly released into the U.S. the better part of 7 million more, and allowed at least 1.8 million more to evade Border Patrol—the “gotaways.”
As Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year, “The White House knows that an overwhelming majority of the people coming aren’t fleeing persecution but are economic migrants gaming our asylum laws. They know that there will be no serious effort to deport people whose claims are denied.”
Nonetheless, the roughly 10 million inadmissible foreign nationals who the White House calls “newcomers” will be new leverage to push immigration “reform,” which means massive amnesties and new “pathways” into the U.S. outside and on top of the legal immigration system authorized and numerically limited by Congress. Biden’s threat is to leave the taps wide open.
Under this pressure, wavering conservatives might concede to ineffective or even counterproductive legislation like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., bill that claimed to be a solution but did nothing to reduce the illegal flow. Fortunately, it failed on Thursday.
It was a trap—House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., correctly stated that the bill “would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open-border policies that created this crisis in the first place,” making it difficult for a future conservative president to reverse.
“Once bitten, twice shy” sums up why conservatives aren’t going to fall easily for this round of extortion. The relevant lesson is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The deal was that about 3 million illegal aliens would be amnestied, but that the government would work to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and keep another amnesty from happening again. To achieve this, employers would have to confirm the legal status of people before hiring them or face penalties.
The first part of the bargain (the amnesty) happened, but the second part did not in any comprehensive manner. Almost 40 years later, the number of illegal aliens present in the country is perhaps five times as great as in 1986.
Until recently, Democrats believed in enforcing immigration laws, even if they might want them eased. Listen to President Bill Clinton talking here in 1995. He endorsed the conclusions of the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform chaired at the time by Texas Democratic Rep. Barbara Jordan, which in its final 1997 report urged “immediate reforms to ensure that aliens with final orders of deportation, exclusion, or removal are indeed removed from the United States.”
Today, there are over 1.2 million such aliens with final orders, including 400,000 convicted criminals, and the Biden administration plans to remove barely 30,000.
Clinton also proudly stated that his administration had “moved aggressively,” hiring more Border Patrol, deporting “twice as many criminal aliens as ever before,” “cracking down on illegal hiring,” and “barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Today, no elected Democrat would even dare call an alien present in the U.S. illegally an “illegal alien.” In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is required to use the nonsensical term “undocumented noncitizens,” and Biden apologized recently for calling Laken Riley’s accused alien murderer “illegal.”
In 2024, after three years of mass release, mass parole, and lax enforcement, “Democrats appear to be panicking about this fall’s election, to the point that they are feigning doing something about the invasion at our southern border,” as Teresa Mull put it in the Spectator. Their strategy is to try and convince the American people that the real obstacle to securing the border is unreasonable Republicans. To sell this message would be to pull a giant rabbit out of a very small hat, as the open border is the clear work of the president and his hand-picked secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Schumer brought up the supposedly “bipartisan” Senate border bill for another vote Thursday, but it failed again, with even less support than in February. Biden may claim that he had “proposed and negotiated and agreed to the strongest border security bill this country has ever, ever, ever seen,” but senators who read it no doubt quickly reached the same conclusion as Johnson did in a few hours. The bill would have turned Biden’s welcome mat policies from overreaching executive whim into hardlaw. The Schumer bill was electioneering in the guise of legislating.
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-N.J., claimed the bill “gives the president new tools to better manage the border.” In fact, Biden has had the tools, including under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, since January 2021.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre unwittingly admitted this week that Biden could “unilaterally” limit how many illegal aliens are allowed to enter the country. Biden has also considered ordering expedited processing for newly caught illegals rather than just releasing them. Inaction on the border is the president’s choice.
In a May 19 letter to fellow senators, Schumer wrote “the American people … want bipartisan action to secure our border.” Indeed, a May 21 nationwide poll by the University of South Florida found that 77% wanted more Border Patrol agents at the southern border, and 60% actually supported “increasing physical barriers.” In a March poll, The Wall Street Journal reported that “at least 72% of respondents in each of the [seven swing] states saying the country’s immigration policy and border security were headed in the wrong direction.” Schumer somehow discovered this six months before the national elections.
Jean-Pierre has echoed her boss many times over the past three years in claiming that the border was “not open”—even as it leaked 10,000 or more illegal aliens a day. On May 20, she told senators to set “partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border.” But even Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., opposes using the bill he drafted for purely political messaging, and Johnson has called it “dead on arrival” if it were to pass the Senate.
“Bipartisan” should mean just that, like the Jordan Commission report, not a one-party position enforced through the extortionary means of doubling the illegal alien population via mass release, parole, and negligence.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration Raises Security Concerns
The Ways the Left Exploits Illegal Immigration for Electoral Gain
The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
The post Reason No. 3 the Left Wants Open Borders—Extortion for Amnesty: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A Palestinian state would spell Israel’s “destruction” and the Biden administration’s repeated pressuring of Israel to accept one is “plain stupidity,” according to Religious Zionism Knesset member Simcha Rothman, who described Hamas as a “terror cartel” that exports terrorism globally, insisting that Israel must defeat the radical Gaza-based Islamist terrorist group to “protect its own security and the security of the world.”
The post Exclusive: Israeli Minister Warns Palestinian State Would Spell Israel’s ‘Destruction’ – Biden’s Pressure ‘Plain Stupidity’ appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—After President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to work with private organizations to mobilize voters, senior White House officials asked agencies for “bold ideas” and explained plans to coordinate with “stakeholders.”
One message from the White House, obtained by The Daily Signal, said: “We look forward to working with you to”—but the rest of the content is blacked out by a redaction.
The specifics of those “bold ideas” and “stakeholders” isn’t knowable right now because “upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office, the information is being withheld under the presidential communications privilege,” according to a cover letter to The Daily Signal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The letter accompanied 99 pages that The Daily Signal obtained from USDA through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Since Biden signed his executive order on elections in March 2021, members of Congress, the press, and watchdog groups have struggled to get basic information on how the administration is implementing the order. Some details have trickled out through FOIA law, which requires that basic information from the government be available to the public.
Earlier this month, two House committees intensified their investigations of Biden’s order on turning out voters.
Although records obtained previously by The Daily Signal under FOIA requests contained redactions and cited exemptions, the responses didn’t refer to “presidential communication privilege.”
“The presidential communications privilege protects communications among the president and his advisors,” the cover letter to the released but redacted documents says.
“The records being withheld here consist of email communications concerning President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 and attached records that were solicited and received by the president or his immediate White House advisers who have broad and significant responsibility for investigating and formulating the advice to be given to the president,” says the letter signed by Alexis R. Graves, director of the USDA’s Office of Information Affairs.
Other exemptions to disclosure cited in Graves’ cover letter include the deliberative process privilege and attorney-client privilege.
Critics of Biden’s executive order, some of whom refer to it as “Bidenbucks,” argue that its implementation could cause bureaucrats to violate the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits political activity using resources of the federal government. Critics also say the order may violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits agencies from spending taxpayers’ money for reasons not approved by Congress.
Separately, the Justice Department has invoked presidential privilege to shield documents about Biden’s order in a public records lawsuit brought by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a watchdog group.
“In recent years, the presidential communications privilege has become an increasingly common excuse used by federal agencies to sidestep their disclosure obligations under federal law,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal.
“During the current administration, federal agencies have shown an increasing willingness to stretch the presidential communications privilege well beyond what is allowed under current law—documents or other materials that reflect presidential decision making and deliberations that the president believes should remain confidential—to any and all documents received by White House advisers and their staff,” Whitson said.
“If allowed to persist, federal agencies and the politically appointed bureaucrats leading these agencies will gradually render the FOIA law meaningless. Government transparency and our very democracy are under threat,” he said.
Stephonn O. Alcorn, then the associate director of racial justice and equity at the White House, sent an April 1, 2021, email to all federal agencies that is heavily redacted in the released version.
Alcorn’s email was about an interagency meeting to be convened eight days later, on April 9, by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Domestic Policy Counsel. The agenda is completely redacted.
Alcorn notified agencies that taking the White House lead on Biden’s election executive order would be Justin Vail, special assistant to the president for democracy and civic participation with the Domestic Policy Council, and Larry Schwartztol, an associate White House counsel.
In September 2021, Kumar Chandran, senior adviser for nutrition to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, notified Vail of a change of plans for how the USDA wanted to implement Biden’s order. In the released record, however, the change is blacked out from public view.
“After input from Sec. Vilsack this week, we are considering a change to one of our proposed actions, which would result in [redacted],” Chandran wrote.
“We need to do some further diligence to determine if it is viable, but if it is, we think it might be more meaningful,” he added.
A White House press release that month gave a broad overview of how the USDA would implement Biden’s order on mobilizing voters.
“The Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service will encourage the provision of nonpartisan voter information through its borrowers and guaranteed lenders, who interface with thousands of residents in the process of changing their voting address every year,” the White House press release said. “In addition, Rural Development agencies—which are spread throughout field offices across the country where rural Americans can apply for housing, facilities, or business assistance—will take steps to promote access to voter registration forms and other pertinent nonpartisan election information among their patrons.”
Getting to the point of how the USDA would push Americans to vote appears to be a tedious process, based on what’s discernible from the released records.
Some messages were more heavily redacted than others. For example, a September 2021 message from USDA Deputy Undersecretary for Rural Development Farah Ahmad says only “This is” before the text is blacked out.
A June 2021 email from Vail to Chandran was about the “interim report template.”
“At this point,” Vail’s message began, followed by several lines of redacted information. He continued: “We just want to ensure that all agencies are taking steps to generate bold ideas and begin to flesh out those ideas; it will also allow the opportunity for us to provide feedback.”
This statement is followed by more heavy redactions.
White House official Devontae Freeland, special assistant to the racial justice and equity team, notified agencies on July 2, 2021, about an upcoming conference with “stakeholders” on Biden’s executive order.
Separate document releases show that a Zoom conference the following July 12 involved Biden administration officials and numerous far-left political organizations, among them unions. The groups included the Southern Poverty Law Center, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, and the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network.
“As you know, we’re coordinating some input from stakeholders, including what we hope you found to be an informative session yesterday afternoon with state and local election officials,” Freeland wrote.
“We’ve also planned a session for nonpartisan nonprofit organizations engaged in voting rights advocacy to provide their recommendations and thoughts on best practices; we will follow up shortly with an additional session from nonprofit organizations with substantial expertise in reaching out to and engaging particular populations of voters who may be more difficult to reach. We hope that each of these sessions will provide helpful feedback,” he wrote, before more redactions blacked out the text.
In another heavily redacted message, Vail wrote USDA officials in late September 2021 with the subject line “Voting EO/Follow up items.”
On Oct. 6, 2021, Vail wrote to agencies about meeting on Biden’s executive order in coming days.
“We look forward to working with you to [redacted],” he wrote.
The next interagency meeting would be Oct. 20, Vail wrote.
Spokespersons for the White House and the Agriculture Department didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries about this report before publication.
The post ‘PRIVILEGE’: What the White House Doesn’t Think You Should Know About Biden’s Order on Mobilizing Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House.
That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of that year.
The Biden administration responded by simply redefining the word “recession.” The move made a bizarre kind of sense coming from a bureaucracy that has redefined what it means to be a woman.
The White House stated in July 2022 that “it is unlikely that the decline of the GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
The Heritage Foundation, a stick-in-the-mud organization that doesn’t support willy-nilly redefining words to suit the woke movement, decided to get to the bottom of this whole redefining-a-recession nonsense. Heritage’s Oversight Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2023, asking the Treasury Department for internal communications regarding recessions. (Heritage created The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Treasury asked Heritage to narrow the parameters of the request. It did so. Treasury refused to hand over the documents by the time required by law. Heritage sued. Late last month, Treasury handed over some documents.
The catch? Most of the conversations in those documents have been redacted.
To be sure, we do get little gems like “I’d be glad to discuss tomorrow or Monday,” and “Thank you for forwarding.” These largely meaningless pleasantries are among the few words Treasury apparently deems nonthreatening enough to reveal to the public.
Many pages simply feature a large black box redacting the entire page.
One email shows Treasury staff discussing a quote from the International Monetary Fund stating that a “technical recession” consists of two quarters of economic decline.
“For the United States, some indicators, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow forecasting model, suggest that a technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth) may already have started,” Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden, quoted the IMF in an email on July 26, 2022.
Treasury redacted Sperling’s own words in his email, along with the substance of every email responding to him.
So, Heritage plans to sue again.
“The Oversight Project sued the Treasury Department to seek answers on why the Biden administration gaslit the American people into changing the definition of recession,” Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel at the Oversight Project, told The Daily Signal. “We have received multiple document productions from our lawsuit showing that there were a lot of communications about this change, but excessive redactions have hampered our ability to determine the truth. We intend to challenge these redactions as we progress in the case.”
The Biden administration’s apparent attempt, yet again, to hide the substance of internal discussions about the definition of a recession raises more questions than answers.
Did Treasury officials intentionally twist the definition in order to politically protect Biden in a midterm election year? Did they develop strategies for hiding negative economic news that might interfere with the 2024 election? If they weren’t trying to monkey with the definition of recession, why are they so insistent on hiding that fact?
Perhaps the Biden administration merely wishes to redefine “transparency,” as well.
The post WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? Biden Admin Redacts Its Justification for Altering the Definition of ‘Recession’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that Joe Biden has overseen $10.9 million in payments to the Taliban.
The post Report: Biden Admin Has Paid Taliban Nearly $11 Million Since Withdrawal Disaster appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Aides to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra routinely inquired about how at least one agency under his control was putting President Joe Biden’s executive order on elections into action.
At least one message suggested that Becerra’s office and the agency within HHS wanted to know whether private organizations that received government grants were working to get out the vote through public service announcements or other means.
On Nov. 30, 2021, two months after the White House announced a vague description of how federal agencies would implement Biden’s executive order on turning out the vote, Anna Perng, a special assistant in HHS’ Administration for Community Living, emailed colleagues to say that the department’s Immediate Office of the Secretary wanted monthly updates.
“IOS [Immediate Office of the Secretary] gently reminded me to update EO 14019 Promoting Voting Access milestones this Friday, 12/3. I had thought tha[t] [REDACTED].”
The Administration for Community Living focuses on issues important to senior citizens and disabled Americans. The White House previously announced that the agency would be a “voting access hub.”
On Dec. 15, 2021, Perng sent another email to ACL staff.
“It is our favorite time of the month: IOS is looking for updates on these milestones by this Friday. Are there any changes to the following?” Perng wrote in part.
Perng emailed ACL colleagues on March 3, 2022, with another reminder.
“IOS is requesting a status update on the EO Promoting Voting Access milestones by tomorrow COB,” Perng wrote. She continued: “For example, I know that there are primaries underway. ACL had said we would share/retweet/repost promote grantees’ voting resources. Have grantees created any voting materials, PSAs, etc.?”
The Daily Signal obtained 159 pages of heavily redacted documents from the Administration for Community Living through a request submitted under the Freedom of Information Act, shedding some light on how the HHS agency is implementing Biden’s election order.
About three dozen pages of the records are from ACL’s “Administrative Priority Overview” and are almost entirely blacked out.
Because of the excessive redactions to the released documents, it’s not clear how “milestones” may be defined or whether any were accomplished.
Biden issued Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, requiring federal agencies to work on voter turnout.
Since that time, public records trickling out through requests under the Freedom of Information Act show that federal agencies partnered or met with numerous left-leaning nonprofit advocacy groups on the subject of getting out the vote. The groups include Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network, and the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
In September 2021, the White House issued a press release explaining how federal agencies would boost voting.
“The Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Community Living will launch a new voting access hub to connect older adults and people with disabilities to information, tools and resources to help them understand and exercise their right to vote,” the press release says.
The only other HHS agency specified by the White House as implementing Biden’s order is the Indian Health Service, which The Daily Signal first reported is partnering with Demos and the ACLU.
It’s not clear from the unredacted information whether the Administration for Community Living is teaming with any overtly political groups.
The newly obtained records include correspondence dated March 11, 2022, from Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager for the National Disability Rights Network, which advocates on behalf of the disabled.
Bishop’s email was to Ophelia McLain, program manager with ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, who was active in implementing the president’s order.
“As requested, I am sending an updated summary of trainings and resources planned for 2022,” Bishop told McClain.
Bishop wrote that the National Disability Rights Network was partnering with other groups—including Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, the National Association of the Deaf, and the National Federation for the Blind—on activities such as making videos and “providing plain language explanations of complicated election topics” such as primaries, the differences between open and closed primaries, and how ranked choice voting works.
Spokespersons for neither the HHS nor the ACL responded to The Daily Signal by publication.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the Department of Health and Human Services was contacted for comment before publication.
The post EXCLUSIVE: HHS Chief Routinely Checked Progress of Biden Election-Meddling Directive, Records Show appeared first on The Daily Signal.
On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” host Joy Reid stated that “it feels like the Biden administration wants soft regime change” in Israel and that the administration appears to be “sort of openly supporting Netanyahu’s chief rival, who said
The post MSNBC’s Reid: Seems Like Biden Admin. ‘Wants Soft Regime Change’ in Israel appeared first on Breitbart.
Republicans said that the Biden administration is putting politics over protecting workers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The post Republicans: Democrats Putting Politics over Protecting FDIC Workers appeared first on Breitbart.
Biden administration officials circulated and discussed a memo authored by a coalition of liberal groups aimed at getting more college students to participate in elections as part of the Education Department’s presidentially ordered voter-registration efforts, newly surfaced emails show.
Groups that donated millions to elect Democrats and are funded by major liberal donors submitted a list of recommendations to the Education Department in 2021 outlining ways the department could get college students, a historically liberal demographic, to vote more, according to emails obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. [Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.]
The memo recommended that the Education Department include a voter registration option on its college financial aid application, use resources to make students aware of vote-by-mail opportunities, and allow universities to use federal work-study to pay students for nonpartisan election work.
The coalition of groups sent its memo in response to President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order directing federal agencies to promote voter registration, education, and participation, offering recommendations on how to implement it.
Nick Lee, deputy assistant secretary for higher education, shared the memo with Annmarie Weisman, another deputy assistant secretary, and Gregory Martin, another department official, emails show. Lee explained to Weisman and Martin that he had been discussing ways to implement Biden’s executive order with an Education Department policy director and that he was willing to speak further on the topic.
Lee also shared the memo with members of the Education Department’s Office of the General Counsel, again explaining that the department was in the process of finalizing responses to Biden’s voting executive order, emails show.
The Biden administration may have been receptive to at least one of the recommendations the coalition of left-of-center groups offered.
In April 2022, the Education Department clarified that universities could pay students with federal work-study funds to engage in election-related work. Although students may be compensated for voter registration work, they cannot be paid using federal funds “for work involving partisan or nonpartisan political activity, including party-affiliated voter registration activities, as this is expressly prohibited,” the department said.
In February, the Education Department expanded on the specific work that federal funds could cover, stating that “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline or serving as a poll worker” were all acceptable.
Although Biden’s executive order stresses that agencies should tap “nonpartisan third-party organizations” to aid with voter registration efforts, the effects of registering more college students to vote could be a boon for the Democratic Party.
A September 2020 poll found that 70% of college students said they would vote for Biden in that year’s election, compared to just 18% who said they would vote for then-President Donald Trump. Strong turnout among college students in 2022 helped Democrats pull off a better-than-expected midterm election performance, NPR reported.
Heading into the November presidential election, Biden’s reelection campaign is seeking to mobilize college students.
The president held a 23-point lead over Trump among college students heading into the election, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics poll conducted in March.
The groups that sought to push the Education Department to mobilize more college voters themselves have ties to the Democratic Party.
The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, for instance, are both signatories of the memo and have spent millions of dollars to help elect Democrats through their political action committees, Federal Election Commission records show. Both groups endorsed Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary season and historically have supported the Democratic Party.
New America Foundation, which signed on to the memo through its education program, has received extensive support from the Soros family’s philanthropic network, pulling in millions since 2016, according to a grant database. George Soros himself has donated massive sums to Democrats and is one of the largest figures in the left-of-center philanthropic world.
The Voter Participation Center, another group that signed on to the memo, has received over $1 million from nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors, tax filings show.
Arabella Advisors is a consultancy firm that manages a network of nonprofits that spend millions every year on efforts to help liberal groups and Democrats.
The Voter Participation Center on its website claims to work diligently to mobilize members of the “New American Majority,” which includes people of color and unmarried women, to register to vote and cast ballots.
Republicans have taken issue with the Biden administration’s approach to using federal resources to juice voter participation.
“We have concerns about the lack of constitutional and statutory authority for federal agencies to engage in any activity outside the agency’s authorized mission, including federal voting access and registration activities,” a May 13 letter from the House Oversight Committee sent to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young reads.
The Education Department, New America, the Voter Participation Center, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
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The Biden administration faced fierce GOP opposition last year after its decision to host the recently deceased Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi — a Holocaust denier dubbed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his role in the mass executions of tens of thousands of political prisoners — in New York to attend the 2023 United Nations session.
The post Flashback: Biden, U.N. Hosted ‘Butcher of Tehran’ President Raisi in NY Against GOP Opposition appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration allowed entry to U.S. territory to Arelys Casañola Quintana, an official of Cuba's communist Castro regime now requesting asylum proceedings out of "fear of socialism," according to a report published by Martí Noticias on Thursday.
The post Biden Grants Asylum to Cuban Communist Official as Political Prisoner Count Surpasses 1,100 appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration must investigate reports of communist China and Cuba directly funding and influencing radical left-wing organizations to incite anti-Israel and anti-American protests across the U.S., according to Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who noted the goal of such externally funded subversion campaigns is to create chaos, weaken the country, and “tear us apart.”
The post Ted Cruz Calls for Investigation into Reports of China, Cuba Fueling Anti-Israel Protests in U.S. appeared first on Breitbart.
Seven pro-life activists were sentenced to years in federal prison on Tuesday and Wednesday for protesting at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, DC, in 2020, an abortion clinic infamous for late-term abortions.
The post More Pro-Life Activists Sentenced to Years Behind Bars, Including Veteran, Two Women in Their 70s appeared first on Breitbart.
The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden failed to comply with federal protections when suspending whistleblowers’ security clearances, according to a memo released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General.
The inspector general found that the Justice Department doesn’t give employees a way to appeal suspended security clearances, which does not align with a federal regulation updated in 2022, according to its memo. Additionally, the inspector general found that the DOJ under Biden failed to provide employees a reasonable opportunity to stay on the federal payroll if they think the department suspended their clearance to retaliate against them for protected whistleblower activity.
“Existing DOJ practice is inconsistent with the intent of the federal statute,” the inspector general’s office announced in a news release.
House Republicans accused the FBI in a May 18, 2023, report of retaliating against FBI special agent Stephen Friend, FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen for speaking out against the agency. O’Boyle said being placed on unpaid suspension by the FBI left his family effectively homeless.
The Office of Inspector General said it unearthed these concerns after receiving complaints from “employees alleging that their security clearances were suspended in retaliation for protected whistleblowing activity.”
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, who represents Allen through his organization, stated on social media that the memo was prompted in part by Allen’s complaint.
? This morning @JusticeOIG released a memo citing concerns about DOJ's compliance with whistleblower protections for employees with a security clearance. The review was in part prompted by the whistleblower complaint of @EMPOWR_us's client, Marcus Allen. https://t.co/Xg0u8bSCGM
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) May 14, 2024
Though the DOJ provides employees with an appeals channel if their security clearance is revoked, no such path exists for employees whose clearance is suspended pending a final decision on whether or not to revoke it, according to the Office of Inspector General. The inspector general identifies this as a problem because the law requires the DOJ to provide a path for whistleblowers to challenge suspensions lasting longer than a year as retaliatory.
Since the DOJ lacks a way for employees who suspect retaliation to contest suspensions if they go on for longer than a year, the agency “does not meet the requirements” required by law, according to the inspector general’s memo.
Losing security clearance often means DOJ employees can no longer do their jobs, seeing as jobs in the department can require that employees have clearance in order to perform their duties, according to the memo. This means, in addition to having their clearance suspended, these employees are often suspended from their jobs without pay.
Federal law mandates that individuals who believe the DOJ suspended their security clearance in retaliation for whistleblowing must be permitted, as far as it is practical, “to retain their government employment status” during the course of the suspension, according to the inspector general.
The Office of Inspector General also found that the DOJ’s existing policies create “the risk that the security process could be misused, as part of an inappropriate effort to encourage an employee to resign.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
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In previous years, people might have missed the irony. But not now—not after the meteoric rise of women’s basketball.
When the WNBA champs visited the White House last week, reporters didn’t cover it out of obligation. They covered it because it was a real story. And President Joe Biden’s betrayal of girls sports only made it more of one.
The timing of the photo op couldn’t have been more politically inconvenient for the president, whose administration has been lit up by lawsuits over the dismantling of the very thing the team was there to celebrate—women.
While Biden was applauding the champs for “showing that the future of women’s sports is brighter than the Vegas lights,” most people couldn’t help but notice how utterly disingenuous he was being. After all, Biden is the one trying to eradicate 52 years of women’s progress. He’s the one insisting biological men make better girls than our daughters. And it was his idea—not Congress’—to turn Title IX into a manifesto of transgender rights.
Yet, he stood at the podium and with a straight face declared, “It matters to girls and women, finally seeing themselves represented—and it matters to all of America.”
“That’s why,” Biden insisted, “as a nation, we need to support women’s sports … .” Not just during the championships, he tweeted later. “But all year-round. Let’s grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.”
As a nation, we need to support women’s sports by showing up in person and watching on TV – with more sponsorships and programming.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 10, 2024
Not just during championships. But all year round.
Let's grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.
The reaction was instantaneous. After three years of this administration, most parents, coaches, and teachers understand exactly what this president wants to do to women’s sports—and it isn’t growing them. It’s erasing them.
“Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women,” Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner fired back: “ … Keep men out of women’s sports.”
Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women instead of watching TV:
— Kristen Waggoner (@KWaggonerADF) May 10, 2024
Keep men out of women’s sports. pic.twitter.com/FZ7FP4bELn
The Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon was equally incensed by the president’s hypocrisy. “President Biden wants to ‘grow’ women’s sports by allowing men who ‘identify’ as women to play. Forcing women to accept men in our locker rooms, sports teams, and even prisons IS NOT supporting women,” she argued. “Protecting women’s sports and female athletes would be truly inspirational for the nation’s women and girls, and the men who love us.”
Former NCAA All-American Riley Gaines was just as appalled, saying on her “Gaines on Girls” podcast that the “easiest way to support women’s sports is to keep men out of them.” And frankly, the Independent Women’s Forum pointed out, it’s difficult to believe the “audacity” of Biden’s comments considering that he “just mandated that girls surrender their sports opportunities to boys.”
Members of Congress, who just took turns grilling Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on this absurd rewrite of Title IX, were appalled that Biden would try to play both sides of this debate based on the harm he’s already done. The rule Biden’s team released has already triggered a number of lawsuits from more than 20 states—a fact not lost on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
After the president’s phony hype for girls sports, Republicans tweeted, “Three weeks ago, the Biden admin finalized a radical rewrite of #TitleIX that would ERASE women’s sports by allowing biological males to compete in female sports. The guy doing the most to harm women’s sports should sit this one out.”
In one of those hearings, Cardona’s refusal to even protect his own daughter prompted a passionate response from Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah. When Biden’s top education official couldn’t answer whether he’d step in if his daughter was uncomfortable dressing in front a biological boy, the dad of girls couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’ll say this, Mr. Secretary, before I go on to the next topic,” Owens paused. “With all due respect, I pray that our country will never, ever have the vision that your policies are driving us toward in terms of manhood. It’s a vision that teaches our boys that harming girls is no big deal. I pray that we remain a country that produces overwhelmingly massive majorities of men who feel the way I do about my girls.
I will give my life in a heartbeat for my girls. And the blessing I have is that they have no doubts about that. There are millions of men and women across this country that do not have faith, do not have trust in you protecting our girls because of policies you can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to.
By the way, those are not very hard questions as a father.
He repeated that sentiment with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s edition of “This Week on the Hill.” Asked why he took Cardona to task, Owens replied simply, “I have five girls—and I grew up in an age where we were taught, very simply, [to be] a very proud young man, have a good legacy, a good name, be happy when it’s all said and done. Learn to love God, country, family. Respect women … particularly motherhood and womanhood. We all know that’s what makes our country what it is—how we think of our ladies and what they bring to our culture.”
But right now, Owens pointed out, “We have an administration that could care less about our ladies.” Equally as frustrating, he said, they don’t care what their transgender agenda is doing to our sons. “Young men have no idea what it is to respect ladies. They have no idea what it is to not be bullies. And they don’t mind harming ladies in any way they can.”
The reason he put Cardona on the spot, he explained, is that leftists may have a way of dealing with the fallout of this rule in theory, “but when it comes down to their kids, they think quite differently. They use their common sense. Well, not [being] able to answer commonsense questions about putting his daughter in harm’s way shows the American people cannot trust him. He needs to leave,” Owens insisted, adding:
He needs to do something else. We cannot trust this guy to take care of protecting our kids or educating our kids standing up for our culture.
It’s all backward, Owens argued. “The upside is that we now know what they’re all about. And [the] American people will not stand for it.”
This past Friday, former President Donald Trump illustrated the stark difference between the two men’s policies when he vowed to roll back Biden’s extreme new Title IX immediately.
“We’re going to end it on Day One,” he promised.
“Don’t forget, that came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it. … Tell your people not to worry about it,” he said, calling Biden’s idea of letting boys in the girls’ locker rooms “crazy.”
“It’ll be signed on Day One,” Trump repeated. “It’ll be terminated.”
A slightly modified version of this article was originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post At WNBA Ceremony, Biden Urges America to Support the Women’s Sports He’s Destroying appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Republican senators slammed the Biden administration's announcement Tuesday of increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles as being more about President Joe Biden's attempt to bolster his green agenda at the expense of U.S. automakers.
The post Republicans Slam Biden Tariffs on China: ‘Phony Attempt’ to Cover Up ‘Far-Left, Green Agenda’ appeared first on Breitbart.
In response to new federal rules on pronouns and bathrooms based on gender identity, 18 state attorneys general are suing the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
“This end-run around our constitutional institutions misuses federal power to eliminate women’s private spaces and punish the use of biologically accurate pronouns, all at the expense of Tennessee employers,” Skrmetti said in a public statement.
The Daily Signal first reported last month that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance determining that an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a personal pronoun that the person doesn’t want used.
The guidance, which the EEOC adopted on a party-line vote of 3-2, would determine how the commission would handle an employee complaint on the matter and also could affect other employee litigation as the formal federal policy.
EEOC has 2,331 employees, according to its 2023 annual report.
Joining Tennessee in the lawsuit are Republican attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
“In America, the Constitution gives the power to make laws to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable commissioners, and this EEOC guidance is an attack on our constitutional separation of powers,” Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, said. “When, as here, a federal agency engages in government over the people instead of government by the people, it undermines the legitimacy of our laws and alienates Americans from our legal system.”
The EEOC issued new sexual harassment guidance that extends Title VII’s prohibition of sex-based discrimination to cover gender identity. Title VII forbids employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer, public or private, with more than 15 employees.
Under this guidance, an employer may be responsible under Title VII if the employer, or another employee, uses a name or personal pronoun other than the one an employee prefers for his or her gender identity, or limits access to a restroom or other sex-segregated facility that isn’t consistent with what the employee prefers to use.
This rule prevails regardless of the biological sex of the employee in question.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” EEOC’s new enforcement guidance says.
An EEOC spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the Justice Department for comment on this report. A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond by publication time.
In a previous public statement, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows, a Democrat, praised the enforcement guidance.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” Burrows said shortly after the commission announced the guidelines. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrats, Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal. The commission’s two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
In 2021, Burrows attempted to unilaterally include such actions under what constitutes harassment through a press release, without public comment or a vote by the full commission.
However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. Another federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did not appeal the rulings.
The post 18 States Fight Federal Trans Agenda on Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is probing a controversial Biden administration executive order tasking the federal government with mobilizing voting groups it says are underrepresented.
In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has requested that Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young produce a slew of documents and information concerning the development and implementation of President Joe Biden’s sweeping “Executive Order on Promoting Accessing to Voting” no later than May 28 and a staff-level briefing by May 20.
The demand by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee signals an escalation in Republican lawmakers’ efforts to combat an effort they say may be unlawful, if not unconstitutional.
The administration characterizes its efforts as a remedy to “discriminatory policies and other obstacles … disproportionally affect[ing]” black, non-English-speaking, handicapped, and other minority voters. Executive Order 14019 calls on all federal agencies to develop and execute corrective plans to “promote voter registration and voter participation.”
It instructs officials government-wide to consider “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations … to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
Seeing the order as potentially enabling “the executive branch to circumvent the legislative process,” Comer is asking Young to clarify the “constitutional or statutory authority the President relied on,” as well as all “White House and OMB documents and communications” pertaining to the drafting of it.
In past oversight letters, including ones delivered in June 2022 by then-ranking Republicans on various committees, including Comer, members have also raised concerns that officials could violate the Hatch Act prohibiting their engagement in political activities in carrying out the order.
Senate Republicans have also questioned whether the act violates the Antideficiency Act, which precludes federal agencies from using funds “for a purpose that Congress did not explicitly authorize,” namely “voter mobilization.”
“Overreach by the federal government often leads to confusion and inconsistencies,” Comer also stated. He cites a recent letter from Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson to Attorney General Merrick Garland to illustrate this issue.
The order mandates that relevant agencies seek to ensure “access to voter registration for eligible individuals in federal custody.”
To satisfy that charge, the Magnolia State official notes that the U.S. Marshals Service is modifying contracts and/or intergovernmental agreements with jails “to provide voter registration materials and facilitate voting by mail,” and likewise that the Justice Department is working to “facilitate voter registration and mail voting for individuals in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons.”
He says these efforts create “numerous opportunities for ineligible prisoners to be registered to vote in Mississippi.” Illegal aliens, Watson warns, may be among those receiving information on how to register to vote.
The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14019 in March 2021. Despite a raft of oversight requests from House Republicans of agencies within their respective committee jurisdictions, those agencies have largely withheld the strategic plans they were tasked with crafting and implementing, and information regarding the putatively nonpartisan groups with which they have coordinated.
The White House has rebuffed RealClearInvestigations in its efforts to solicit details about an order that Republicans characterize as little more than a taxpayer-funded Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the Biden administration has sought to drive voter registration through agencies as diverse as the departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development via job training centers, public housing authorities, and child nutrition programs. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
The Department of Education has blessed the use of “federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities.
In January, over two dozen Pennsylvania legislators filed a federal lawsuit challenging the executive order. The Foundation for Government Accountability—which has litigated with the Biden administration to pry loose documents concerning the order—submitted an amicus brief supportive of the suit, asserting that the agencies’ efforts have one thing in common: “They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
Republicans’ concerns over the order extend to the involvement of the third-party groups with which agencies were to consider coordinating. The order itself was built on a blueprint from progressive think-tank Democrats. In a since-deleted but still archived analysis, the outfit estimates that if fully implemented, the order could generate 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually—a significant figure given that recent presidential elections have been determined by thousands of votes across a few states.
Democrats as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have reportedly worked to implement the directive. Documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and released earlier this month show that at a July 2021 listening session convened by the Biden administration, left-leaning activist groups encouraged some of the practices federal agencies would ultimately implement to carry out the directive, for example, in targeting prospective voters in prisons and at naturalization ceremonies. (The Daily Signal was foundation by The Heritage Foundation in 2014.)
“Every participant whose party affiliation or political donation history could be identified by the Oversight Project was identified as a Democrat except for one Green Party member,” the report noted.
While the participants suggested efforts to target constituencies—including criminals, immigrants, low-income families, including those in public housing, and Native Americans—the Oversight Project observed that “There is no corresponding evidence of efforts [to] increase voter access and education in likely Republican constituencies.”
As RealClearInvestigations has also recently reported, Democrats have made purportedly nonpartisan voter registration targeting groups that vote disproportionately Democrat a linchpin of their plans to prevail in recent election cycles.
“If the Biden Administration wants to use taxpayer-funded buildings to allow ‘nonpartisan third-party organizations’ to engage in voter registration,” Comer writes, “then the American people deserve to know who these organizations are.”
The Oversight Committee’s pursuit of information regarding the order comes in the wake of the House Small Business Committee’s recent escalation of its own probe of the order.
It recently subpoenaed two members of the Small Business Administration who refused to sit for transcribed interviews regarding an unprecedented partnership the agency inked with the Michigan Department of State. Under the relevant memorandum of understanding, among other things, state officials may conduct in-person voter registration at administration small business outreach events.
Fox News reported that the Small Business Committee found that nearly all, “22 out of 25 such outreach events, have taken place in counties with the highest population of Democratic National Committee target demographics.”
In March, a federal judge dismissed the Pennsylvania legislators’ case challenging the executive order on grounds of standing.
In late April, the legislators took their case to the Supreme Court, filing a petition for writ of certiorari and motioning for expedited consideration of their request in hopes the nation’s highest court will rule favorably on the matter of standing prior to the 2024 election.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
The post House Oversight Committee Probing Biden Voter Mobilization Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An American PPE manufacturer told Breitbart News that the Biden administration's tariffs on Chinese-made PPE are too little, too late.
The post Exclusive — American PPE Manufacturer: Joe Biden’s Tariffs on China Come ‘Too Little, Too Late’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration claims that the Texas border island that was utilized by Mexican drug cartels for drug and human smuggling operations is owned by the federal government. The State of Texas recently secured the island from the Mexican drug cartels and cleared it of underbrush.
The post Biden Admin Claims Cartel-Utilized Border Island Seized by Texas is Federal Land appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.
Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.
Biden’s controversial Executive Order 14019 requires federal agencies to participate in voter registration activities and help third-party organizations perform those activities on agency premises.
Potentially, this could involve spending government funds, contracting with third parties for the payment of those funds, or accepting voluntary services by these “approved” third-party organizations such as Demos.
Biden’s order appears to violate at least two provisions of the Antidefieicncy Act, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
But, Whitson added, to determine whether the Biden administration is violating that law, it’s necessary to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and what it’s being used for.
Existing pots of money, for example, could be distributed by the Department of Agriculture to state agencies to help carry out voter registration activities, he suggested.
“Even if the Biden administration were to claim that no public funds are spent to carry out EO 14019—a dubious and laughable claim—this effort would still violate the Antideficiency Act because it would mean federal agencies were accepting voluntary services from these third-party organizations to help carry out EO 14019, who also happen to be politically aligned with the current administration,” Whitson said.
Neither the Agriculture Department nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
OMB “created a template for budget requests for the Voting EO [executive order] within their equity template in case any funding is needed for implementation,” says a Sept. 23, 2021, email among Department of Agriculture officials.
Biden’s executive order also directed agencies to team with private organizations to boost voting. Chief among those groups is the liberal think tank Demos, which drafted the executive action before Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Akhil Rajan, then an assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, sent the September 2021 email message about the OMB’s template to USDA senior adviser Kumar Chandran, now the department’s acting undersecretary. Rajan is now a senior policy adviser to the White House’s deputy chief of staff.
Rajan’s email to Chandran noted, “Contact K. Sabeel Rahman,” apparently meaning he was the one to contact with any questions.
By that fall, Rahman, who was president of Demos when the liberal think tank drafted the executive order on voting, had joined the Biden administration’s OMB as part of its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Rahman is now a professor at Cornell Law School.)
The Daily Signal obtained 73 pages of emails from the Department of Agriculture through a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents were USDA’s second interim response to a request from The Daily Signal regarding Biden’s executive order on encouraging voter registration and voting. Some pages are heavily redacted.
The documents also prominently mention meetings and guidance from Demos, which is based in New York. The left-wing think tank drafted Biden’s executive order to agencies about voter registration in December 2020, the month after Biden defeated Donald Trump before he took office.
Although describing it as “minimal,” USDA acknowledges some budgetary impact from Biden’s order. Any amount, however, could mean obligating tax dollars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Antideficiency Act.
In an email dated Sept. 21, 2021, Anne DeCesaro, chief of staff for the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, wrote to Chandran about several issues, including “assessment of budgetary impact.”
“For all actions, we expect minimal budgetary impact as providing memos and letters and regular interactions with states are part of our normal business practices,” DeCesaro wrote.
In that same email, DeCesaro explained to Chandran how other agencies within USDA could participate: The National School Lunch Program could promote voter registration in high schools, for example, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, could register its beneficiaries to vote.
Ten days earlier, on Sept. 10, 2021, Chandran emailed several senior USDA staff about Biden’s executive order on increasing voter participation.
“Thank you for your past work to complete our interim strategic plan for the voting rights executive order,” Chandran wrote in the email. “We are now being asked to submit a final strategic plan, based on what we provided in our interim plan.”
He later added: “The WH [White House] team leading this effort has put together a template for the final strategic plan. This template largely follows the same format as that for the interim [plan], except it also includes instructions for how to flesh out each proposed action.”
The second interim response from the USDA to The Daily Signal’s FOIA requests didn’t include the department’s strategic plan or the template provided by the White House or its Office of Management and Budget.
An email dated Aug. 3, 2021, refers to a meeting between USDA officials and Demos executives to discuss Biden’s order on voting.
The Agriculture Department and Demos communicated again about the president’s executive order in November 2021.
“We’d love to reconnect soon to learn about your plans and see how Demos and the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union] may be able to support you in their continued development and implementation,” Demos senior policy analyst Lauren Williamson wrote Nov. 5 to senior USDA officials.
“When we met last, we talked about wanting to explore additional programs in more detail to ensure maximal impact of the EO for the communities the USDA serves and we’re eager to continue that conversation,” Williamson said.
Four days later, Rajan, assistant to the secretary of agriculture, wrote to Chandan, saying: “[D]emos has been extremely helpful in thinking about ways to expand opportunities for voting, and the coalition they assembled for our last call was rich in the types of groups that have assembled rigorously-tested best practices. So from that perspective it may be helpful to hear from them but understand that REDACTED.”
Because USDA redacted Rajan’s next words, it is impossible to know what Vilsak’s assistant wanted Chandran to understand.
The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Issued ‘Template’ to Impose Biden’s Voter Mobilization Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden is “playing politics” with the lives of Americans being held hostage by the Gaza-based terrorist Hamas group, according to Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. She slammed the 81-year-old Democrat leader for “playing into Hamas’s hands” and “making terrorists rejoice, instead of tremble in fear” by withholding support from the nation's “greatest ally in the region,” Israel.
The post Exclusive — Joni Ernst: Biden ‘Playing Politics’ with Americans Held Hostage by Hamas, ‘Making Terrorists Rejoice’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Republican officials are blasting the current “wildly anti-Israel” administration for withholding crucial ammunition from Israel in its war on the terror group Hamas, accusing President Joe Biden of “carrying water for the pro-Hamas mob” in order to “appease his radical anti-Semitic base” and the Democrat party’s “pro-Hamas wing” for his own “personal political gain.”
The post GOP Accuses Biden of Withholding Arms from Israel for ‘Personal Political Gain’ – Pandering to ‘Pro-Hamas Mob’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott wrote a letter to President Joe Biden opposing a Department of the Air Force proposal to transfer National Guard units from state control to federal without the governors' authorization. The proposal calls for certain National Guard units to be transferred out of the National Guard to the newly created Space Command.
The post Texas Governor Joins with Bipartisan Coalition Opposing Biden Admin’s National Guard Power Grab appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration is refusing to comment on if it is withholding aid from Israel after a Sunday report said that it was.
The post Biden Administration Refuses to Say if It Is Withholding Aid from Israel appeared first on Breitbart.
The United States diplomat who quit over President Joe Biden’s handling of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas spoke out, saying she feels that the U.S. is on the “wrong side of history.” Hala Rharrit, the first U.S. diplomat
The post U.S. Diplomat Who Quit Over Biden’s Approach to Israel Speaks Out: ‘Wrong Side of History’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Here we have the video of the day. It depicts a horde of illegal aliens breaking through the razor wire (mounted, I assume, by Texas authorities) and overrunning Texas National Guard soldiers seeking to resist them in El Paso. The video raises many questions, among them how many many “migrants” does it take to mount used to be known as an “invasion”?
We have now entered year four President Biden’s open borders program. Why does Biden refuse to see that the law is faithfully executed? Why does he support the invasion of the United States? When do we get to defend ourselves? How long can this go on?
This is the moment when TX National Guard became overrun by migrants rioting to get across the border here in El Paso today
We were there and saw it all happen. Absolute chaos here. pic.twitter.com/VN6Kf663ie
— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) March 21, 2024
In Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” the heroine announces that she’s unable to lunch today. Why? She has a good excuse — because she was strung up by a mob for killing “the man who had led her so far astray.”
Now Ms. Yellen regrets. Janet Yellen holds the venerable office of Secretary of the Treasury. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Yellen is well qualified for the job and an ostensibly serious person. Yet she has proved unfit for the office, regurgitating administration talking points with an utter lack of seriousness. Inflation — she declared in 2021 that it was “transitory.” Abortion — restricting it would be “very damaging” to the economy. By contrast, she supports the administration’s gusher of “green” spending as constructive. ‘S wonderful.
Ms. Yellen regrets she has revealed herself to be a political hack. “I regret saying [inflation] was transitory,” Yellen said in a March 13 interview on Fox News. “It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.” Three years later, it might be worth asking what “transitory” means to her and who suggested she use the term in coordination with the other occupants of the Biden administration clown car.
When Yellen adopted the administration line on inflation being “transitory,” nobody had led Yellen astray. She killed her own reputation. However, she is also able to lunch today. Why anyone should even believe anything she says is not exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. No one should.
The New York Post devotes its cover story to President Biden’s election-year budget. By Josh Christenson, the story is headlined “Biden unveils massive $7.3T budget with $5.5T in tax hikes, plans for ‘highest burden’ in US history.” The Post has created a classic cover to flag the story (below). It should probably come with some kind of a warning: “Viewing may induce nausea.” I’m filing this under Laughter Is the Best Medicine.
Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.
But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:
President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.
Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.
The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.
Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.
Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:
The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.
Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:
The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.
Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.
Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.
The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.
Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:
Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.
Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.
A final (I hope) footnote to Joe Biden’s disgraceful SOTU performance: he referred to Jose Ibarra as an illegal, which was, as I said here, perhaps the only true statement in the entire speech. But Biden met with blowback from Democrats who don’t seem to mind that Ibarra is an (alleged) murderer, but were horrified by Biden’s admission that his presence here is illegal.
So, as recorded at the link above, Biden apologized on MSNBC for using the word “illegal.” (The correct legal term is “illegal alien.”):
President Biden apologized Saturday for using the word “illegal” during his State of the Union address to describe the Venezuelan migrant accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
“An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal, it’s undocumented,” Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart in an excerpt from an interview airing Saturday….
***
“So, you regret using that word?” Capehart asked.“Yes,” Biden responded.
I, and everyone else, called that an apology. But the White House is now backtracking on its backtrack:
The White House on Monday pushed back against claims President Biden apologized for using the term “illegal” to describe the migrant accused of killing Laken Riley — just days after the president said he had “regret” for using the loaded term.
***
White House deputy spokesperson Olivia Dalton attempted to clarify on Monday, telling a reporter that “the president absolutely did not apologize” despite his expression of regret.“There was no apology anywhere in that conversation,” Dalton told reporters on Air Force One. “He did not apologize. He used a different word. I think what we should be really clear about is the facts.”
“He used a different word.” All right, then! Biden said that he “shouldn’t have used” the word illegal, and he “regrets” doing so. Talk about a fine distinction. So, why did the White House bother to walk back, at least partially, Biden’s MSNBC comments? I suppose because if you apologize, you have to apologize to someone. In this case, who is that someone? The (alleged) murderer, Jose Ibarra. Many have criticized Biden for apologizing to a murderer for calling him an illegal. Hence his handlers’ most recent spin: it wasn’t an apology, it was only an expression of regret for something he shouldn’t have done.
Got it, Joe.
And, finally, for a spokesman for the Biden White House to say that “what we should be really clear about is the facts” is, in its own way, a classic of dark comedy.
Referring to an illegal alien as “illegal” in unscripted remarks during his State of the Union Address this past Thursday, President Biden inadvertently offended a core Democratic constituency (i.e., illegal aliens). That could not stand and it didn’t. As John notes nearby, Biden recanted and apologized within 48 hours.
Illegal or undocumented — which is the correct term. As a matter of fact, “Illegal alien” is the correct term.
When we got married, my wife was an illegal alien. Having graduated from law school and been hired by Hennepin County District Judge Robert Bowen as a law clerk, she applied for a work visa. In response she received a letter from the INS apprising her that her student visa had expired and that she was out of status. She applied for legal residency.
We went down to the local INS office for an interview. We had been advised that we would be asked a few questions to establish that our marriage was bona fide — not a fraudulent exercise undertaken solely to allow an illegal immigrant to escape deportation. As it turned out, we appeared to be the only bona fide couple of the four or five with us in the waiting room. And this was early in the Reagan years.
In the course of the interview, the INS officer asked me what toothpaste “the alien” used. It seemed funny because “the alien” was sitting next to me at the time, but we took no offense. We thought it was funny and I was happy to ace the quiz.
Today a question in that form would probably get the guy fired. Today the prescribed term is “undocumented.” Today that is the term on which the Democrats insist. Today it is the term that every mainstream media outlet (including Fox News) uses. What’s happening here?
What’s happening is the blessing of illegal immigration and the destruction of citizenship. The left seeks to break down our resistance to illegal immigration by means of a mandated euphemism. It’s an Orwellian device. The phenomenon of illegal immigration is not even to be described with tolerable accuracy. The underlying distinction is to be rendered meaningless.
As I say, illegal aliens have become a core constituency of the Democrats. To illegal aliens the left requires that the knee must be bent. I’m not sure why Fox News is compliant. It is frankly disgusting.
Here I speak for my wife and me. We support enforcement of the law. We oppose illegal immigration. We do not seek to accommodate it. We do not respect it. We desire the return of illegal immigrants to their home country or deportation to some other place. We do not want to support them with our tax dollars. We are sickened by the invasion of illegal aliens promoted by Biden and the Biden administration. The abuse of the English language that accompanies it is the least of it, but it deserves at least to be noted.
Brian Deese is “an MIT Innovation Fellow, focusing on the impact of economic policies that strengthen the United States’ industrial capacity and on accelerating climate investment and innovation.” Before that, Deese assisted Joe Biden as Director of the National Economic Council. Asked in 2022 how American families could cope with surging gasoline prices, the NEC boss said, “this is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.” As Sir Bedevere(Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of economics?
Deese is the son of Boston College political science professor David Deese, who “researches the international and comparative politics of energy and climate policies worldwide.” Brian’s mother, Patricia Stanton, served as deputy commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and assistant commissioner of waste prevention at the state Department of Environmental Protection.
At Middlebury College Deese earned an undergraduate degree in international politics and economics. He got into Yale Law School but left a few credits short of graduation to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Composite character president Obama tapped him to help out with climate change.
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Obama touted the “amazing” Brian Deese, who “engineered the Paris Agreement, the Aviation Agreement,” and “may have helped save the planet.” The auto industry was also in trouble.
“The wunderkind in charge of saving our auto industry is a 31-year-old with about as much experience as a summer intern,” noted Glenn Beck. “Despite having no formal business education, no business experience and no auto industry experience, 31-year-old Brian Deese is now in charge of dismantling General Motors.” David Sanger of the New York Times also weighed in with, “Meet the 31-Year Old in Charge of Dismantling GM.”
In 2017, Deese became a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. From there it was on to BlackRock, where Deese headed the sustainable investing division, advising clients on meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Deese was reportedly bagging some $2.8 million a year, and building a net worth of $4 million.
In June of 2021, the amazing Deese outline his vision for a “new industrial strategy,” an “activist government,” approach including “targeted public investment, public procurement, climate resilience and equity.” As Deese contends, “markets on their own will not make investments in technologies and in infrastructure that benefit an entire industry.”
And so on, in what Olson Johnson of Blazing Saddles might call “authentic statist gibberish.” Or, in the style of Monty Python, the wealthy MIT Innovation Fellow could qualify for “upper class twit of the year.”
Jeffrey Anderson presents a comparative analysis of presidents and inflation. The mainstream press to the contrary notwithstanding, he explains what Biden has done to make us feel so black and blue. It’s not our imagination. It’s the inflation, stupid! See his City Journal column “No great mystery.” Anderson manages to review the data and perform the analysis with a sense of humor.
The daycare minders at the White House have persuaded Biden to single out “shrinkflation” as the villain. However, “shrinkflation” reflects “inflation.” It is a manifestation of rising prices. Sentient observers understand that Biden economic policies have triggered the inflation that we have suffered, just as they understand that Biden’s senescence has slowed the windmills of his mind. Biden trusts we won’t notice he indicts himself when he decries “shrinkflation.”
Biden’s daycare minders take us for fools. Thus the administration’s critique of Republicans for causing the invasion of illegals that Biden invited, facilitated, and denied. They think we are stupid.
We hear that Biden threatens to point the finger at alleged corporate wrongdoing as the source of our pain in tonight’s State of the Union address. For some reason or other this wave of alleged wrongdoing has run riot under the regime of…Joe Biden. It was somehow held in check under the regime of…Donald Trump. James Bovard seeks to immunize us against the foolishness of the Biden party line in his New York Post column “Joe Biden’s State of the Union ‘shrinkflation’ swindle.”
Reading about the ceasefire negotiations that the ceasefire negotiations with which the Biden administation hopes to engineer a Hamas victory requires a certain kind of immunity to savagery. Hamas seeks to trade kidnapped Israelis for terrorists who can help Hamas finish the task it undertook on October 7. The Hamas terrorists are murderers and genocidaires. The Israelis are, well, you know, Jewish. Hamas seeks ten terrorists in exchange for every kidnapped Israeli and Israel seems okay with the proposition and the ratio.
However, the Israelis declined to show up in Cairo for further negotiations so long as Hamas refuses to provide a list of living kidnap victims. The Israelis assess that 31 of the kidnap victims taken by Hamas on October 7 are now dead. This is either elided in mainstream news accounts or referred to euphemistically as one of the “sticking points.” The Times of Israel summed up the status of negotiations yesterday:
Israel has said that 31 of the 130 hostages held since October 7 are dead. The first phase of the mooted deal is reported to provide for the release of 40 of the living hostages, including women, children, the elderly and the sick, in the course of a six-week truce, and in exchange for some 400 Palestinian security prisoners. The outline reportedly provides for negotiations on the further phased release of the remaining hostages, living and dead, in return for longer pauses in the fighting and many more Palestinian prisoner releases.
On Sunday afternoon, a Hamas official told CNN that the group will not agree to a deal without Israel consenting to an end to the war in Gaza, a non-starter for Israel.
Citing “a highly placed source” in the terror group, CNN reported that the two other areas of disagreement holding up a deal are the withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza, and Gazan civilians being allowed to return to the northern Gaza Strip.
Vice President Harris found this a good time to hammer Israel yesterday in Selma, Alabama (White House transcript here). Israel is apparently responsible for “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Why, “just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.” The savages of Hamas have their allies among the idiots, useful or otherwise, of the Biden administration.
“Centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value,” Winston Smith discovers in George Orwell’s 1984. “One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “history has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” For all but the willfully blind, the parallels are apparent on every hand.
For the Biden Junta, America is nothing more than a bastion of racist oppression, and the American Declaration of Independence, as Orwell noted, is pure thoughtcrime. The unelected ranks of the deep state constitute the “Inner Party,” deploying the FBI against the people. Under the Delaware Democrat, pretty much every week is hate week. Should that be doubted, recall Biden’s September 1, 2022 speech. Also relevant for current conditions is Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the place of wild, non-domesticated creatures must be decided.
The revolutionary animals rule that rats are comrades, a view now institutionalized in America. Witness the rise of pro-crime district attorneys such as Chesa Boudin and George Gascon. Criminals also do the heavy lifting that woke politicians won’t perform, such as torching businesses and assaulting people at random, all passed off as “peaceful protest.”
Joe Biden brings in some eight million illegals with no criminal background checks. A criminal illegal is charged with murdering University of Georgia Biden student Laken Riley on February 22. In his February 28 speech on crime, Biden failed to name the victim or mention the case, and made no reference to illegal immigration.
In 1984, Winston Smith came to love Big Brother but it’s hard to believe that people approve Joe Biden’s steady demolition of America. It’s even harder to believe that this is what the American people were panting for in 2020. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens in 2024.
Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student in Athens, Georgia. Thursday morning, she went for a run and didn’t return. Her body was found on the campus of the University of Georgia. Riley was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela:
Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, who was arrested Friday in connection to the murder of the 22-year-old Augusta University student, crossed into El Paso, Texas, from Venezuela in September 2022, NewsNation reported Saturday, citing Department of Homeland Security sources.
He had been released due to a lack of detention space, the sources added.
Laken Riley
Ibarra is one of millions of illegals whom Joe Biden has deliberately welcomed into the United States, in violation of federal law, the Constitution, and Biden’s oath of office. Biden’s motives are hard to understand. But in the law, one is held to have intended the natural and inevitable consequences of one’s actions. Occam’s Razor, like the common law, implies that Biden is trying to bring chaos and destruction to the United States.
Having entered America with no problem, Ibarra set out for New York. I don’t believe it has been reported how he got there, but he spent a year or so in New York City before relocating to Georgia. His social media accounts suggest that he was living it up:
In September 2022, however, the Venezuelan native looked carefree, smiling in Times Square and Rockefeller Center in New York City, posts on a Facebook account linked to his name showed.
Of course, he got into trouble in New York, too:
Police sources in New York confirmed to NewsNation that a suspect matching Ibarra’s name and age was arrested in the Big Apple for endangering a 5-year-old child last year.
But illegals who commit crimes are rarely punished. Ibarra eventually joined his older brother Diego, who I assume is also an illegal although I haven’t seen this reported, in Athens. The older brother is a criminal, too; he was arrested three times between September and December 2023. Ho hum. Liberals refuse to enforce our laws, until a known criminal commits a crime so heinous that it attracts national attention. Like this one.
So, because Joe Biden opened our southern border, Jose Ibarra waltzed in from Venezuela, spent a year or so hanging out in New York, where any crimes he committed went unpunished, then joined his brother in Georgia. Where, day before yesterday, he saw Laken Riley jogging on the University of Georgia campus and decided it would be fun to kill her. Congratulations, Joe. This one’s on you.
A postscript: the U.S. isn’t the only country dumb enough to admit large numbers of illegal aliens, often referred to in the press as “asylum seekers.” Western Europe has problems even worse than ours, as exemplified by this case:
Police in Vienna launched a criminal investigation after three women were found dead in a brothel, authorities said Saturday.
A witness discovered traces of blood outside the building, located near the Danube River, and alerted police on Friday evening. The bodies of the three victims had “cuts and stab wounds,” police spokesperson Philipp Hasslinger told The Associated Press.
A 27-year-old man was soon arrested in the vicinity of the brothel while carrying a knife, the supposed weapon. Police said the suspect is an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan and will be questioned by police later on Saturday.
The Vienna brothel was legal, but apparently the “asylum seeker” disapproved of it. Hey, some of us may disapprove of it, too. But we wouldn’t murder the women who work there. Open-borders immigration policies have been a disaster wherever they have been implemented.
UPDATE: It turns out that Jose Ibarra had a “wife.” Sort of:
“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives.”
So, just another species of immigration fraud. Honestly, though, Ibarra and his “wife” needn’t have bothered. Joe Biden’s welcome mat is out, and everyone is here to stay–especially those who will degrade our country.
The Biden administration has fashioned another program of student debt relief forgiveness. The so-called SAVE plan was promulgated by regulation last year. It takes the load off the fanny of beneficiaries of certain federal college loan programs and puts it right on the back of taxpayers. Politico reports that Biden is emailing 153,000 student loan borrowers that he’s canceling their debt. “I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room,” the message says.
Those of us who actually pay taxes could use a little breathing room, but there is no breathing room to be found. Suffocation is the order of the day.
President Biden is himself a suffocating demagogue, as in his victory lap in the video below (White House transcript here). We thought the Supreme Court had spared us this particular outrage by its decision last year in Biden v. Nebraska. Apparently the justices needn’t have bothered themselves.
Biden declares that he has discovered a workaround. To the extent that one can understand what he’s saying in the clip below, he strikes a defiant note. He’s unafraid of consequences. He’s daring someone to stop him.
Biden on student loan cancellation: “The Supreme Court blocked it. But that didn't stop me." pic.twitter.com/ZomPnhTU1k
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 22, 2024
NRO’s James Lynch has a good story on Biden’s announcement in “Biden Administration Wiping Out another $1.2 Billion in Student-Loan Debt.” Matt Continetti adds up the damage:
On February 21, Biden announced that he was canceling $1.2 billion in federal student loans for 153,000 borrowers. That’s on top of more than $130 billion in student debt that he has canceled to date. The Penn Wharton school says that Biden’s efforts will cost a total of $475 billion over 10 years.
NRO’s Charlie Cooke has posted a cry from the heart expressing his indignation over the unfairness of Biden’s action. In his concluding paragraph, he seems unfairly to blame House Republicans. According to Politico, however, the House actually voted to kill SAVE this past December, but the Senate saved it. Now what?
The regulatory background to the current monstrosity is set forth by Jill Desjean in “ED Releases Final Rule on Latest Income-Driven Repayment Plan.” The final regulation was announced in the Federal Register here last year.
In light of the Supreme Court decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the regulation purports to find authority for the regulation under section 455 of the Higher Education Act than under the HEROES Act. See the “Legal Authority” section of the Federal Register announcement linked above.
What we have here is a monstrosity. James Bovard has an entertaining New York Post column satirizing it, but Bovard has no proposal to kill it. The current monstrosity comes to life this coming July 1. What we need to kill it is a new president to rein in the Education Department, or Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, or some serious legal analysis on which to premise a challenge to the madness of King Joe.
Vaunce News 