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Tim Murtaugh became a familiar face to many Americans as President Donald Trump’s communications director for his 2020 reelection campaign. As one of Trump’s most visible spokesmen, Murtaugh had a front-row seat to the most-watched campaign in history.
But just a mere four years earlier, Murtaugh found himself in a much different spot. After struggling with alcoholism for years, he was jailed in 2015 for public drunkenness and unsure of his fate. That’s when he decided to give up alcohol and focus on turning his life around.
Murtaugh would go on to work for Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue before joining Trump’s reelection campaign. Today, he’s running his own communications firm. He joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about his new book—out today—called “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape from Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
Listen to the interview, watch the video, or read an abridged and edited transcript below.
Rob Bluey: Tim Murtaugh, you’re the author of a new book, “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It.” You’re somebody who our Daily Signal audience will probably remember as a return guest to this show. You’re the founder and principal at Line Drive Public Affairs and the former communications director for the Trump 2020 campaign.
Tim Murtaugh: Good to see you, Rob. Thanks very much. And there was a time where I was a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation as well.
Bluey: We appreciate your contributions during that time. And I’m thankful to you for telling this story. Take us back to in 2015. You are in a Fairfax County jail. It illustrates so much how far you have come in just a few short years.
Murtaugh: On May 16, 2015, I went out and as I liked to do at the time, got drunk. And at that time, I was charged with drunken public intoxication, something along those lines. I ended up in the Fairfax County Adult Correctional Center and that’s where I came to.
That day was different from many of the other times that I had been drinking too much because I was on probation for the second of my two DUIs, and I had 80 days of suspended jail time hanging above my head. And if I had gotten convicted of that public intoxication charge, I was going to have to go serve nearly three months in jail, and it would have been pretty much the end of everything. I would have lost my job on Capitol Hill. I would have lost my career.
My family was about at the end of their rope. My new wife didn’t know what to do with me, and so it really could have been the end of everything. And that’s the day I took my last drink, and I have never looked back.
I wrote this book for two reasons. One, because when I was in rehab—and I went to rehab five times—when I was there, I spent a lot of time in the bookstore buying titles and just devouring them. They were more autobiographical in nature, people writing about their own stories and how they made it through their battles with addiction. I wanted to write a book that helped people like me who are in rehab.
The other reason was, I had some opposition researchers coming after us on the Trump campaign. Back in 2020, they were trying to get reporters to write stories about me and my background. And I thought, if I just write a book about it myself, they’ll never be able to attack me with it again.
This is the story of my 2 lives – one with alcohol and one without. (Spoiler: one is better than the other.)
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) January 26, 2024
Oh, and half of it is about politics & the 2020 Trump campaign.
It would be so kind if you’d take a moment, check it out & consider ordering:https://t.co/RIgo9dWk59
Bluey: Was it difficult for you to put it all out there?
Murtaugh: Writing it, actually, was cathartic. I’m not sure that there’s any single person who knows everything that I went through. My wife certainly knows a lot about it. My parents and my brother, my close friends and close relatives, know big parts of it. But I don’t know that anybody, except for me, knows everything else that I went through.
I’m coming up on nine years now since I took my last drink. And I know that any day I could slip and pick one up. If I had that first one, it would be a downward spiral from that moment. Writing the book was an exercise that helped me stay sober for that period of time.
When you have been an addict—and you’ve managed to defeat it—there is always that lingering fear that if I’m not careful this could come back and get me.
Bluey: What have you found to be effective in terms of resisting that urge?
Murtaugh: This is really just a story of how I did it. It’s not entirely about this. It’s half a political book, half about my life in the Trump 2020 campaign, which at the time, until this next one, was the most-watched political campaign in world history. There are a lot of stories from behind the scenes from that campaign.
But the other half of the book, it is about my struggles with alcoholism and my whole story. It is not a how-to book—it’s just a story of how I got through it.
>>> An Insider Takes You Behind Scenes of Trump’s Campaign
People might find some parts of it that they can relate to or at least laugh about because not every word of it is deadly serious. There are some ridiculous things that people like me do when they’re in the throes of all that. It shouldn’t be looked at as a how-to fix-it sort of manual—just how one guy got through it. That’s all it is.
Bluey: You work in a high-stress environment, political communications, and I would imagine being right there in the forefront on the Trump campaign was at the pinnacle of that. What were some of the ways you found to be effective in terms of keeping your mind on your work and not getting distracted by alcohol?
Murtaugh: There’s a lot of pressure in politics. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the presidential campaign, which I was, or on lower campaigns, which I have also done. Whether they’re races on the state level, congressional, Senate, governor’s races—it doesn’t matter. There’s varying amounts of pressure. It all seems like the most important thing in the world when you’re going through it.
It helps to stay busy for sure. I broke the day up into little chunks. Could I get out of bed and get dressed and get ready to go to work without having to stop for a drink? Could I get from home to the office without stopping to buy a drink? Could I make it through the day and not sneak out somewhere at noon? And then at the end of the day, can I make it all the way home without stopping somewhere to pick up a bottle or to stop and get a drink?
I relied a lot on Alcoholics Anonymous, going to meetings like that. I found using the Serenity Prayer, just helped me if I had a little storm going on in my brain and I was worried that maybe I was going to veer off to the side and do something that I shouldn’t do. Stopping for 15 to 20 seconds to say the Serenity Prayer really helped me sort of refocus and get back on the rails.
Books about Biden are not selling well, so maybe this will interest people.
— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) March 28, 2024
It’s not like any other political book you’ve ever read – it’s partly about the 2020 Trump campaign & partly about my battle with alcohol.
Order now for Tuesday’s release:https://t.co/RIgo9dWk59
Bluey: Family played a big part in your recovery. You come from a proud family. Your grandfather is Danny Murtaugh, the legendary manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a two-time World Series champion. What role does family play for others who might be struggling with alcoholism?
Murtaugh: It’s a really big, very important part of it. My wife is a very private person and she doesn’t relish a lot of these details getting out—or any of them really. But in fact, a few years back, it was her idea to write this book. And if she had not been on board with it, I wouldn’t have done it. And the fact that she is on board, is an illustration of how important she has been to me throughout my entire recovery.
Without her, I think there’s no question that I would either still be in jail or I would be dead. I don’t think there’s any two ways about it. And my parents were very instrumental in guiding me to rehab and helping me.
Bluey: In 2015, you found yourself at a low point. Then, within a span of four years, you are the communications director for the most-watched presidential campaign in history. Did President Trump know about your circumstances and did others on the campaign know about what you were going through?
Murtaugh: I felt like it was my responsibility to tell them. I started on the Trump campaign in February 2019. It was about four years after I had already taken my last drink. However, I did have pretty checkered past and I did have a history with law enforcement. I had two DUIs, served five days in jail with some suspended time for the first one, served 10 days in jail with 80 days suspended for the second one. I also had a variety of different drunk in public and different public intoxication charges.
Opposition researchers, and anybody who looked into it, would find all that stuff in about 10 minutes. So there wasn’t any point in hiding it.
When I went to work in the Trump administration for Secretary Sonny Perdue—I was his communications director for two years before I went to the Trump campaign—I told Secretary Perdue up front as I was interviewing. And then when I was being considered for the Trump campaign, I told Brad Parscale, the campaign manager, that very same thing. I said, “You should look into this because this is what I’ve got in my past and the president needs to know this.”
At the time, Sonny Perdue said, “Listen, as long as you’re not drinking now, I really appreciate you telling me, you’re going to be fine.” And then Brad Parscale went and ran it past the president and came back and he said, “Look, the president likes a good redemption story. He likes a good comeback story.” He himself doesn’t drink because he blames alcohol for the death of his brother, but the president was aware of it. And Brad said, “You know what? You’ve conquered it, let’s move on. And if anybody comes after you, I’ll stand by you.”
And he did because a lot of reporters called us because they had gotten the material from the opposition researchers, and they were threatening to write stories. Brad stood by me, and the campaign stood by me, and the president stood by me.
None of those stories ever got written. We managed to talk them out of it and talk them into agreeing with us that that was in the past.
Bluey: Are there any resources that you would recommend to individuals who may be struggling with addiction right now?
Murtaugh: There is always going to be an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that you can find and get to. And they truly are welcoming. Anyone can walk in off the street and find people who understand what you’re going through. That helped me an awful lot.
If you need more than that, then find a way to check yourself into a 28-day program. An inpatient rehab program can do wonders for people. As for me, I went to rehab five times. So sometimes it doesn’t take right away.
I would hope that people pick up the book. It’s called “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It,” available on Amazon.com right now, or other retailers as well. I hope that they can find some humor in it, and also maybe find some way to look at it and say that I can relate to it.
Bluey: Tim Murtaugh, thanks so much for having the courage to share your story. We’re proud of all that you’ve accomplished.
Murtaugh: Rob, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
The post An Addict’s Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ronna Romney McDaniel was with MSNBC for just four days. Sharing airwaves with the former Republican National Committee chairwoman was more than her colleagues could bear. They curled their lips, as if she had the cooties.
“It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor,” Mika Brzezinski huffed.
Rachel Maddow snarled, “I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.”
After McDaniel’s only appearance as a contributor, Chuck Todd growled at “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”
MSNBC’s anchors gave their brass the bird, turned them into plucked peacocks, and tossed them into the Potomac. The emasculated executives soon took on water.
“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” gasped NBCUniversal’s Cesar Conde, extolling groupthink rather than intellectual diversity.
“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” Conde gurgled, just before he sank into the river.
MSNBC’s mutiny was the newsroom equivalent of what too often befalls conservative speakers on college campuses.
“Cancel him!”
“Boot her!”
“SHUT UP!”
The only thing missing at MSNBC was a mob of black-clad bookers breaking cameras and setting makeup rooms ablaze.
As a news organization, MSNBC botched a perfect opportunity. Several times each week, in an election year, its hosts could have put cameras in McDaniel’s face and asked her tough questions on live TV:
Why focus solely on Trump? MSNBC could have grilled McDaniel like a salmon across GOP-related topics:
MSNBC staffers could have interrogated McDaniel, and she would have had to take it. Unlike her old job, she could not say, “No comment,” and then hide in her office (which was not her style). McDaniel could have fulfilled her contract and faced on-air questions or clammed up and surrendered her reported $300,000 annual salary.
Turn the tables: Imagine that Fox News Channel hired Biden’s former climate czar John Kerry. Rather than implode on camera, my Fox News colleagues eagerly would ask Kerry such questions as:
Nothing analogous will face the ex-chief of the RNC because NBC = DNC.
John Chancellor and David Brinkley must be revolving in their graves.
Rather than crumple like aluminum foil, NBC’s brass should have sacked their insolent, insubordinate “talent.” Ambitious journalists from newsrooms across America would have leapt to replace them.
Brzezinski, Maddow, and Todd are all replaceable. Especially Todd.
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 REVOLTING: Crybaby Journos Give NBC Brass the Bird appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., said in an interview over the weekend that President Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” which parts of Catholicism he will adhere to.
Gregory appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday with the female Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, where he discussed the Catholic president’s open support for issues such as abortion that are in direct contradiction with Catholic Church teaching.
Biden, who describes himself—and has been described by establishment media—as a “devout Catholic,” is open about frequently attending weekly Mass. But the president heads the most pro-abortion administration in United States history; promotes transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even for children; and celebrates transgender ideology.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a crime against human life, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
Although Gregory said that Biden is “very sincere about his faith,” the cardinal added that Biden “picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts.”
“There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ [in which] you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging,” Gregory explained.
DC’s @WashArchbishop Wilton Gregory: Joe Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” what parts of Catholicism to actually adhere to or ignore (like abortion). pic.twitter.com/i0Cbs226Uf
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 1, 2024
Gregory continued: “I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore.”
“The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death,” the cardinal said. “And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.’”
The Archdiocese of Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the cardinal’s remarks drew praise from Catholics on social media, among them The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who described Gregory’s comments as “marvelous.”
Good to see some faithful moral leadership from the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, especially at a time when the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington is vacant. https://t.co/QqHcI7pKWf
— André Béliveau (@TheRealBeliveau) April 1, 2024
Gregory sparked a backlash in November 2020 when he said in an interview with a leftist Jesuit outlet, America Magazine, that he would not deny Communion to Biden at Mass.
“The kind of relationship that I hope we will have is a conversational relationship, where we can discover areas where we can cooperate that reflect the social teachings of the church, knowing full well that there are some areas where we won’t agree,” Gregory told America Magazine at the time.
His stance drew criticism from traditional Catholics, who argued that Biden’s open embrace of unrestricted abortion constituted a grave scandal.
In September 2021, however, the cardinal offered a rare rebuke of Biden’s denial that life begins at conception, telling the president: “The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that human life begins at conception, so the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”
He added: “Our church has not changed its position on the immorality of abortion. I don’t see how we could, because we believe that every human life is sacred.”
The White House would not address Gregory’s most recent remarks. Instead, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates mocked The Daily Signal, the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, saying, “We refer The Heritage Foundation to the Office of Public Engagement. You have reached the press office.”
The post DC Archbishop: Joe Biden Is a ‘Cafeteria Catholic’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
California Democrats’ incorrigible obsession with racial preferences is the definition of insanity: They keep trying and failing to legalize racial preferences, and yet, they expect a different outcome each time.
When will they learn from their failures?
Not any time soon.
Their futile cycle has restarted with another effort to legalize racial preferences. The California state Assembly passed a proposed constitutional amendment, ACA 7, that would effectively nullify a provision of the California Constitution that prohibits the state from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
That anti-discrimination provision, known as Proposition 209, affirms the constitutional right to equal protection under the law for all individuals, regardless of race.
Left-wing politicians and activist groups have assailed it relentlessly and continuously since its adoption in 1996. They want to reinstate racial preferences within California’s institutions, but they have failed every time.
Before ACA 7, California legislators had attempted to overturn the anti-discrimination provision in a measure known as Proposition 16, which was decisively rejected by California voters in the November 2020 general election. A comfortable majority of voters voted “No” on the measure, despite the “Yes” proponents outspending the opposition by more than 19 to 1.
Although California voters emphatically rejected racial preferences in education and hiring, the supporters of racial preferences still have not taken “No” for an answer.
This time, they’re hoping to trick the people into changing their minds. Whereas Prop 16 was open and honest about abolishing racial neutrality, ACA 7 is much more deceptive. Rather than repeal race neutrality, ACA 7 creates “exceptions” that look modest, but which would effectively nullify the rule.
Assemblyman Corey Jackson introduced the bill to create a procedure for agencies to appeal to the governor for “exceptions” to Prop 209. The amendment would give the governor power to approve exceptions if a state-funded, “research-informed” program that uses racial preferences “increases the life expectancy of, improves educational outcomes for, or lifts out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, or sexual orientation.”
In other words, this bill is just an attempt to restore racial discrimination under the guise of science.
Find some ideologically driven, low-quality research that appears to support a program that allegedly “increases the life expectancy” or “educational outcomes” of any minority group, and voila, racial discrimination is lawful again.
Jackson insists that Prop 209 is an “unjust law” and a “barrier.” Yes, it’s unjust, he says, not to discriminate on the basis of race. He’s wrong about that, but he’s right about Prop 209 being a barrier. Prop 209 bars the state government from racially discriminating against the state’s residents.
It guarantees one of the fundamental tenets of justice; namely, that all are equal before the law.
Jackson is happy to sacrifice equal justice to “rectify the enduring disparities that have afflicted California for far too long.” But even assuming that racial discrimination would rectify disparities and would do so without causing even worse problems (both faulty assumptions), that doesn’t change the fact that racial discrimination is unjust and immoral.
Most Californians know this. So, thankfully, there’s still hope in the fight against racial preferences.
The resounding defeat of Prop 16 in 2020 pointed to the reality that California voters, despite their infamously deep-blue political leanings, are not in favor of considering race in education or hiring decisions.
According to Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies’ post-2020 election survey of Californians, although 56% of African American voters supported Proposition 16, only 30% of Latinos and just 35% of Asians did.
If ACA 7 passes the California state Senate, it will appear on the November ballot. If past is prologue, California voters will demonstrate—as if twice wasn’t enough—that racial discrimination is not tolerated in California, no “exceptions.”
The post Some in California Want to Legalize Racial Discrimination—Yet Again appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Cross-dressed by his grandmother as a child, abused by his uncle, confused and hurting, Walt Heyer sought to become a woman. As a young man, he underwent attempted gender-reassignment surgery, lived as a trans-identifying woman for eight years, and ultimately detransitioned.
Heyer, now 83, has spent the past few decades offering support to men and women who also have been taught to believe they were born in the wrong body. As part of that effort, he told The Daily Signal, he’s written a number of books and answered “thousands” of letters from individuals, often men, who seek his help.
Now, he’s partnering with Ascend Pictures Productions to produce a movie about his story, tentatively titled “Who Am I.” That movie will pose the question, Heyer says: “Who do we think we are?”
“There’s been nothing like it,” he said in a Tuesday telephone interview. “It is a powerful movie.”
Heyer knows his story has inspired many people, and he believes it should be shared through movie. When he was only 4 years old, he has shared, his grandmother would secretly dress him in a purple chiffon dress.
The attention and affirmation—which made Heyer feel very special as a child—“would be his mustard seed of torment.”
His film’s website shares: “The dress also became a source of his turmoil once his parents found out about his secret. His father’s spankings became more intense and also led to his being sexually abused by his uncle. This manifested into Walt’s affliction—thoughts and feelings that maybe he should have been born a girl. Andrea and then Laura were born in his mind, and they wanted Walt gone.”
Heyer sought transgender treatments that “promised relief,” but those treatments only “led to the destruction of his marriage, his family, and his career.” The movie would explore Heyer’s journey, he said, which includes his ultimate discovery of his Christian faith and the “road back to redemption” and forgiveness.
Heyer emphasized to The Daily Signal that he wants the film to focus on sharing his story, rather than being preachy: “We really want it to appeal to people who don’t know Jesus. And I think it will.”
He wants viewers to understand that the issues he was dealing with, and the issues that other individuals who try to transition are experiencing, go much deeper than gender. And gender therapists are not going to be able to help individuals struggling in this way, Heyer maintains.
But the movie will need financial support to make it happen. Heyer encourages supporters to visit the prospective film’s website, where they can sign up for updates.
“We need support,” he noted. “We need the crowdfunding to get it off the ground. Crowdfunding is the most important part.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: Movie Would Share ‘Gut-Wrenching Story’ of Man Who Tried to Become a Trans Woman appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—a law guaranteeing equality between the sexes in education—has been on the chopping block from Day One of the Biden administration.
But after a lengthy delay, the federal Department of Education has formally announced it will punt on the announcement of its new Title IX sports rule, one that would permit biological males who identify as females to participate in women’s scholastic sports in accordance with their gender identity.
The civil rights law has been subject to rulemaking, both on the trans-sports issue and on the broader application of gender-identity protections in federally funded education programs.
While the administration has announced that it will delay announcing its new sports rule, at least for now, the broader, earlier proposed Title IX rule is already in the final stages of review at the White House, with a likely release date in August or September. Once released, it would apply to private spaces (restrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms), preferred pronouns, sexual assault and harassment, and more.
The seismic changes included in the rule will affect any educational program that is funded directly or indirectly by the federal Department of Education—whether public school, private school, higher education institution, recreation center, charter school, or the like.
In reporting on the delay of the sports rule, The Washington Post quoted an insider who said, “Folks close to Biden have made the political decision to not move on the athletics [regulation] preelection. It seems to be too much of a hot topic.”
It sounds like the White House is finally waking up to the radioactivity of the trans-sports issue, a notion borne out by recent polling that indicates nearly 70% of Americans support separating sports by biological sex.
That polling, and the delay of Biden’s sports rule, means that now more than ever, state legislatures must act in the interest of female athletes and pass legislation protecting women’s equal educational opportunity before it’s too late.
That’s due to two developments; namely, the temporary suspension of the Title IX sports rule and the fact that even though the administration cleaved out a Title IX sports rule from the broader Title IX rule, a closer reading of the fine print indicates that, despite the administration’s attempts at legerdemain designed to fool the public, sports are included in the broader, earlier rule after all.
The earlier proposed Title IX rule explains, “preventing any person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with their gender identity would subject them to more than de minimis harm on the basis of sex and therefore be prohibited.” School sports? They’re “an education program or activity.” The proposed rule also prohibits gender identity discrimination in “extracurricular activities.”
Extracurricular activities include school sports.
There are 25 states with women’s sports laws on the books. And while Wisconsin’s governor, Democrat Tony Evers, just vetoed a state bill that would have maintained sex separations in school athletics, other states—Nebraska, for instance—still have time to act before the close of their legislative sessions.
Nebraska’s “Sports and Spaces” Act, LB 575, is sponsored by state Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha, who is hopeful the bill will be voted out of committee sometime within the week. The bill would restrict access to school bathrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex and would add similar restrictions to most school sports teams.
Some have dubbed it one of the “most controversial bills” of the legislative session, likely due to the hot-button nature of its subject matter. As a result, the bill has been sitting in committee since its introduction by Kauth last year.
But controversial it isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be. With 70% of Americans backing these kinds of commonsense restrictions, it’s a wonder the legislation has stalled, especially in light of increasing evidence that women aren’t just losing playing time and athletic titles to transgender-identified men, but are now increasingly injured as a result of competing against them.
Nebraska’s legislative session ends on April 18. But all pending legislation must be debated on the floor before the end of this week to advance.
The speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, John Arch, has urged senators to consider the truncated time frame of legislative debate and hold off on bills that are unlikely to have enough votes to progress.
Such timidity is misguided.
Fifty years ago, the feminists of yore worked tirelessly to secure equal educational opportunity for women and girls. But choosing to support self-proclaimed “females” over biological girls who simply want a chance to play is wrong.
The time for legislative action is now—before it’s too late.
The post Biden Admin Punts on Radical Title IX Sports Rule Change for Now, but Nebraska Has Chance to Act appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department announced Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit accusing the state of Utah, and its Department of Corrections, of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act in failing to give a man hormones for his gender dysphoria.
The prisoner, who identifies as a transgender woman, is said to have requested to purchase women’s clothing and “personal items in the commissary,” such as women’s underwear and makeup.
He also wanted to be housed with female prisoners, the DOJ said. The Utah Department of Corrections assigns prison accommodations based upon sex at “commitment,” when staffers conduct a visual search of genitals, according to the Justice Department.
The Utah Department of Corrections did not grant those requests, the DOJ said, accusing the Utah agency of causing the man’s gender dysphoria to worsen.
“Twenty-two months after entering custody,” the DOJ said, the trans-identifying prisoner “performed dangerous self-surgery and removed [his] own testicles.”
“People with gender dysphoria, including those held in jails and prisons, are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act and are entitled to equal access to medical care, just like anyone else with a disability,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
“Delays or refusals to provide medical treatment for people with gender dysphoria can cause irreparable harm, including debilitating distress, depression, attempts at self-treatment and even death by suicide,” Clarke added. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the rights of all people with disabilities in our country, including those who experience gender dysphoria—and those rights are not given up at the jailhouse door.”
The DOJ also accused the Utah Department of Corrections of “imposing unnecessary eligibility criteria for assessment and treatment for gender dysphoria that it does not require for other conditions.” A letter of findings to the Utah agency states that the prison system routes requests for “medical care” for gender dysphoria through its gender dysphoria committee.
If a man in the Utah Department of Corrections self-identifies as a transgender woman, he will have to request an evaluation by the agency’s mental health staff, and these staffers then present their findings to the gender dysphoria committee. The committee will decide whether or not to refer the man to a health care provider for a diagnostic evaluation for gender dysphoria, and if the committee approves the evaluation, the Department of Corrections will refer the individual to its contract psychologist, according to the letter of findings.
“If the committee denies the evaluation, the incarcerated person must wait one year before they are eligible to request diagnostic services again,” the letter said. “After a diagnostic assessment, [the Utah Department of Corrections] medical staff will consider the psychologist’s recommendations and may order treatment with hormones, but not ‘[c]osmetic or elective surgical procedures for the purpose of sex reassignment.’”
The Justice Department claims that the committee included people who were reluctant to prescribe hormones for gender dysphoria, calling that “overt bias against the individuals seeking care.”
When the Department of Corrections finally allowed the prisoner identified in the Justice Department’s lawsuit to start hormonal medication, the DOJ claimed, the prisoner’s Department of Corrections doctor tried to talk him out of taking hormones. The DOJ claims that the doctor then failed to take “basic steps to ensure that it was provided safely and effectively,” such as conducting routine laboratory testing.
The Justice Department is calling on the Utah agency to adopt, revise, and implement new policies that let men who think they are women or women who think they are men to obtain “health care services” for gender dysphoria, and to “reasonably modify UDOC policies, practices, and procedures when necessary to ensure that individuals with gender dysphoria have equal access to all UDOC services, programs, and activities including commissary, pat and visual searches, housing, and required and optional programming.”
The Utah Department of Corrections said in a March 12 statement that it is working to address the “complex” issue and described itself as “blindsided” by the DOJ’s announcement regarding its findings in March.
“We have also taken steps on our own, and as a state, to address the needs of inmates while maintaining the highest safety standards,” Executive Director Brian Redd said in a statement. “We fundamentally disagree with the DOJ on key issues, and are disappointed with their approach.”
The post Biden DOJ Targets Utah Prisons After Trans Prisoner Removes His Own Testicles appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An executive subpoenaed in the House’s investigation of companies involved in so-called ESG policies claims conservative legal activist Leonard Leo is behind a “crusade” to stop the corporate practice.
ESG is an acronym for environmental, social, and governance practices that promote left-leaning activism among companies and corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating numerous companies and organizations for potential violation of federal antitrust laws in collaborating on such practices.
Leo, long affiliated with The Federalist Society and currently co-chairman of its board, is well known in such conservative legal circles.
Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, an ESG-advocating nonprofit, brought up Leo’s name in an interview Friday with the left-wing broadcast and internet program “Democracy Now!” hosted by Amy Goodman.
“Leonard Leo, he’s the, you know, co-chair of The Federalist Society—those are the folks, all of the right-wing judges, particularly the Supreme Court, but across the whole landscape—he was given $1.6 billion in mid-2022 to lead this crusade,” Behar said on “Democracy Now!”
“It’s a very orchestrated campaign,” he added.
Behar’s syntax may have been scrambled, but the CEO of As You Sow appeared to claim that Leo, backed by a $1.6 billion slush fund, is leading the charge against ESG investment policies.
Reached for this story, a spokesman for Leo said the conservative attorney had never heard of As You Sow and doesn’t respond to conspiracy theories.
Behar likely was referring to reports in 2022 from two left-leaning media outlets, The New York Times and ProPublica, that Chicago billionaire Barre Seid had donated $1.6 billion to various networks associated with Leo. But that donation extended well beyond ESG as a target of conservative advocacy.
>>> Related: Ted Cruz Slams Left’s Attacks on Leonard Leo as a ‘Full-on Assault on Our Constitution’
A source with knowledge of the House Judiciary Committee’s ESG probe was dismissive of the notion of shadowy motives behind it.
“To suggest that the committee is investigating As You Sow because of Leonard Leo is completely ridiculous and laughable,” the person, who asked not to be identified, told The Daily Signal. “It seems that As You Sow is scared of what the committee is uncovering and working overtime to save face for their lack of cooperation with the investigation.”
For his part, Behar said during the “Democracy Now!” interview that his organization provided 12,000 pages of documents to the House Judiciary Committee before getting another subpoena March 28.
>>> Related: ‘2 Things That Can’t Both Be True’: Tennessee AG Sues BlackRock Over ESG Deception
An August letter to As You Sow signed by Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and other committee members says:
We write because As You Sow is potentially violating U.S. antitrust law by entering into agreements to ‘decarbonize’ corporate assets and reduce emissions to net zero—with potentially harmful effects on Americans’ freedom and economic well-being.
As You Sow is a member of Climate Action 100+. Through Climate Action 100+, As You Sow appears to have colluded with other institutional investors to ‘work with the companies in which [they] invest to . . . deliver net zero [greenhouse gas] emissions by 2050. … Collusive agreements harm competition and consumers and are illegal under the Sherman Act.
The post ‘Ridiculous and Laughable’: Subpoenaed CEO Blames Conservative Legal Activist for ESG Probe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
In January, an activist with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a project of the liberal group Civic Nation, contacted officials with the state of Wisconsin and its capital city, Madison, about a need to allow money from the Federal Work-Study Program to pay for students to engage in election-related work.
By late February, the U.S. Department of Education and Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden administration was doing exactly that.
A new Wall Street Journal poll of voters in battleground states found former President Donald Trump tied with Biden in a two-way race in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by only about 20,000 votes of over 3.2 million cast.
In a Jan. 18 email, Ryan Drysdale, director of impact and state networks for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, sent an email to Bonnie Chang, voter outreach coordinator in the Madison city clerk’s office, about U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s plans to revise how taxpayer money may be used.
“Lastly, as you may be aware, the secretary has been working on clarification about Federal Work-Study being eligible for supporting student workers with local election officials and feels confident another letter will come from the WH/Dept of Ed with guidelines,” Drysdale wrote to Chang, referring to the White House and the Department of Education.
The Federal Work-Study Program, funded by the Department of Education, provides financial aid to eligible undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities.
The youth vote helped stop an anticipated “red wave” for Republican candidates in 2022. It once was perceived as a core Democrat constituency, which is one reason the Biden administration has tried repeatedly to “forgive” student loan debt.
ALL IN asserted that the youth vote was the deciding factor in 2022 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The initiative announced that 394 colleges and universities across 44 states and the District of Columbia were part of its first program recognizing “Most Engaged Campuses for College Student Voting.”
“I was invited to join a meeting with the secretary, the UW-Superior campus team and surrounding local election officials who are exploring both internship and FWS opportunities,” Drysdale wrote to Madison’s Chang, referring to Cardona, the University of Wisconsin in Superior, Wisconsin, and the Federal Work-Study Program.
“There was a lot of excitement even without the FWS component,” he wrote. “They hope to use UWS [University of Wisconsin-Superior] as a case study for other [Wisconsin] institutions and local election officials to learn from. Happy to share more on a quick call if that would be helpful. There’s a big interest from partners and funders about FWS and these types of opportunities so we’ll be following these developments in WI.”
On Jan. 19, Chang forwarded Drysdale’s email about the Federal Work-Study Program, or FWS, to Madison City Attorney Michael Haas.
She noted that University of Wisconsin-Madison officials said that “it’s in the federal language that FWS students are not able to work at the polls on Election Day nor engage in GOTV/voter engagement spaces.”
GOTV is a reference to “get out the vote.”
That same day, Haas wrote to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe.
“If I understand correctly, there is a request to change the FWS rules regarding work as election inspectors but I don’t think that has happened yet,” Haas said of Federal Work-Study rules. “In any event, the secretary of state is trying to help make it happen.”
The Wisconsin Secretary of State’s Office didn’t reply to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
The Daily Signal previously reported that Civic Nation’s board includes Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama; Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama; and Cecilia Muñoz, former director of the Obama White House’s Domestic Policy Council.
Funders of Civic Nation include left-leaning grantmakers such as the Democracy Fund, established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; the Environmental Defense Fund; and the Joyce Foundation, which included Barack Obama on its board before he became president.
Besides ALL IN, other groups run by Civic Nation include United State of Women and When We All Vote.
Amanda Hollowell, When We All Vote’s national organizing director, was among activists who met Feb. 27 at a White House event with the vice president to talk about turning out voters.
“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students. And, for example, we have—under the Federal Work-Study Program—[we] now allow students to get paid, through federal work-study, to register people and to be nonpartisan poll workers,” Harris told the gathering at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“As we know, this is important for a number of reasons,” she said. “One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to—to strengthen our communities. But also, this is the work that we need to do, knowing that so many poll workers have left this work for a variety of reasons that we will also discuss.”
The city of Madison played no role in pushing for a clarification of U.S. Education Department policy on allowing the program to pay students for election work, the city attorney told The Daily Signal.
“City of Madison officials did not lobby the Biden administration to change FWS rules. We have not been involved in that issue except for receiving the email from Ryan Drysdale so I do not [know] details about the FWS regulations or how they changed as they do not affect the city’s operations,” Haas said. “The city of Madison hires a number of UW-Madison students as poll workers and pays them in the same way as other poll workers with city funds.”
The Daily Signal sought comment from ALL IN’s Drysdale and the press contact for Civic Nation. Neither responded.
The Education Department referred The Daily Signal to a “Dear Colleague letter” to college administrators, dated Feb. 26, from Nasser H. Paydar, assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education.
In part, the letter says: “The department is today clarifying that FWS funds may be used for employment by a federal, state, local, or tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
The documents released to The Daily Signal by the Wisconsin Elections Commission also showed consultation between state officials and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency within the Commerce Department.
NIST was putting together its strategic plan to comply with Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote, which it later made public.
The institute is one of at least four federal agencies to make such a strategic plan public. The Justice Department, however, has claimed presidential privilege to prevent public release of its own plan for complying with Biden’s order.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Left-Wing Group Pushed a Policy That Could Shape 2024 Election Outcome—Using Your Tax Dollars appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A ballot initiative OK’d by the Florida Supreme Court perpetuates abortion advocates’ favored strategy of using vague definitions of “health” to expand abortion on demand.
Florida voters will face a referendum measure in November that would allow abortion up to the moment of birth if deemed “necessary to protect the patient’s health” after the state Supreme Court’s decision on Monday allowing the measure on the ballot.
Amendment 4, the so-called Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion, is being pushed by a pro-abortion political committee, Floridians Protecting Freedom.
The proposal’s vague definition of “health” is similar to that of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Doe v. Bolton, which defined “health” of the mother as “all factors” affecting the woman.
The Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that same year that states could issue no regulations for first-trimester abortions and some regulations for second-trimester abortions, but only for the purpose of protecting the “health” of the mother. In the third trimester, when the unborn child is viable, the since-overturned Roe allowed states to make abortion illegal contingent on the existence of exceptions to protect the mother’s life and “health.”
Doe v. Bolton, the lesser-known case decided on the same day as Roe, defined the “health” of the mother as “all factors” that affect the woman, including “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age,” drastically expanding the allowable abortions legalized by Roe.
Florida’s Amendment 4 similarly would prohibit restrictions on abortion when “necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
The proposal would circumvent current state law protecting unborn children with a heartbeat. On the same day the Florida court approved the ballot initiative, it upheld a state law protecting unborn children from most abortions after 15 weeks, enabling a six-week abortion ban approved last year to take effect on May 1. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the six-week ban into law last April, but it couldn’t take effect unless the 15-week ban survived legal challenges in the state Supreme Court.
Because the text of the constitutional amendment contains no definition of “health” or “health care provider,” the measure would likely legalize abortion at any stage of the pregnancy if anyone who claims medical expertise asserts the mother would benefit from it physically, emotionally, or otherwise.
Florida statutes define a health care provider as “a physician licensed under chapter 458, an osteopathic physician licensed under chapter 459, a podiatric physician licensed under chapter 461, or an advanced practice registered nurse registered under 464.0123.” If it receives 60% of the vote in November, the ballot initiative would allow any doctor, osteopath, podiatrist, or nurse to determine if a woman’s health could in any way benefit from ending the life of her unborn child.
Michigan voters legalized abortion up until birth with similarly vague language in a November 2022 ballot initiative. Proposal 3 prohibited laws against abortion if a “health care professional” deemed it to be “medically needed to protect a patient’s life or physical or mental health.”
Broad and unclear definitions of health have allowed half a century of violence against the unborn after Doe v. Bolton, and have ended thousands of lives in Michigan with the passage of Proposal 3.
In November, Florida voters will have the chance to stop another vague definition of health from turning the Sunshine State from one of the states with the most protections for the unborn to the most pro-abortion state in the South.
The post Pro-Abortion Ballot Initiative in Florida Aims to Trick Voters With Vague Definition of ‘Health’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The places where they were raised and to which they traveled formed the Founding Fathers’ geographic orientation, which influenced their view of the nation and what the country could become, according to Michael Barone.
While George Washington had “a map that goes north by northwest,” Thomas Jefferson “saw the country from [the] perspective of the West,” says Barone, a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics” since its first edition in 1972.
In his new book “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” Barone explains how the differing “mental maps” of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton were sometimes in opposition, but together formed our great nation.
Barone joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the little-known facts about the Founding Fathers he uncovered while researching the new book.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Understanding the Founding Fathers’ ‘Mental Maps’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
John Eastman is a lawyer, a legal scholar, and a friend.
I got to know John—a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, candidate for California attorney general, and dean of Chapman University School of Law—during my weeklong 2018 legal fellowship with the Claremont Institute, which he oversaw. We have stayed in touch and done at least one event together for Claremont since that time.
Unfortunately, since the 2020 presidential election, John has been put through the wringer more than just about anyone in American public life.
He was forced to retire from the law school where he was a longtime constitutional law professor and even dean. He was let go by the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for Western Civilization, where he was a visiting scholar. Armed Stasi—sorry, FBI—agents accosted him in a parking lot and seized his phone without a warrant. He has been suspended from academic conferences and lost board seats. He and his wife have endured death threats, spikes in their driveway, and threatening graffiti in their neighborhood. He has been debanked by Bank of America and the USAA. He is being criminally prosecuted by scandal-ridden Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis. And last week, State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland devoted 128 pages to explaining why he should lose his law license.
All this because John had the chutzpah to do what every law school student is taught to do in legal ethics class: defend and zealously advocate for one’s client, no matter how unpopular or even disreputable that client may be. In this case, John’s unpopular client was a high-profile one: former President Donald Trump.
There has been an astronomical amount of misinformation about John’s activities in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol jamboree, as well as the legal advice that he offered his high-profile client during that time. The corporate media and the Democrat-lawfare complex typically speak of John’s legal advice as encouraging the “overturning of an election” or “fomenting an insurrection,” but such hyperbolic talk is irresponsible and wildly off base.
John acquitted himself well in a compelling essay he penned for Claremont’s American Mind online journal on Jan. 18, 2021, titled “Setting the Record Straight on the POTUS ‘Ask.'”
His 12th Amendment argument about the vice president’s more active role in certifying the states’ slates of electors and his accompanying argument regarding the constitutional dubiousness of the Electoral Count of 1887 might not be correct (although it could be), but it is well within the bound of plausible, nonfrivolous legal argumentation an attorney can (indeed, should) press upon an embattled client.
That is doubly so here, because the U.S. Supreme Court has never authoritatively interpreted the relevant 12th Amendment provision. Countless legal arguments more frivolous than this are advanced every day in courtrooms across America.
Nor is John Eastman the only man being prosecuted, and possibly disbarred, for his legal activity after the 2020 election. Former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark is also being prosecuted in Georgia, and he was just found by the District of Columbia Bar to have violated an ethics rule, which might lead to his own disbarment there—all stemming from an internal Department of Justice memo that Clark never even sent.
Once upon a time, the American Left understood the moral imperative of ensuring that all Americans have adequate access to legal representation, no matter one’s popularity in the eyes of the government or societal elites.
Indeed, the definitive American example of such unpopular legal representation actually dates back to before the United States was even independent: In 1770, a young lawyer named John Adams, the man who would become the young republic’s second president, took it upon himself to defend the British soldiers accused of killing five colonists at the Boston Massacre. Years later, in his dotage, Adams reflected that this was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
Presumably, Willis and Roland would have preferred to see Adams tarred and feathered for his treachery. One also cannot help but wonder how they might have viewed the NAACP’s legal representation in the Deep South during the days of Jim Crow.
The ultimate aim of those Jacobins prosecuting and disbarring lawyers for having the temerity to practice the legal profession is clear: the subordination of the rule of law to the Jacobins’ own friend/enemy-level politics, and the cowing into submission of those lawyers who would so much as consider representing a high-profile Republican client or work in a Republican Department of Justice. Ironically, and without any hint of self-awareness, they do all this in the name of “our democracy.”
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The post John Eastman and the Left’s War on the Legal Profession appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Staffers at a pro-life pregnancy resource center in Rochester, New York, are criticizing the FBI for failing to provide any kind of status update of investigations into pro-abortion vandals’ attacks on the pregnancy center.
Nearly two years after the initial June 2022 attack, CompassCare pregnancy medical center says that the FBI has put up billboards offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the criminals who firebombed the pregnancy center.
The billboard is placed about a mile away from the center, CompassCare said in a release. The group added that the billboard appeared shortly before the sentencing of a separate pro-abortion arsonist, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, who in December pleaded guilty to attacking a pro-life organization in Madison, Wisconsin.
CompassCare says that the FBI won’t communicate with them about the billboard, first noticed by the organization on April 1, and won’t provide a status update on its investigation into the attack.
“Supporters have asked if CompassCare paid for this expensive billboard,” said the Rev. Jim Harden, CompassCare CEO, in a statement provided to The Daily Signal. “We did not. The FBI refuses to communicate.”
“The erratic nature of [Department of Justice] and FBI behavior around cases of violence against pro-life groups appears to be PR related, bolstering their reputation when under pressure to produce results by media and congressional judiciary committees,” Harden speculated.
“Perhaps they anticipate more violence against Christian pro-lifers ahead of the next big Supreme Court ruling in June and want to make it look like they care?” he questioned.
The FBI and DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.
CompassCare was attacked a second time in March 2023. The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen reported at the time that surveillance footage from the attack showed an individual wearing a hoodie walk up to the front of the pregnancy center, spray paint the word “Liars” over the CompassCare sign, then walk away back down the street.
The radical pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge took responsibility for the June 2022 firebombing of the pro-life center. Pro-abortion activists also spray-painted the words “Jane was here” on the side of the building.
Since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon thereafter be overturned, there have been at least 236 attacks on Catholic churches and at least 90 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers, according to Catholic Vote trackers.
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) prohibits the intentional destruction or damage of reproductive health care facilities, theoretically protecting not only abortion clinics, but also pro-life churches and pregnancy centers.
But President Joe Biden’s DOJ charged only pro-life activists with FACE Act violations in 2022, and has since charged only five individuals with violating the FACE Act by targeting pregnancy centers.
In February, conservative leaders called on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to pass the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 “as soon as possible.”
“In the aftermath of additional pro-life activists being convicted by the Biden administration under the FACE Act for peacefully protesting outside an abortion business, we respectfully urge you to take immediate legislative action to protect peaceful pro-life activists from the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice and an unconstitutional law,” the leaders said in a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“The Biden administration has weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and activists who want to save lives and change hearts and minds,” Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller told The Daily Signal at the time.
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Pregnancy Center Slams FBI For Failure to Arrest Pro-Abortion Firebombers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Before voters approved a constitutional amendment to make their state the 28th in the nation to ban private funding of election administration, Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, already had spent over $1 million in private grants.
Madison, like jurisdictions in three other states that ban private dollars from paying for elections—Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri—is a member of the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization, founded by the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, doled out $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Wisconsin’s move to ban private money to pay for elections was significant progress for election integrity but not a silver bullet, said former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.
“It is like staying ahead of hackers,” Cuccinelli told The Daily Signal. “But this is the real world and not digital, where we are dealing with votes and maintaining clean elections.”
“The other side will keep trying to muddy the waters and we will keep trying to clean it up,” he said. “Some jurisdictions are bragging about already spending the money. Good. This is about stabilizing elections going forward.”
In the book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” I detail the impact of the Zuckerberg grants in battleground states. Democrat-leaning counties in Pennsylvania got about 92% of the grant money. In Arizona, more than half of the “Zuckerbucks” went to Maricopa County.
A special counsel appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature concluded the Zuckerberg grants functioned as a state-sanctioned get-out-the-vote campaign conducted almost entirely in the heavily Democrat areas of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Madison.
The city of Madison got $1.5 million in private dollars before the ballot initiative, which won’t be affected by the voter-approved ban.
“The city has spent the second grant it received from CTCL in the amount of $1.5 million to purchase equipment that will automate the process of mailing absentee ballots and sorting them upon return, as well as security carts to transport voting equipment,” Madison City Attorney Michael Haas told The Daily Signal.
“There was also a grant to help the city pay for its membership in the [Alliance] for Election Excellence,” Haas said in a written statement. “Since that grant was made and the membership was purchased prior to the constitutional amendment being passed, I do not believe the amendment applies to it.”
“Plus, the amendment prohibits the use of money or equipment from a grant to conduct elections,” the city attorney added. “I think it is a stretch to argue that learning and developing best practices, which is what [the alliance] does, is actually conducting an election.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that DeKalb County, Georgia, accepted a $2 million grant from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence last year despite a 2021 Georgia law that banned the use of private money to administer elections.
DeKalb County contended that it could accept the money because the 2021 law said only that “no superintendent” who oversees elections could accept the money. So the county’s general treasury accepted the money and then passed it to election officials.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans accused DeKalb County of skirting the ban. In 2023, the Georgia Legislature closed the loophole and made it a felony for any public official to accept private dollars intended for elections.
DeKalb County officials acknowledged an inquiry from The Daily Signal, but didn’t respond before publication of this report.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Donny Bridges, and Whitney May, who previously worked together at the New Organizing Institute, which The Washington Post referred to as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts of digital wizardry.”
For the Alliance for Election Excellence, CTCL partners with several nonprofits, including the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, that are funded by Arabella Advisors, a left-wing dark money organization.
Coconino County, Arizona, is also a member of the alliance. But it’s not getting any grants, County Recorder Patty Hansen said.
“We received a $614,000 grant from the CTCL in 2020 before the Legislature passed the ban,” Hansen told The Daily Signal. “We don’t accept any money from the alliance. We accept services. … The alliance works on developing best practices and standards that can be shared across the country.”
Both Arizona and Georgia were formerly solid-red states that flipped blue in the 2020 election. Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump in each state was assisted by large margins of victory in Coconino County, where the largest city is Flagstaff, and DeKalb County, where the largest city is Decatur.
Two Missouri counties, Boone and Scotland, are also members of the Alliance for Election Excellence and neither received grants, Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said. She made it clear when the county signed up that it couldn’t receive private funds, Lennon said.
“Boone County is a member of the Alliance for Election Excellence; however, we do have the prohibition in Missouri law for private funding and, as a result, our county has not received grant funding from the alliance,” Lennon told The Daily Signal in a written statement.
Missouri, which leans heavily Republican, isn’t a battleground state in elections.
Boone County, which includes Columbia, the state’s fourth-largest city, also went heavily to Biden in 2020. Scotland County, with a population under 5,000, went overwhelmingly to Trump.
“Scotland County, Missouri, is our other Missouri member of the alliance and they also have not received private funding,” Lennon said in the written statement, adding:
The membership gives us access to subject matter experts that are current or former local election officials on administrative areas like poll worker recruitment (finding enough election judges, especially judges that affiliate as Republicans, is a perennial problem for us), better ways to design forms and applications so that voters can understand them, and ways to make our existing elections processes more efficient.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report.
The center’s Alliance for Election Excellence gave $3 million to Clark County, one of the larger jurisdictions in Nevada, which is considered a battleground state in 2024 with no ban on private money to run elections.
The other jurisdictions in the alliance are in solidly blue areas and have no ban on private dollars bankrolling local elections. They are Shasta and Contra Costa counties in California; Kane and Macoupin counties in Illinois; and the city of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The post Left-Wing Election Group Still Rooted in These Areas With ‘Zuckerbuck’ Bans appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump says each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
Trump’s position on abortion has previously been unclear looking toward the 2024 presidential election, despite the fact that the former president appointed three Supreme Court justices who ultimately made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by a majority vote.
“I want to thank the six justices: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch,” Trump said. He called them “incredible people, for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
Trump appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
Further clarifying his view on abortion, he said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline,” he added.
“We are deeply disappointed in President Trump’s position,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement Monday morning.
“Unborn children and their mothers deserve national protections and national advocacy from the brutality of the abortion industry. The Dobbs decision clearly allows both states and Congress to act,” Dannenfelser said, referring to the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ultimately used by the high to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Saying the issue is ‘back to the states’ cedes the national debate to the Democrats who are working relentlessly to enact legislation mandating abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy,” Dannenfelser said. “If successful, they will wipe out states’ rights.”
Trump criticized Democrats’ abortion positions in his remarks, saying: “Democrats are the radical ones in this position, because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth—and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born, the baby is executed after birth—is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, praised Trump for “celebrating ‘the ultimate joy in life’—children and family” in his comments.
“That kind of love and support for the bedrock of society, the family, will be a welcome change in the White House,” Hawkins said. However, she added, “We clearly have some work to do to educate the Trump administration to come on the many ways that abortion has been made federal.”
CatholicVote President Brian Burch also responded to Trump’s abortion video, arguing that the “federal government cannot abandon women and children exploited by abortion. Leaving abortion policy to the states is not sufficient.”
“President Trump’s latest statement also reflects the electoral minefield created by Democrat abortion fanaticism,” Burch said. “The fact remains that pro-life voters need to win elections to protect mothers and children. Further, Democrats are now preparing a billion-dollar election-year barrage with radical abortion as its centerpiece. While Trump did not commit to any specific pro-life policies, he notably will not stand in the way of states that have acted to protect innocent children from the violent abortion industry.”
Trump began the video, which runs 4 minutes and 23 seconds, by expressing his support for the family and the creation of families through in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
“Under my leadership, the Republican Party will always support the creation of strong, thriving, and healthy American families,” Trump said. “We want to make it easier for mothers and families to have babies, not harder. That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every state in America.”
“Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the vast majority of Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and pro-life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” the former president said.
The post Trump Makes His Position on Abortion Clear: ‘States Will Determine’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Vatican on Monday issued a declaration, “Dignitas Infinita,” on human dignity, warning that the practice of surrogacy, transgender surgeries, and gender theory are contrary to human dignity.
“In the face of so many violations of human dignity that seriously threaten the future of the human family, the Church encourages the promotion of the dignity of every human person, regardless of their physical, mental, cultural, social, and religious characteristics,” the document says. “The Church does this with hope, confident of the power that flows from the Risen Christ, who has fully revealed the integral dignity of every man and woman.”
The name of the document translates to “Infinite Dignity,” and it’s a five-year-long product of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that reaffirms Catholic Church teaching on the topics. It addresses a number of weighty topics that have entered the political sphere, including surrogacy.
“The Church also takes a stand against the practice of surrogacy, through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object,” the document states.
“First and foremost, the practice of surrogacy violates the dignity of the child,” it continues. “Indeed, every child possesses an intangible dignity that is clearly expressed—albeit in a unique and differentiated way—at every stage of his or her life: from the moment of conception, at birth, growing up as a boy or girl, and becoming an adult.
“Because of this unalienable dignity, the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver,” the document adds.
It also addresses “critical issues present in gender theory,” warning that “it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference.”
“This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference, but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them,” the Vatican document says. “In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.”
As for attempted sex-change operations, “Dignitas Infinita” emphasizes that the “dignity of the body cannot be considered inferior to that of the person as such.” It quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that “the human body shares in the dignity of ‘the image of God.’”
“Any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception,” the document states. “This is not to exclude the possibility that a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of health care professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.”
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A Nebraska state legislator is transitioning from blue to red after his own party censured him for having a pro-life stance. Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell officially left the Democratic Party last week after 40 years and became a Republican.
In a written statement explaining his decision, McDonnell wrote: “I have asked the Democratic Party to respect my religious based pro-life position. Instead over the last year they have decided to punish me for being pro-life.”
Last month, the Nebraska Democratic Party voted to censure McDonnell, a Catholic, over his pro-life record, contending that his stance “adversely affected the reproductive rights of Nebraskans and the rights of transgender individuals in the state.”
Douglas County Democrats also voted in January to deny party funding to McDonnell due to his votes against abortion measures and against gender-transition procedures for minors.
“The state Democratic Party voted to censure me because I am pro-life,” McDonnell wrote. “Being a Christian, a member of the Roman Catholic Church and pro-life is more important to me than being a registered Democrat. Today I am changing my party affiliation to Republican.”
In a speech addressing his decision, McDonnell explained that he registered as a Democrat in 1984 and ran for the state Legislature in 2016.
“I wanted to see how we could grow our state and reduce property taxes at the same time,” he said. “I asked the Democratic Party of Douglas County to respect that I’m pro-life, that I’m a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and my beliefs are based on that. But Douglas County Democrats, instead of respecting that, they decided to punish it. … I continued to vote pro-life.”
“This is not an easy decision,” the state senator added. “After 40 years of being a registered Democrat, having your grandfather tell you when you’re 10 years old, ‘What are we? We’re Irish, we’re Catholic, and we’re Democrats.’ That kind of stuck with me.”
Pointing to his new Republican Party colleagues, McDonnell said: “Over the last year, regardless of my decision [on] switching parties, they have been so supportive. … We had great discussions about what the Republican Party is doing, where they’re trying to go, how I potentially could fit in there. But the greatest thing about [it] is now I can participate again.”
U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., a former governor of the state, responded to McDonnell’s decision by writing on X: “I am pleased to welcome Sen. Mike McDowell to the Republican team.” He added: “The extreme new Democrats are pushing commonsense officials and voters to our party.”
McDonnell is far from the only Catholic abandoning the Democratic Party due to what many consider mandatory abortion extremism.
Recent studies show that white American Catholics have been drifting away from the party for decades, but in increasing numbers over the past two decades, coalescing instead around the GOP.
A survey of Michigan voters found last month that former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee credited with appointing three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who enabled the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, holds a significant lead among Catholic voters over President Joe Biden, a Democrat and self-described Catholic.
A week ago, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory, called Biden a “cafeteria Catholic” due to his rejection of the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion.
In response to McDonnell’s new party affiliation, Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Kleeb issued a written statement saying: “The Nebraska Democratic Party will continue to stand up for reproductive freedom and the human rights of the LGBTQ community.”
Kleeb added: “Our decision to censure Sen. McDonnell was never about him being a pro-life Catholic. Our decision was based on our party reaffirming our core values to protect women’s ability to make health decisions and to keep politicians out of our personal health decisions.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
The post Citing Pro-Life Views, Nebraska State Senator Switches Parties appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump used political jujitsu to grab a left-wing anti-Trump lie and turn it against his opponent, President Joe Biden.
Trump told Ohio voters on March 16 that if he lost his comeback bid in the November election, Biden would welcome imports of Chinese-designed, Mexican-built electric vehicles. This, Trump said, would trigger an economic “bloodbath” in the auto sector.
Biden and other leftists disinformed Americans by claiming that Trump threatened to unleash a political bloodbath if Biden won. Trump did no such thing.
Trump got even in Michigan last Tuesday when he unveiled a slogan that electrifies America’s No. 1 issue: Angst over the hordes of illegal aliens who Biden welcomes daily.
“It’s a border bloodbath, and it’s destroying our country,” Trump said. “It’s going to end on the day that I take office.”
“Biden’s Border Bloodbath” correctly describes the mayhem fueled by Biden’s deliberate demolition of America’s southern frontier.
Because illegal aliens often are shadowy, the problem is tough to gauge precisely. Nonetheless, Customs and Border Protection counted eight foreign-citizen criminals convicted of homicide or manslaughter from fiscal Year 2017 through fiscal 2019, under Trump. During Biden’s first three fiscal years, the CBP has tallied 151 such convictions—up 1,787.5%.
Consider these cases, thanks largely to documentation by the Federation for American Immigration Reform:
“He wasn’t awake for it,” his sister, Taylor, told Fox News anchor Steve Doocy. “He didn’t get to experience anything. So, did he really actually make it to 12?”
Travis was on life-support until March 6, when his catastrophic brain injuries finally killed him.
Travis Wolfe, a 12-year old Missouri boy killed by an illegal migrant. This is what an open border does. Say his name https://t.co/zjllQKRwTa
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 11, 2024
This lethal crisis began the day Biden took power. His 94 executive actions shredded Trump’s effective border-tightening initiatives.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, told Fox News on Wednesday: “Biden’s border policy is as effective as a screen door on a submarine.”
The Border Patrol has caught 7,444,297 illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexico boundary through February, Biden’s 37th month as president. Trump’s analogous number was 2,138,696. Biden trounces Trump by 348%. These apprehensions included 351 people on the terrorist watch list during Biden’s “return to normal,” versus just 11 under Trump—up 3,090%.
Add 1.6 million gotaways (including terrorists) who The Washington Post estimates were detected, but not detained, and at least 9 million illegal aliens have cascaded through the “border” under Biden.
Trump and his supporters should remind voters constantly about the victims whom illegal aliens are killing while Biden snores. These deaths remain 100% preventable, if Biden simply keeps these killers out.
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 RIP: The Death Toll of Biden’s Illegal Alien Bloodbath appeared first on The Daily Signal.
They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”
They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.
On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”
They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”
PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”
Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?
As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”
Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.
Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”
Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”
If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”
These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”
How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”
Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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The Biden administration is proposing a new rule that would further entrench unelected federal bureaucrats from accountability to President Joe Biden or his elected successors.
Key to the new rule from the Office of Personnel Management is the effective “grandfathering” of federal employees into their current category of employment, making it harder for a future president to issue an executive order like the one that then-President Donald Trump signed in October 2020 to rein in the bureaucracy.
A rule listed in the Federal Register, like this one was Thursday, could be more difficult to overturn than an executive order because it would have to be reversed under the provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act, one former senior OPM official said.
“If such a rule were allowed to stand, it would tie a future president’s hands—at least temporarily—in carrying out his responsibilities to make and implement his policies,” said Robert Moffit, who was at OPM during the Reagan administration and is now a senior research fellow for health and welfare policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The president cannot run the huge federal government from his office in the West Wing of the White House, Moffit told The Daily Signal.
Some career federal employees who have civil service protection are neither impartial nor nonpartisan, he added.
“To effect his policy, therefore, the president must not only have the ability to hire political personnel who will carry out his electoral mandate, but also remove career personnel who attempt to obstruct that mandate,” Moffit said. “So, any attack on any president’s capacity to carry out the policies upon which he was elected is fundamentally ant-democratic; it is an attack on the American people who elected him.”
Among other things, the OPM’s proposed rule would clarify that “the status and civil service protections an employee has accrued cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service, or from one excepted service schedule to another.”
“Once a career civil servant earns protections, that employee retains them unless waived voluntarily,” the rule says.
In October 2020, just before the election he lost to Biden, Trump signed an executive order to create a new category of federal employee called Schedule F. Personnel in this category are in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions that remain on the payroll when a presidential transition occurs.
The executive order from Trump, who faced resistance to his policy changes from within the federal bureaucracy, gave agencies more flexibility and oversight for career employees in critical positions that affect policy.
Upon taking office in January 2021, Biden scrapped the Trump order. The final version of the new rule would make it more difficult for a future president to reverse, because it is a regulation published in the Federal Register rather than an executive order. Undoing it would require going through a time-consuming administrative procedure.
Career federal employees enjoy civil service protection, making it nearly impossible to fire them; by contrast, political employees serve at the pleasure of an elected president.
Career federal bureaucrats tend to be overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning based on their campaign donations; federal employee unions donate between 70% and 90% to Democrat candidates. Republicans have accused some career employees of blocking implementation of Republican presidents’ policies.
Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation that establishes a plan for the next conservative presidential administration, calls for restoring Trump’s Schedule F as part of a broader effort to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
This has been a long-standing policy goal for Heritage, Moffit noted.
“Respecting the president’s prerogatives to have the appointees necessary to carry out policies is one of the major reasons why former Heritage President Ed Feulner strongly opposed Republican attempts to hamstring Democratic President Clinton and reduce the number of his political appointees,” Moffit said.
“Political appointees can formulate the details of the president’s policies and see to it that they are implemented all the way down the chain through departments, agencies, subagencies, and bureaus of the federal government.”
Biden’s Office of Personnel Management issued the final rule Thursday, asserting it received 4,000 comments about it, and said the rule would be published Tuesday in the Federal Register.
“This final rule honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a public statement. “The Biden-Harris administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more.”
According to the OPM press release, the new rule also would clarify that the phrase “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating” refers to positions that are noncareer, political appointments.
The rule also would establish procedural requirements for moving positions from “career” to “political,” and set up an appeals process for employees.
“Career officials are obviously crucial in the implementation of presidential policy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “Those of us who served in presidential administrations all have war stories, however, about how politically hostile civil servants, through various means, including intentional slow-walking or foot-dragging, can delay, thwart, or undermine the president’s policies.”
“A career civil servant who does not or will not carry out the policy of any president, regardless of party affiliation, should have the honor and the decency to resign,” he said. “They should not enjoy regulatory protection.”
The post Biden Protects Deep State Bureaucrats With ‘Anti-Democratic’ Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A prominent Catholic organization is calling on the Department of Justice to defend Catholic churches from anticipated pro-abortion attacks, pointing to the disparities in the DOJ’s enforcement of a law protecting both abortion clinics and churches.
In a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal, CatholicVote President Brian Burch calls on Attorney General Merrick Garland to detail what steps the DOJ plans to take to “combat the incessant attacks against Catholic churches.”
“How much more violence needs to happen before you will act?” he asks Garland. “Why is the FACE Act being enforced against Holocaust survivors, but not [against] those who attempt to destroy churches or even kill Catholics?”
The letter references President Joe Biden’s administration’s focus on prosecuting pro-life activists through the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. As recently as April 3, the DOJ announced that a federal judge found four pro-life activists guilty of violating the FACE Act—including an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Eva Edl.
“We have had enough of the Biden administration prosecuting pro-lifers while ignoring attacks against Catholic churches across the country,” Burch told The Daily Signal on Tuesday.
“Attorney General Garland’s silence on these hate crimes is deafening,” he added. “Many more attacks are expected this year if he continues to turn a blind eye. It is well past time for the Biden administration to act.”
CatholicVote points out to the DOJ that a man in Verona, New Jersey, set a Catholic Church on fire on April 4. This was the third time since 2018 that this individual, named Elliot Bennett, 42, had “engaged in violence and vandalism against the church,” Burch said. Bennett had been charged with criminal mischief and a hate crime related to prior incidents.
“The Verona incident was the 21st attack on a Catholic church in 2024, the 247th attack since Catholic churches across the country were put under organized siege by pro-abortion domestic terrorists after the Supreme Court leak [of a pending ruling overturning Roe v. Wade] in May 2022, and the 412th attack since general civil unrest swept the nation in May 2020,” Burch wrote. “We have found evidence of arrests in only about 25% of these cases, and zero federal prosecutions.”
The FACE Act protects churches in the same way that it protects abortion clinics, Burch emphasized.
“And yet under your leadership, the Biden administration has refused to prosecute a single act of violence against a Catholic church despite many other cases of arson and firebombing; pro-abortion protesters blocking church entrances and disrupting Masses; and even physical assaults on priests and parishioners, among many other types of violence,” the CatholicVote leader said.
“These attacks have caused at least $25 million in quantifiable damage to churches and instilled fear into hundreds of Catholic communities,” he added.
Though the DOJ promised CatholicVote in December 2021 that it would conduct a 15-day review to ensure that appropriate resources are being deployed to protect houses of worship, this review apparently has not occurred. And according to Burch, the violence has not only continued, but “increased, unabated.”
“This problem is taking on new urgency this year,” he wrote. “Up to a dozen states will be voting on abortion-related ballot initiatives. We have seen surges of attacks against Catholic churches during voting on abortion ballot initiatives in Kansas, Michigan, and Ohio, which had signs expressing their opposition to abortion.”
CatholicVote argues that Catholic churches and individuals have an absolute right to practice their faith, and that these attacks against churches that stand for the right to life are “textbook examples of voter intimidation and voter suppression.”
He added: “You have sued multiple states which you allege are engaging in voter suppression, comparing their laws to those of the Jim Crow era, yet you have not devoted a single minute of federal time to addressing the intimidation and suppression of Catholic voters, which bears striking similarities to the prejudice and violence against African Americans during the Jim Crow era.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
Since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon thereafter be overturned, there have been at least 236 attacks on Catholic churches and at least 90 attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers, according to CatholicVote trackers.
Yet the Biden DOJ charged only pro-life activists with FACE Act violations in 2022, and has since charged only five individuals with violating the FACE Act for targeting pregnancy centers.
In February, conservative leaders called on House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., to pass the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2023 “as soon as possible.”
“In the aftermath of additional pro-life activists being convicted by the Biden administration under the FACE Act for peacefully protesting outside an abortion business, we respectfully urge you to take immediate legislative action to protect peaceful pro-life activists from the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Justice and an unconstitutional law,” the leaders said in a letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“The Biden administration has weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and activists who want to save lives and change hearts and minds,” Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller told The Daily Signal at the time.
The failure to prosecute attacks on Catholic churches under the FACE Act has drawn particular attention in light of the fact that Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president and is often described by the media as a “devout Catholic”—though the president heads the most pro-abortion administration in U.S. history; promotes transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers, even for children; and celebrates transgender ideology.
The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a crime against human life, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and “close the sexual act to the gift of life.”
In an Easter weekend interview, the left-leaning archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory, described the president as a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” which parts of Catholicism to adhere to.
“I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore,” Gregory said.
“The issues of life begin at the very beginning. And they conclude at natural death,” the cardinal said. “And you can’t pick and choose. You’re either one who respects life in all of its dimensions, or you have to step aside and say, ‘I’m not pro-life.’”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Must Defend Catholic Churches From More Expected Pro-Abortion Attacks, Leader Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A number of Arizona Republicans are rapidly distancing from the state’s controversial Supreme Court ruling protecting almost all unborn babies from abortions.
The state Supreme Court upheld a 1864 law on Tuesday that bans almost all abortions in Arizona, except when the mother’s life is at risk. In a 4-to-2 decision, the court said that the law is “now enforceable,” though it will likely not go until effect for a number of weeks.
Though Arizona has a law protecting unborn babies after 15 weeks, Arizona’s Democrat governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order in 2023 giving the state’s Democrat attorney general the power to enforce abortion laws. That attorney general, Kris Mayes, promised not to enforce any protections for the unborn and to “fight like hell” to protect abortions in the state.
News of the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision was celebrated by pro-life groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, but it prompted outcry from some Arizona Republicans who had formerly expressed desires to protect as many unborn lives as they could.
Senate candidate Kari Lake, who had previously drawn praise from pro-life groups for her staunch defense of life and exposure of Democratic abortion extremism, announced on Tuesday that she not only believes the old law is “out of step with Arizonians,” but she also wants Hobbs and the state legislature “to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.”
“Ultimately,” she said in a statement wherein she promised to oppose a federal ban on abortion, “Arizona voters will make the decision on the ballot come November.”
Lake, during remarks delivered at the American Leadership Forum in 2022, had previously referred to a “great law” that Arizona had “on the books” as she discussed her hope that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned.
“If that happens, we will be a state where we will not be taking the lives of our unborn anymore,” she said at the time.
Her campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
.@KariLake in 2022: “Obviously I think Roe should be overturned…we have a great law on the books right now. If that happens, we will be a state where we will not be taking the lives of our unborn anymore.” pic.twitter.com/KtoaGBdiOT
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 9, 2024
The state’s former Republican governor, Doug Ducey, issued a similar statement calling on the state lawmakers to “heed the will” of the people.
“I signed the 15-week law as governor because it is thoughtful conservative policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on,” he said. “The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.”
Republican Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the state, has publicly expressed gratitude to his mother for choosing last minute not to abort him. He similarly voiced his disapproval of the ruling on Tuesday.
“I do not support today’s ruling from the AZ Supreme Court,” he said Tuesday in an “X” post. “This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench. I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.”
The congressman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I do not support today’s ruling from the AZ Supreme Court. This issue should be decided by Arizonans, not legislated from the bench. I encourage the state legislature to address this issue immediately.
— Rep. David Schweikert (@RepDavid) April 9, 2024
Republican Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who has described himself as strongly pro-life and supportive of exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, called the ruling a “disaster for women and providers,” insisting that the state’s 15-week-protections for the unborn “protected the rights of women and new life.”
“It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy—one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand,” he continued. “As my record shows, I’m a strong supporter of empowering women to make their own healthcare choices and I oppose a national abortion ban.”
Ciscomani similarly did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement celebrating the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Ciscomani had said that he “will always defend life as a member of Congress.”
“As a husband and a father, I believe that life is precious, and as a country, we must protect women and children in every way possible,” he said at the time.
My statement on the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling today. pic.twitter.com/A1Do8AjYlb
— Congressman Juan Ciscomani (@RepCiscomani) April 9, 2024
The slew of statements follow former President Donald Trump’s Monday announcement that each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
Trump’s position on abortion was unclear heading into the election, though the former president appointed three Supreme Court justices who ultimately made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by a majority vote — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
“I want to thank the six justices: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch,” Trump said. He called them “incredible people, for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.”
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
Further clarifying his view on abortion, he said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline,” he added.
Trump also criticized Democrats’ extreme abortion positions in his remarks, saying: “Democrats are the radical ones in this position, because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth—and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born, the baby is executed after birth—is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Arizona Republicans Back Away From the Unborn Following State Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The foreign policy establishment that once thrived under the control of both political parties has used Big Tech and the Biden administration to codify a “war on wrongthink” that stifles dissent from the elites’ narrative, a journalist and an online censorship analyst warned.
“What we’re up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT-BLM-maximizing identitarian politics when we’re talking about censorship on the internet,” Michael Benz, a former State Department official under President Donald Trump and founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation.
It’s not “partisan politics” driving censorship, said Benz, but “the foreign policy establishment.” Conservatives and populists “don’t think about the American empire, they don’t think about the managers of the American empire, which is the foreign policy establishment, our State Department, our Pentagon, our intelligence services.”
“When you go upstream on internet censorship and what’s driving it, you will find that foreign policy establishment,” Benz argued.
Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, also attributed “the leading edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of dissenting Americans” to the administrative state and the “deep state” within it. (The “deep state” refers to bureaucrats who oppose the agenda of the duly-elected president.) These entrenched bureaucrats “felt most threatened that [Trump] would upend the uniparty foreign policy blob,” he said.
“You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again,” Weingarten said, referring to both the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory.
“They kind of used the pretext of Russian mis-, dis-, and malinformation, grafting a Cold War paradigm” to define a new enemy—Americans who disagree with their agenda, he said. “We are the enemy that’s engaging in wrongthink that threatens to undermine their power.”
After 2016, “Big Tech platforms became perceived as—rather than vehicles for free and open discourse—now they needed to be weaponized as assets of this security state, essentially.”
These bureaucrats used the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as a pretext to launch “a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” Weingarten claimed, referring to the Biden White House strategy released in June 2021.
He warned that the strategy “codifies a war on wrongthink in this country,” based on the idea that “you can’t have an information environment that enables what we saw on Jan. 6.” He described as “terrifying” the idea that the federal government would take upon itself the task of “confronting the longterm contributors to domestic terror” in the context of the misinformation panics of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benz, the former State Department official, highlighted what he called the “foreign-to-domestic switcheroo,” noting that federal powers created to oppose terrorism in the War on Terror became tools to silence dissent at home.
The narrative that Donald Trump represented a threat to the U.S. from Russia enabled the foreign policy establishment to target conservatives, he said. Yet special counsel Robert Mueller’s report found no smoking gun evidence of Trump as a Russian agent, so the establishment had to move on to something else.
“Instead of shutting down the censorship apparatus when Russiagate died, they changed the predicate,” Benz noted. Suddenly, the foreign policy blob started warning about “a threat to democracy.”
“Democracy is the watchword of the foreign policy establishment to overthrow governments,” Benz said.
He noted that the National Science Foundation has given over $60 million in the past year to “specially-constructed censorship labs” to study “misinformation as a threat to democracy.” This bolsters “the ability to overthrow a government that is not doing the bidding of the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” he warned.
Benz described a symposium with “some of the most important thought leaders in the industry” convened after Space X founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now known as X.
Benz said the “censorship industrial complex” suffered a serious setback when Musk purchased Twitter and with the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case revealing the extent to which the federal government pressured social media companies to censor dissent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet he said the censors still have “two tricks” up their sleeves.
He explained that the European Union Digital Services Act—which he dubbed “the NATO censorship law”—intends to “stop the rise of populist parties,” going beyond “the simple hate speech laws” in Europe to establish a new rule on disinformation.
“You cannot be a multinational tech platform without access to the EU market,” Benz warned. This disinformation rule will come from “the same people who constructed the election censorship apparatus in 2020,” which urged Big Tech to censor concerns about voting by mail, for example.
He also warned about state governments launching “state-mandated programs on media literacy” in public schools, teaching students that “if you read the wrong media sources, you are illiterate.”
The “censorship industrial complex” is becoming an industry employing millions of people,” Benz warned.
Benz said Americans need to pressure Congress to cut funding to the “censorship industrial complex.”
Weingarten, the RealClearInvestigations editor, agreed, saying that “cutting off the federal funding … is imperative.”
“I would advocate for criminal penalties” for those who use social media and “misinformation” programs to censor Americans, he added. “There’s a censorship-to-criminalization pipeline and all we have is oversight? There needs to be something more than oversight.”
The post TERRIFYING: The True Force Behind the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Two months ago, the House voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Next week, the Senate will receive the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is expected to dismiss the charges just as quickly as he receives them.
“Schumer is going to table it,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., predicts of the impeachment articles.
The articles were originally expected to be delivered to the Senate on Wednesday, but some Senate Republicans asked House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to delay the delivery until next week. Fox News reported that the benefit of delaying the delivery of the articles is to allows more time for debate without the time restraint of the coming weekend.
Schumer has not indicated he plans to change his position on the articles of impeachment if they arrive next week instead of Wednesday.
If Schumer does dismisses the charges against Mayorkas, it will be a historic first, according to Marshall.
“This has never happened before,” the Kansas lawmaker said, adding that there have “been 21 impeachment trials over on the House side. Four of those, the person died [or] they resigned, but 17 of them still had the person in office when those impeachment articles were delivered, and every one of those was followed through with the trial. Again, this is so toxic that Chuck Schumer is going to table it. That’s certainly what it looks like, but we’re going to go down screaming and fighting,” Marshall says.
The Republican-controlled House voted 214 to 213 on a party-line vote to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13 after a failed attempt a week prior.
The House’s first article alleges that the homeland security secretary has failed to secure America’s border and enforce immigration laws, instead executing policies that incentivize illegal immigration.
The House’s second article of impeachment contends that Mayorkas is in breach of the public trust and knowingly has made false statements to Congress and the American people.
Marshall joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the Senate’s expected course of action on the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, and to explain what course of action remains for conservative lawmakers seeking to secure America’s borders.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Senator Vows to Go Down ‘Screaming and Fighting’ in Mayorkas Impeachment Battle appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: The head of the Arizona Freedom Caucus condemned the “calculated political decision-making” exhibited by Arizona Republicans who sought to distance themselves from the state’s most massive pro-life victory yet.
Some high-profile Arizona Republicans had decried news on Tuesday that the state’s Supreme Court had upheld an 1864 law protecting almost all unborn babies in the state, except when the mother’s life is at risk.
Senate candidate Kari Lake, former Gov. Doug Ducey, Rep. David Schweikert, and Rep. Juan Ciscomani, were among the Republicans who condemned the news and suggested that pro-abortion legislation was needed to rectify the situation.
But the Arizona Freedom Caucus, led by Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman, came out swinging on Tuesday evening, declaring in a statement that the court “upheld the intent of the legislature, and preserved the rule of law” by “ruling that the pre-Roe law will remain effective.”
“We will not compromise on the core value of cherishing and protecting life,” the statement said. Numerous members of the state’s Freedom Caucus promoted the post on “X” and voiced their support.
? STATEMENT ON ARIZONA SUPREME COURT’S PRO-LIFE RULING ?
— Arizona Freedom Caucus (@AZFreedomCaucus) April 9, 2024
Today, the Supreme Court of Arizona made the correct ruling, upheld the intent of the legislature, and preserved the rule of law today by ruling that the pre-Roe law will remain effective.
Protecting the lives of… pic.twitter.com/SPbr7Bamhe
“This is why I am proud to be a member of the AFC,” said state Rep. Rachel Jones, and state Rep. Austin Smith chimed in, “We will continue to lead the way and be unabashedly in favor of supporting both the mother and the unborn child.”
In a phone interview with The Daily Signal on Wednesday, Hoffman emphasized that life is not an issue Republicans should be willing to compromise on.
“We should be resolute in our convictions and in our principles and in our party platform, to be willing to make the case that we cherish life, and that we are going to do everything we can to protect it,” said the Arizona Freedom Caucus chair.
This respect for life should include caring for mothers and families as well, he said.
“What the Arizona Freedom Caucus saw, is this calculated political decision-making yesterday, with people diving for the bushes and effectively abandoning everything that they claim to believe in for the last decade, two decades, three decades in some cases,” he said.
“We just don’t believe that’s how we should operate in this environment that is truly a battle between good and evil. So our statement was simply based on our convictions, and it certainly did send a warning flare up into the sky for those who were hiding in the bushes that no, we need to stand and unabashedly for protecting life and for our principles,” Hoffman added.
Though Arizona has a law protecting unborn babies after 15 weeks, Arizona’s pro-abortion, Democrat governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order in 2023 giving the state’s Democrat attorney general the power to enforce abortion laws. That attorney general, Kris Mayes, promised not to enforce any protections for the unborn and to “fight like hell” to protect abortions in the state.
Hoffman described Arizona Democrats as supportive of “ripping children apart, limb by limb, in the womb” and working actively to “normalize abortion” and create a “culture of abortion on demand until the moment of birth.”
“This is deeply embedded in Democrat culture,” he said, speculating that some of the reactions from Arizona Republicans on Tuesday may have been a reaction to the energy of the massive abortion messaging machine that is Democratic leadership.
On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump weighed in on the Arizona ruling, asked by reporters if the ruling went too far.
“Yeah they did, and that will be straightened out,” he said.
“As you know, it’s all about states’ rights,” he added. He also said he thinks Hobbs will “bring it back into reason.”
The former president also made an announcement on Monday that he believes each state should follow “the will of the people” and pass state-specific laws on abortion. He also said he supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted Monday morning on Truth Social.
“This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people at each state,” Trump added. “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
The former president encouraged Americans to “follow” their “hearts on this issue” but to remember that “you must also win elections to restore our culture and in fact to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline.”
Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
The post Arizona Freedom Caucus Leader Slams Republicans ‘Calculated Political Decision-Making’ Following Abortion Ruling appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.”
That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the “American Masters” series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS.
Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen.
This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley, nor a fair and balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’ liberal arrogance.
In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right.
Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994.
Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism.
Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues, “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.”
This would match the spirit of PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.”
Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice.
Have they watched five minutes of “The Reidout” or “The View”? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility.
But on PBS, they must locate experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right … by the end, it was clear the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here.
PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics.
Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.”
Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.
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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 Firing Lies: PBS ‘Documentary’ Tars, Feathers Onetime Host William F. Buckley appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, left Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas stumbling during a Wednesday hearing by rhetorically asking him what powers Congress had stripped him of to enforce the border.
Mayorkas testified during a hearing of the House Appropriations’ homeland security subcommittee titled “Budget Hearing: Fiscal Year 2025 Request for the Department of Homeland Security.” Cloud questioned Mayorkas about whether he lacked the power and authorization to secure the U.S.-Mexico border due to congressional action since he took office.
“Could you speak to any authorities that Congress has removed from you or the president since taking office?” Cloud asked Mayorkas, in reference to claims by President Joe Biden that he is unsure whether he has the power to take certain steps to prevent illegal immigration. Biden said he was “examining” what powers he had to close the border during a Univision interview that aired Tuesday.
“Has Congress removed any authorities from you or the president since taking office?” Cloud asked as Mayorkas stammered in response.
“That is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question,” Cloud added. “Why are you filibustering? I asked you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.”
Biden reversed numerous policies initiated by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, during his first days in office. Mayorkas has claimed that the border is secure on several occasions, despite U.S. Customs and Border Protection reporting more than 6.6 million encounters with illegal immigrants since the start of fiscal year 2021.
“You have approximately a 20% larger budget than Trump had,” Cloud said. “The president has made the point that he can’t secure the border, he can’t get down to it, because he is waiting on Congress to move, and I just point that out to belay that and to point out the truth, the fact that he has every single authority as President Trump, he has more resources at his disposal than President Trump, yet he’s done everything he can to undermine the security of our border.”
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post ‘Why Are You Filibustering?’: Mayorkas Stumbles Over Answer When Asked What Powers He Lacks to Enforce Border appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Amid increasing suspicion of China’s aggression, the leaders of the United States and Japan are touting an “enhanced” security agreement.
“Our alliance we have with Japan is purely defensive in nature,” President Joe Biden said during a Rose Garden press conference Wednesday with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region,” Biden added. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
Under the new agreement, the U.S. and Japan will upgrade a joint base in Tokyo with 54,000 U.S. troops, set up a joint military council to produce more missiles and other weapons, and increase joint research on artificial intelligence. The two countries also will join a security partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia as a deterrence to China.
Biden met with Kishida at the White House, where a state dinner was set for Wednesday night. On Thursday, the two are scheduled to meet with Philippines President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at a time when Chinese and Philippine vessels have had run-ins in the South China Sea.
The United States already has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. Chinese ships also have been repeatedly intimidating Taiwanese ships in the area.
For Japan’s part, Kishida stressed the need for “rule of law” with regard to China’s hostilities at sea.
“Regarding the challenges concerning China,” Kishida said during the White House press conference, “Japan and the U.S. as global partners should work in close coordination. The president and I are committed to continuing our dialogue with China, but we continue to call on China to fulfill its responsibilities as a world power.”
Biden said he recently spoke to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“I spoke at length to President Xi and we agreed to No. 1, have personal contact with one another … so we know exactly what the other is thinking,” Biden said. “We had a discussion about two weeks ago now. It’s the best way to reduce the chance of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
The president stressed that the U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t aimed at China.
“The things we discussed today improve our cooperation and are purely about defense and readiness,” Biden said. “It’s not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region. And it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict. This is about restoring stability in the region.”
The post Biden Says Enhanced Military Alliance With Japan ‘Not Aimed’ at China appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Recently appointed 4th Circuit Judge Nicole Berner is legally married to the pro-abortion lawyer who represented Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her.
The Washington Post describes Berner as “the first openly gay judge and the first labor lawyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit,” which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Berner, who is also pro-abortion, formerly served as a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood, where she focused on “protecting and expanding access” to chemical abortion drugs.
Debra Katz represented Ford in her high-profile #MeToo accusations against Kavanaugh. In subsequent remarks, Katz said that her client was partially motivated to accuse Kavanaugh out of a desire to protect Roe v. Wade, the monumental Supreme Court case that was overturned in June 2022.
Ford recently reappeared in the national news cycle through the announcement of her upcoming book, “One Way Back,” a memoir about her experience accusing Kavanaugh.
Katz issued a joint statement at the time with fellow attorney Lisa Banks, saying, “Five years ago, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s courageous testimony changed the world. She told the truth to the United States Senate, she stood up to enormous public pressure, and she sparked a national reckoning on sexual assault. Her bravery empowered countless survivors to speak out and seek justice.”
“We are proud to have fiercely represented her during the Senate proceedings,” they added. “The impact of Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony changed American culture. We stand beside Dr. Blasey Ford and all our brave clients who have come forward to hold powerful individuals accountable.”
The book was published on March 19, the same day that Berner was confirmed to the court. Representatives did not immediately share with The Daily Signal whether this was a coincidence.
During Berner’s nomination hearing in December, Republicans grilled her about her past statements and related political topics, including the Kavanaugh confirmation, according to The Washington Post.
“I believe Justice Kavanaugh, just like every other justice of the Supreme Court, was legitimately confirmed, and were I to be confirmed, I would follow his opinions and the opinions of every justice,” she told the Republicans present at the hearing.
“The role of a judge is a very different role than that of an advocate,” she added.
Pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood Action Fund celebrated her confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in late March in statements that suggest confidence that she will consistently side with abortion advocates.
Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that Berner “knows firsthand the evolving state of our nation’s reproductive and other fundamental rights,” and Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju emphasized that Berner “understands that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right.”
CONFIRMED: Nicole Berner to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
— Senate Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryDems) March 19, 2024
Ms. Berner is a highly experienced litigator, as well as a steadfast advocate for workers’ rights, reproductive rights, and civil rights for all.
She’s also now the first LGBTQ+ judge to serve on this court. pic.twitter.com/2b980Mzdd3
Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh sparked a media circus, stories filled with debunked anonymous sources, a Senate investigation, a highly televised Senate hearing, and more. The Senate Judiciary Committee ultimately found “no evidence” to corroborate the claims against the Supreme Court justice, who was confirmed to the court on Oct. 5, 2018.
“After an extensive investigation that included the thorough review of all potentially credible evidence submitted and interviews of more than 40 individuals with information relating to the allegations, including classmates and friends of all those involved, Committee investigators found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against Justice Kavanaugh,” the 414-page report says.
Katz has been described as “the feared attorney of the #MeToo movement.” She is a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin LLP, where she focuses on sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation.
In video footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2019, Katz revealed that putting “an asterisk next to” Kavanaugh’s name before “he takes a scalpel” to Roe v. Wade was “part of what motivated” Ford to speak out.
“In the aftermath of these hearings, I believe that Christine’s testimony brought about more good than the harm misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanaugh on the court,” Katz explained in April 2019 at the University of Baltimore’s 11th Feminist Legal Theory Conference.
Why would a competent lawyer say this? I'm stunned. https://t.co/7oJcyOISEm
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) September 4, 2019
“He will always have an asterisk next to his name,” Katz continued. “When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”
The video was first reported by Ryan Lovelace in his book “Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh.” The author told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time that it calls into question everything that Ford and Katz have previously said on the matter.
Lovelace additionally suggested that had this information been known during the Kavanaugh hearings, there might have been different questions and different results. Ford had told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she came forward out of a sense of “civic duty.”
“Ford’s audience was not the Senate, as Katz had previously suggested, but the American people,” Lovelace wrote. “If they could be persuaded that Justice Kavanaugh was a predator, then they might not accept a future ruling by the five Republican-appointed justices altering the right to obtain an abortion established by Roe v. Wade.”
“Had the Senate understood Ford’s real motivation, as described by Katz, it might have appreciated more fully the pressure that ‘organized forces’ were applying,” he added.
Katz’s remarks at the Baltimore conference rang partially true: The notoriety of the Kavanaugh hearings caused Kavanaugh to become a target for protesting. In the days following the leak of the draft opinion indicating that Roe would soon be overturned, protesters repeatedly showed up outside Kavanaugh’s home where they yelled, sang, and chanted, often accusing him of being a rapist.
Shortly before Roe was overturned, authorities arrested a man near the Kavanaugh family home who said that he had traveled from California to kill the justice out of a desire to protect abortions in the United States. That man’s name is Nicholas Roske. Almost two years later, there is still no trail date or plea agreement in his case, as The Washington Free Beacon reported.
The post Newly Appointed 4th Circuit Judge Married to Pro-Abortion Christine Ford Lawyer appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Back on May 30, 2023, after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut a deal with President Joe Biden to suspend any limit on the federal debt through all of 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised the deal as an act of “responsible” government.
“Again, nobody got everything they wanted,” said Schumer, “but this bill is the responsible and prudent and necessary way forward.”
At the close of business on the day Schumer made this statement, the federal debt was $31,463,988,658,765.75.
At the close of business on April 8 of this year, the debt was $34,608,412,560,642.47.
In just over 10 months since Biden and McCarthy made their deal, the debt has increased by more than $3 trillion ($3,144,423,901,876.72).
To put this in perspective, the total federal debt did not top $3 trillion for the first time until fiscal year 1990—214 years after the nation was founded in 1776.
Schumer and his colleagues in the current Congress borrowed more money in less than one year than their pre-1990 predecessors did in more than two centuries.
What is the fiscally “responsible” Schumer talking about now? He is bragging about how he is spending federal money on pet projects in New York state.
In the seven days from April 2 through April 8, Schumer’s Senate office posted eight press releases announcing projects that would funnel $79,174,581 in federal funding to New York.
His communications staff was especially busy on April 2.
The first press release they put out that day said that Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., had “secured $3,822,000 for critical local projects.”
“This nearly $4 million in federal funding makes vital investments in the Capital Region’s top-notch educational institutions, helping give students the equipment and hands-on training they need,” Schumer said.
The second press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $3,000,000 for the Syracuse University and CenterState CEO in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to upgrade facilities at the Syracuse University’s South Side Innovation Center and prepare local small business to succeed in the semiconductor industry through CenterState CEO.”
The third press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “personally secured $1,000,000 for Binghamton University to purchase state-of-the-art advanced packaging equipment for its Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB) in Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills as a Congressionally Directed Spending request to bolster workforce training for advanced chip manufacturing in cleanroom environments.”
A fourth press release they put out that day said Schumer and Gillibrand “secured $1,200,000 in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations package for DAY ONE Early Learning Community, a preschool in Poughkeepsie that serves low-income children and families.”
A fifth press release published that same day said Schumer and Gillibrand “announced $5,633,581 through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Great Lakes Environmental Justice Grant Program to develop and implement the Western New York Environmental Justice Grant Program for underserved communities in Lake Erie and Niagara River’s watershed.”
Two days later, on April 4, Schumer “announced $1,559,000 from Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills to support vital semiconductor and healthcare workforce training programs and higher education infrastructure upgrades in Rochester.”
Four days after that, on April 8, Schumer declared that he was “proud to deliver a whopping $39 million to help rehabilitate the South Grand Island Bridges and bolster resilient infrastructure needed to maintain these vital corridors for Western NY.”
That same day, he also announced that a “whopping nearly $24 million from our Bipartisan Infrastructure & Jobs Law to bolster flooding mitigation on Cortlandt’s Route 6 will drive our communities towards a safer and more resilient future.”
Who is going to pay for these projects in Schumer’s home state?
Federal taxpayers in New York, of course, will carry some of the burden—but so, too, will taxpaying workers in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Alaska, and every other state in the union.
Because the federal government is continuing to run a massive deficit—it was $828.135 billion through the first five months of this fiscal year—not only will current taxpayers fund such projects but so, too, will future generations who will be required to pay the interest on the money the federal government borrows to fund them.
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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 Chuck Schumer’s $79 Million Week appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Caught on camera making disparaging remarks about the Chicago Fire Department, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., now says he “did not mean to offend” the brave men and women who serve the city.
In a statement posted to X on Tuesday night, Jackson said he was simply trying to “shed light on the need for diversity, training, and equipment upgrades within the Chicago Fire Department.”
A video of Jackson, uncovered Monday by the X account Chicago Contrarian, originally was posted on Instagram by the Black Fire Brigade, a nonprofit group based in Chicago.
This is Rachel Maddow-level bonkers conspiracy mongering.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 8, 2024
U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson is propagating a malevolent conspiracy theory which alleges white CFD respond differently to South and West Side fires as a method of exacting revenge for having "to leave" the neighborhoods in… pic.twitter.com/GuFZRabSu4
In the video, Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a liberal political activist for decades, accuses white firefighters of providing an inferior response to fires in certain parts of the city because of their racial makeup. He says these firefighters are “angry” after being displaced from their former neighborhoods.
“When there is a fire, they go there and watch the building burn,” Jackson tells the audience as it responds disapprovingly. He then cites the city’s predominantly white North Side.
“Go to the North Side. If you see 16 units, 25 units in a building, they go and put out the fire in the single unit. We have a fire in a single unit and the whole building gets evacuated,” Jackson continues. “Because we didn’t have people that lived in the community, that cared about the community, that wanted to put the fire out. They had so much contempt, they let the building burn.”
In the video, Jackson concludes his remarks with a plea: “We need more black first responders, we need more black firefighters.”
Shortly after the video was posted on X, Chicago Fire Fighters Union Local 2 issued a lengthy response condemning Jackson’s language and revoking its political endorsement of the Democrat congressman.
CFD Local 2 has responded to the comments delivered by Rep. Jonathan Jackson.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 8, 2024
Contrarian applauds Local 2 for its swift condemnation of Mr. Jackson's sickening and ignorant remarks. pic.twitter.com/wn8lkMnvYT
“These comments propagated on social media are not only patently false and maliciously divisive—they are dangerous to our membership,” the union’s executive board wrote in a statement issued Monday. “Local 2 firmly demands Congressman Jackson publicly renounce his comments and issue our membership an apology.”
The union also called on Fire Commissioner Annette Nance-Holt to denounce “this hateful rhetoric and unwarranted attack.”
More than 24 hours after the union’s response to the video, Jackson issued his own three-paragraph statement on X but stopped short of an apology.
In his Tuesday post, Jackson wrote: “My pledge is to help, not harm. I promise to raise awareness of the needs and challenges Chicago firefighters face every day. I will continue to make clear and emphasize why diversity within the ranks of the fire department is so important and why providing better training and tools is crucial.”
I have great respect and admiration for our First Responders – our Chicago Firefighters. I want to acknowledge your sacrifice and thank you for the years of friendship and service. I sincerely did not mean to offend. My intent was to shed light on the need for diversity,…
— Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson (@rep_jackson) April 9, 2024
Jackson also recounted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Lewis v. Chicago, a 2010 case involving the Chicago Fire Department’s hiring practices. The congressman contended that, even today, “black firefighters continue to call attention to alleged ongoing workplace discrimination regarding hiring and advancement.”
Jackson isn’t the only Chicago politician to make race-based accusations against the city’s fire department.
Two other videos, posted Tuesday on X by Chicago Contrarian, show city Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor making comments of her own while flanked by Alderwoman Pat Dowell and Aldermen Lamont Robinson and David Moore.
Flanked by Alds. Dowell, Robinson, and Moore, here is Ald. Jeanette Taylor openly stoking racial antagonism.
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) April 10, 2024
In the first video, Taylor accuses CFD of distributing new equipment only to white CFD personnel and claims black CFD personnel receive second-hand equipment.
In the… pic.twitter.com/yKAn7MItQY
In the first video, Taylor asks the audience: “Did you know that firefighters’ equipment only lasts five years, but they give the black firefighters the 3-year-old equipment? They never get the new equipment.”
The department provides new equipment to firefighters upon starting and replaces equipment on a regular schedule, contrary to Taylor’s assertion. It does not hand down equipment.
She also asserts that white firefighters have special access to the Chicago Fire Department’s promotional exam while black counterparts are left to fend for themselves.
“They’ve got a secret club, they hand out the test to them, but we ain’t invited,” Taylor said. “We actually have to do the work.”
A spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department, asked about the allegations of Jackson and Taylor, rejected them in a statement to The Daily Signal.
“The Chicago Fire Department is aware of recent claims regarding our department,” spokesman Larry Langford said. “We want to assure the public that these allegations are inaccurate and do not reflect the values or actions of our dedicated members. The Chicago Fire Department remains committed to serving and protecting our communities with integrity and professionalism.”
The Daily Signal contacted both Jackson and Taylor for comment but has not heard back.
The post Chicago Firefighters Union Revokes Endorsement After Rep. Jackson’s Allegations appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia who has criticized conservatives and is campaigning actively against the House Freedom Caucus chairman, is Speaker Mike Johnson’s choice for a newly vacant seat on the powerful Rules Committee.
Scott’s selection Wednesday infuriated conservatives on Capitol Hill. The Daily Signal spoke with several lawmakers and staffers whose reactions ranged from shock to disappointment that Johnson, R-La., would pick someone who is openly trying to unseat one of the House’s most prominent conservatives.
“This the wrong person for the wrong role at the wrong time,” a Republican member of Congress told The Daily Signal.
By picking Scott for the Rules Committee, one of the oldest and most powerful in the House of Representatives, Johnson revealed whom he trusts to determine floor activity and advance the speaker’s agenda.
“It’s hard to see Johnson’s move here as anything except needing an attack dog against conservatives,” said a former Republican staffer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “You get the impression he’s going to use Austin Scott to help as a blockade on the Rules Committee and throughout the [Republican] conference. That’s the signal it sends.”
Johnson’s staff acknowledged The Daily Signal’s request for comment, but did not provide a response.
Scott, a close ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sought the speaker’s job in October in an ill-fated run against Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
At the time of McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, Scott issued a statement calling the eight members who voted to remove McCarthy “nothing more than grifters who have handed control of the House to the Democratic Party in the name of their own glory and fundraising.”
Scott continued, “There is nothing principled about what they did, and Republican leadership will have to decide to either hold these members accountable or lose the faith of the rest of the conference.”
Months later, he took aim at one of the eight in particular: Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Scott donated to Good’s primary challenger, John McGuire, in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Last month, Scott was a featured guest at a McGuire fundraiser.
Despite Scott’s actions, Johnson handpicked him for a coveted seat on the powerful Rules Committee.
“Speaker Johnson keeps saying, ‘We’re on the same team, knock it off, please stop this.’ But he’s not actually doing anything to stop it,” a Republican staffer told The Daily Signal. “Now, Austin Scott, one of the guys who started this civil war on the primary campaign trail, is put on the Rules Committee. The speaker isn’t ending the war, he’s escalating it by rewarding people going after conservatives.”
And while Scott’s public actions have revealed his contempt for conservatives, lawmakers and staff said he is even more hostile to them in private settings.
“He’s got a short fuse and a hot temper,” another Republican member said of Scott. “Quite honestly, he doesn’t have the temperament to be a legislator.”
Scott’s communications director declined to make him available for an interview with The Daily Signal and instead pointed to his brief statement on X.
It is our sworn duty as members of Congress to govern, and I look forward to serving on the Rules Committee to help advance legislation that benefits the American people.
— Rep. Austin Scott (@AustinScottGA08) April 11, 2024
Known as the “speaker’s committee,” the Rules Committee includes nine Republicans and four Democrats. One of those seats became vacant this week when Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., won the gavel for the House Appropriations Committee.
Two members of the House Freedom Caucus—Reps. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Chip Roy, R-Texas—currently serve on the Rules Committee with another conservative-leaning member, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. Their three votes, combined with four Democrats, are enough to sink the speaker’s plans.
After years of being shut out of the Rules Committee—and any semblance of negotiation over its membership—conservatives scored seats on the panel as part of a deal with McCarthy, resulting in his election to speaker in January 2023.
Unlike when McCarthy negotiated with members, Johnson instead moved swiftly without consulting conservatives about Scott’s selection.
“It is the speaker’s committee, and he can do whatever he wants with it. But in a one-seat majority, there should be a conversation,” a GOP staffer told The Daily Signal. “You talk to people about who’s interested, who might be a good fit, who might be a productive addition on the Rules Committee.”
A former Republican staffer described it as a curious move on Johnson’s part.
“You already have conservatives angry at you for a variety of reasons,” the former staffer said. “You have a one-seat majority. You have a pending motion to vacate [the speaker]. It’s not exactly the time to poke the bear.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., filed a motion to vacate March 22, but has not yet forced a vote. If it’s successful, Johnson would lose the speaker’s job, just as McCarthy did before him.
“Speaker Johnson lives in peril every day for his job depending on what he does,” a Republican member said. “It’s a dicey situation. It appears to me that there are other candidates who are interested in being speaker in the new term.”
Since joining Congress in 2011, Scott has focused his attention on serving the rural Georgia district he represents. He is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Agriculture Committee. He has a lifetime score of 77% on Heritage Action’s Scorecard.
Scott also has developed a reputation among conservatives on Capitol Hill, according to lawmakers and staff who spoke to The Daily Signal.
“Austin Scott is a hothead, a notorious hothead,” a Republican staffer said. “He frequently loses his temper inside conference meetings with other members. He’s threatened, berated, cursed out members.”
Scott’s decision to endorse Good’s primary opponent, therefore, didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. However, it did anger conservatives, particularly because Johnson has privately counseled GOP members not to engage in primaries between fellow Republicans. The speaker recently made another appeal at GOP lawmakers’ retreat last month in West Virginia.
“Austin Scott endorsed Bob Good’s primary challenger, attended a fundraiser with him,” a Republican staffer said. “Mike Johnson, repeatedly for several weeks, has lectured the conference about what he calls the hot war on the campaign trail with primaries against incumbent Republicans. The moderates started this by going after Bob Good.”
Good, who boasts a 99% lifetime score on Heritage Action’s Scorecard, joined the House in 2021 after knocking off an incumbent Republican. He took over as chairman of the House Freedom Caucus in January.
Scott is one of at least six House Republicans who are backing Good’s opponent. Others include House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Reps. Jen Kiggans, R-Va.; Ryan Zinke, R-Mont.; Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis.; and Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas.
“Conservatives were appealing to the speaker to end the civil war before it got out of hand,” a Republican member told The Daily Signal. “And when he refused to, we let everyone know that we’re not going to take all the casualties.”
That’s led some conservative members to make their own endorsements against moderate Republicans.
Good, for example, is backing GOP challenger Derrick Evans in West Virginia’s 1st District against incumbent Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., a leader of the moderate Republican Main Street Caucus. Its affiliated PAC, the Republican Main Street Partnership, is actively spending money against Good.
Notably, Johnson has withheld his own endorsement from Good, whose primary election is June 18. A spokesman for the speaker’s political operation did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
The post Speaker Johnson’s Choice for Key House Committee Sparks Backlash appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A host on liberal MSNBC claimed that teaching students the Bible off-campus during school hours would make them a part of what she called the “Church of Trump” and help “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Alex Wagner’s remarks came in the most recent in a series of three reports over the past two weeks on MSNBC and/or parent company NBC on the nonprofit LifeWise Academy, whose buses pick up some 30,000 students across the country during the school week and take them to an affiliated church or other off-campus religious institution, presents them with Bible lessons, then returns them to their schools.
The three news and/or commentary pieces were critical, to varying degrees, of the nonprofit for supposedly “blurring” the lines of church and state, with one claiming that LifeWise has become a tool of the Right to turn liberal, Democrat-run cities more conservative.
In the most recent piece, Wagner even sought to link LifeWise to former President Donald Trump.
The left-leaning host said that Trump has “managed to turn his Christian followers into politically pious voters, members of the Church of Trump.”
The connection of Trump to the Bible-teaching nonprofit, Wagner claimed, lies in that LifeWise influences “the minds of public school kids in progressive cities like Columbus [in Ohio].” She went so far as to say the Bible program would “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Neither MSNBC nor NBC responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
LifeWise’s practices might surprise some, but they’re entirely legal in the United States, says Joel Penton, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO.
The Supreme Court, in a 1952 case, Zorach v. Clauson, permitted New York City students to leave their classrooms for religious instruction. Since that case is largely unknown, Penton says, many parents are often surprised when offered the option of midday Bible lessons for their children. Parents often assume that the government has full control over their child’s school day.
“I know what people are feeling,” Penton said. “They’re feeling that the school owns that time—the state owns the time of 8 a.m. [to] 3 p.m., or whatever the school day is, and that’s just not true.”
Currently, LifeWise serves 323 schools in 12 states, totaling about 30,000+ K-12 students, Penton said in a recent phone interview.
The nonprofit founder says that LifeWise serves students in 12 states, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Some 250 of the programs serve elementary schools, a majority of the total.
There’s no charge for participation in LifeWise, Penton said, for either school systems or the student participants.
“We want to make the Bible available to all of them [students]. And that’s what we’ve been trying to build, a plug-and-play program any community can implement,” he said. Forthcoming programs are set for schools in Washington state and even California, in a Los Angeles County school.
He said he hopes to have LifeWise operating in at least 20 states and 500 schools by this fall.
The post K-12 Bible Lessons Program Akin to Proselytizing for ‘Church of Trump,’ MSNBC Host Claims appeared first on The Daily Signal.
After a key House committee advanced legislation this week to require a citizenship question on the U.S. Census, support for the measure could be growing in the backdrop of the border crisis and its potential impact on congressional reapportionment.
Heritage Action, a policy advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation, announced Friday the Equal Representation Act would be scored as a key vote. The bill is S 3659 in the Senate and HR 7109 in the House. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Under current law, foreign citizens living in the United States are counted in the Census, and thus toward congressional apportionment. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., publicly admitted, “We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. … I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”
Democrat Congresswoman Yvette Clarke on illegal immigrants in America:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 9, 2024
"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes."
The end game: Dems are willing to destroy what it means to be an American citizen to help themselves politically. pic.twitter.com/3XmBDqYEsH
“Joe Biden’s deadly border policies have made the illegal immigration crisis the number one concern of the American people, and voters are pleading for Congress to fight back,” Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said in a statement.
The House version has 100 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the Census citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration.
?PASSED?
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) April 10, 2024
We just passed this commonsense bill through our committee.
Unsurprisingly, every Oversight Democrat voted against it.
On to the floor! https://t.co/DztcpKaBZN
“Congressional apportionment and electoral votes should be based solely on the needs of American citizens. Heritage Action is proud to have helped push this bill past the 100 cosponsor mark and will keep working with conservatives across the country to finish the job,” Walker said.
The Heritage Action announcement comes the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to join former President Donald Trump for a press conference on election integrity Friday, The Hill reported.
Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, introduced the House version and Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version. The goal is to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” Davidson said in a statement. “Under the Democrats’ open border policies, sanctuary cities and states inflate their population with illegal aliens. Then they’re rewarded with more congressional representation by a Census that counts illegals. The inflated count is then used to draw congressional maps, undermining fair representation for our citizens.”
Edwards stressed only American citizens can legally vote, “so only American citizens should be counted when determining federal representation.”
“In the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, the justices defined ‘the people’ to mean all members of the political community. To be a member of a political community, you must be an eligible voter,” Edwards said in a statement. “The Equal Representation Act addresses one of the many consequences of our open border—illegal immigrant influence in America’s electoral process. America is waking up to this insidious threat to our democracy.”
The post This Bill Would Prevent Illegal Immigrants From Swaying Congressional Representation appeared first on The Daily Signal.
During a conference call with White House officials, top state election officials wanted to know how the Biden administration intended to implement its government-backed get-out-the-vote effort in 2024.
The White House answer essentially was that “those plans are not public and they never intended for them to be public,” according to two secretaries of state who were on the call last week.
“The sad part is, that answer should have been a surprise but it wasn’t,” Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, told The Daily Signal.
Secretaries of state typically are their states’ chief election officials. Their growing frustration comes as more than two dozen state lawmakers in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state, ask the Supreme Court to block President Joe Biden’s executive order to increase voter registration.
Mississippi’s Watson noted that in 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife spent $400 million for election administration grants targeting key jurisdictions that would drive up the Democrat vote.
But, he added, Biden’s putting the power of the federal government behind a similar effort is “1,000%” worse.
The call with White House officials was coordinated by the National Association of Secretaries of State, Watson said.
“We might join in that Pennsylvania case with an amicus brief,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “Now we are leading an effort among secretaries of state to push back against partisan election interference and a get-out-the-vote effort using federal tax dollars.”
In 2022, Warner led a group of 14 other secretaries of state who asked Biden to rescind his executive order from the year before, since states are supposed to run elections.
“There is something surreptitious about the Biden administration and the lack of transparency that reveals what is going on here,” Warner said. “The federal government is not supposed to be doing this. We need states to stand firm on this.”
Federal plans largely have been shrouded in secrecy since Biden signed Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, directing federal agencies to work with nonprofit groups to boost voting.
Involved nonprofits include left-leaning organizations such as Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice, as The Daily Signal has reported using details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was troublesome on the phone call [with the White House]. Several spoke up that none of these third-party groups partnering with federal agencies are associated with Republicans or conservatives,” Watson said. “They responded, ‘We welcome anyone.’ Well, they aren’t bringing them to the table.”
In July 2021, the White House held a “listening session” with dozens of left-leaning groups on plans for implementing Biden’s executive order, according to documents obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those groups include the Southern Poverty Law Center, People for the American Way, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, an the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
The White House did not respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report.
In Pennsylvania, 27 Republican members of the state Legislature sued both Biden over his executive order on elections and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, over his own executive order implementing automatic voter registration.
The plaintiffs contend that both orders violated the constitutional rights of state legislators to make election law.
“The executive order is beyond the scope and powers of a president, not to mention he is interfering in an election where he is on the ballot,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Dawn Keefer, a Republican who is chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus and lead plaintiff in the case.
“We need courts to clarify if legislators have standing. We believe it is a solid case,” Keefer said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “We believe we have standing not only as legislators but, for most of us, as candidates who will be affected by these actions.”
In late March, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the case on standing without considering the merits, stating that the Pennsylvania Legislature wasn’t harmed as an institution. The lawmakers are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, asserting that the rights of individual legislators were violated.
“The judge’s decision would imply that every single member of the Legislature [must] agree on something before the constitutional and civil rights of legislators can be enforced,” Heather Honey, executive director of Election Research Institute, a watchdog organization whose lawyers represent the suing lawmakers, told The Daily Signal. “There is no way you could ever get agreement.”
Honey noted that Democrat legislators twice proposed automatic voter registration, but the bills were defeated in committee.
The effort, she said, was a tacit acknowledgment that such a measure would require legislation and couldn’t be done through a governor’s executive order. Shapiro implemented automatic voter registration through an executive order anyway.
The federal government’s coordination of voter registration efforts has the most far-reaching impact, Honey said.
“The federal government has no right getting involved in the method of selecting presidential electors,” Honey said. “Time, place, and manner of elections is to be decided by Congress, such as the Help America Vote Act. Otherwise, it’s up to the states.”
“There is no role for the president in regulating elections. The full force of the federal government unleashed by an unlawful executive order is interfering in a presidential election,” she added. “Obviously, the Founding Fathers never intended for a president to have the power to use the government for a get-out-the-vote campaign.”
GOP lawmakers contend that the president’s executive order puts the federal government’s thumb on the scale in elections, which are supposed to be the purview of states.
Republicans also argue that Biden’s order could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, which bars them from any political activity on government time or using government resources.
The post How States Are Punching Back on Biden Federal Election Takeover appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Progressives are using legal loopholes and the power of the federal government to maximize Democrat votes in the 2024 election at taxpayers’ expense, RealClearInvestigations has found.
The methods include voter registration and mobilization campaigns by ostensibly nonpartisan charities that target Democrats using demographic data as proxies, and the Biden administration’s unprecedented demand that every federal agency “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”
A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
These efforts, now buttressed by the federal government, amplify and extend what Time magazine described as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies,” who had worked behind the scenes in 2020 “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” to defeat Trump and other Republicans. The “shadow campaigners,” Time declared, “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
Heading into 2024, “there is not a ‘shadow’ campaign,” said Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “There is an overt assault on President Trump and those who wish to vote for him occurring at every level of government and with the support of all major institutions.” (The Daily Signal is the news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)
By contrast, Republican Party stalwarts lament that no comparable effort exists on their side. The GOP’s turnout and messaging efforts seek to thread a difficult needle by encouraging early and absentee voting and ballot-harvesting—pandemic-era measures that Trump and supporters blame for his 2020 electoral defeat—while the party simultaneously fights the mainly blue-state laws that made the practices possible. The party’s position is further complicated by its standard-bearer’s warnings of a rigged election bigger than in 2020, which some speculate could turn off moderate swing voters.
The IRS permits tax-exempt nonprofit groups to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives so long as they do not “refer to any candidate or political party” nor conduct their activities “in a biased manner that favors (or opposes) one or more candidates prohibited.”
These entities have become magnets for funds not only from wealthy donors, who can contribute without traditional campaign finance limits—and get a tax break to boot—but also abundantly endowed private foundations that are prohibited from engaging in partisan activities.
In recent years, dozens of progressive-oriented 501(c)(3)s, now pulling in upward of $500 million annually, have engaged in purportedly neutral efforts to impact elections, according to Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at the election integrity-focused advocacy group Restoration of America.
In practice, critics like Ludwig argue, left-leaning charities flout the law by registering and mobilizing demographics that tend to vote disproportionately Democratic behind a veil of nonpartisan democracy promotion.
During the 2020 election, for example, the Voter Participation Center solicited millions of ballot applications in swing states—many of them prefilled for respondents. This nonprofit, like its peers, is clear that it isn’t targeting just any voters, but what it and progressive activists have dubbed a “New American Majority” of “young people, people of color and unmarried women.”
Tom Lopach, a longtime Democratic Party operative and the center’s president and CEO, told RealClearInvestigations in a statement: “We do the work that state election officials typically do not do—seeking out underrepresented voting-eligible Americans … This is difficult but necessary work that brings democracy to eligible Americans’ doorsteps.”
In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan showed how supposedly neutral efforts can have a partisan impact when they funneled some $400 million through two progressive–led but purportedly nonpartisan nonprofits into election offices across the country.
That money disproportionately went to jurisdictions that Joe Biden won in the pivotal battleground states that delivered his victory, often flowing to left-leaning nonprofits to whom election offices outsourced the administration of sometimes critical functions.
In April 2022, a primary conduit of these so-called Zuckerbucks, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, announced the launch of a successor to the 2020 effort—the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a five-year $80 million program “to envision, support, and celebrate excellence in U.S. election administration.”
“The left has assembled an impressive ‘election-industrial’ complex of nonprofit organizations that is constantly working towards goals like ‘promoting participation’ targeting ‘underrepresented minorities,’” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. Such terms, Snead says, “are code for identifying and mobilizing liberal voters.”
Election experts view such activities as potentially decisive.
“‘Nonpartisan’ and ‘charitable’ voter registration and get-out-the-vote groups” are the Democratic Party’s “electioneering super-weapon[s],” said Parker Thayer, an analyst with the conservative-oriented Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.
Of these, Thayer sees the Everybody Votes Campaign as of paramount importance.
Born of a plan “commissioned by [Hillary] Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, funded by the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, and coordinated with cut-throat Democratic consultants,” Thayer writes in an extensive analysis of the group’s efforts, “the Everybody Votes campaign [has] used the guise of civic-minded charity to selectively register millions of ‘non-white’ swing-state voters in the hopes of getting out the Democratic vote.”
It does so by funding and training over 50 community groups to register voters to close “the voter registration gap in communities of color,” which it attributes to “modern forms of Jim Crow laws,” such as voter ID requirements, the group’s executive director, Nellie Sires, said in a January 2024 interview.
From 2016-2021, the Everybody Votes Campaign, doing business as three entities, collected over $190 million from major Democratic Party donors, unions, and environmental activists. Some of the largest donors include the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund; the New Venture and Hopewell funds, managed by for-profit consulting firm Arabella Advisors; and the George Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society—all 501(c)(3) public charities or private foundations forbidden from supporting “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias.”
The Everybody Votes Campaign distributed the funds to a slew of left-leaning state-based voter registration organizations largely in eight pivotal states from 2016 to 2019—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada—and then to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2021.
According to Thayer’s analysis, the Everybody Votes Campaign’s voter registration push “would have provided Democrats more votes than the total margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania,” securing Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
One notable backer of the Everybody Votes Campaign is Mind the Gap, a “Moneyball-style” Silicon Valley Democratic super PAC founded by Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, and connected to the political activities of her convicted crypto-fraudster son, Sam Bankman-Fried.
The analytics-focused outfit prepared a confidential strategy memo leaked in advance of the 2020 election, noting that “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate” would be the “single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories”—“4 to 10 times more cost-effective” on after-tax basis at “garnering additional Democratic votes” relative to alternatives like “broadcast media and digital buys.”
Mind the Gap recommended that donors contribute to three organizations: the Voter Participation Center and its sister organization, the Center for Voter Information for mail-based registration efforts, and Everybody Votes for site-based registration efforts.
The largest grant recipient, receiving $24 million during the 2016-2021 period, was State Voices, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan network of 25 state-based coalitions … that collectively partner with over 1,200 organizations” consisting of “advocates, organizers, and activists … work[ing] together to fight for a healthy democracy and political power for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and all people of color (BIPOC).”
Another top recipient, raking in over $10 million, was the Voter Participation Center.
According to the Capital Research Center, the Everybody Votes Campaign would collect and spend over $50 million in connection with the 2022 midterm elections—the most recent period for which financials are available. All told, since its founding in 2015, the campaign says, its network has registered 5.1 million voters, of whom 76% are people of color; 56% are women; and 47% are under the age of 35.
Last November, the news outlet Puck reported on a secret memo circulated by Mind the Gap regarding its plans for 2024. “Our strategy early in the 2024 presidential race will be to massively scale high-performing voter registration and mobilization programs,” the memo read. The PAC again specifically directed donors to the Everybody Votes Campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopach, who has worked in Democratic Party politics his entire career, bristled at RealClearInvestigations’ questions regarding critics’ claims of a partisan bent to its work. “The presumptions baked into the questions … emailed to us are inaccurate and reveal the reporter’s own biases,” he responded, while emphasizing the organization’s targeting of “underrepresented voting-eligible Americans.”
Thayer has dubbed Everybody Votes the “largest and most corrupt ‘charitable’ voter registration drive in American history.”
Of such organizations’ claims of nonpartisanship, Howell told RealClearInvestigations: “If they were truly interested in an informed participatory constitutional Republic, they would have an even-handed approach to registering voters.”
“Call me when they show up to a NASCAR race, Daughters of the American Revolution event, or a gun show,” Howell added. “Then we can pretend for a minute that these are beyond just facial efforts to appear somewhat neutral.”
But NASCAR races have not been hubs for GOP-led voter registration efforts either. Restoration of America’s Ludwig estimates that the Right may spend as little as 1% of what the Left spends on voter registration efforts.
A recent memo from the Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect conservatives, noted that in the 2022 election cycle, while $8.9 billion was spent on federal elections, there were zero large independent expenditure organizations on the Right focused on get-out-the-vote efforts or “ballot chasing.”
Republican Party vehicles and conservative outfits like grassroots-oriented Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4), are engaged in such efforts in the 2024 cycle, but the scale and sophistication of their political counterparts’ efforts would appear unrivaled at this point.
Election experts attribute this gap to several factors beyond the GOP’s focus on other tactics to win elections, or ineffectiveness. They note that Democratic voters tend to be more concentrated in urban areas and college campuses, making it easier to run efficient registration drives. As regards early and absentee voting and ballot harvesting, it is not clear if these efforts will substantially grow the pool of Republican voters versus merely enabling the party to “bank” votes earlier.
With respect to the use of 501(c)(3)s to conduct such activities, Ludwig said some conservatives may still be fearful of running afoul of the IRS—through exploiting tax laws to pursue efforts perceived to be partisan effectively on the taxpayers’ dime—in the wake of its targeting of tea party groups for extreme scrutiny during the Obama years.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats have opened a second apparent electioneering front that Republicans could not match even if they wanted to: The rise of so-called Bidenbucks, which uses the “unlimited funding, resources, and reach” of the federal government and agency offices located nationwide to turn out favored voters, according to Stewart Whitson, legal director of the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden introduced Executive Order 14019. The directive on “promoting access to voting” orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters—particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directs the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits in pursuit of its goals.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, Executive Order 14019 appears to have been designed by left-leaning think tank Demos and implemented in consultation and sometimes coordination with a slew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups with the goal of generating up to 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually.
The ACLU and Demos have reportedly helped execute the order. RealClearInvestigations additionally found that at least two recipients of grants under the Everybody Votes Campaign, the NAACP and UnidosUS—formerly the National Council of Raza—were also listed on an email as participants in a July 2021 listening session on the executive order convened by the White House and agency officials.
Whitson, whose organization unearthed that email in its fight to expose details about the order, emphasized that “[U]nlike 2020 wherein the shadow campaign was conducted by private citizens seeking to influence government election operations from the outside, the threat we face in 2024 is being launched from within the government itself.”
Facing both congressional scrutiny and litigation, the administration has closely guarded the strategic plans agencies were to develop to carry out the order, how they are implementing them, to what end, and with whom.
Perfunctory press releases, reports from groups supportive of the order, and documents slowly ferreted out via Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, however, demonstrate that relevant agencies have sought to drive voter registration via public housing authorities, child nutrition programs, and voluntary tax preparation clinics.
In August 2023, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued updated guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
More recently, the Department of Education did the same, blessing the use of federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, recently told The Epoch Times that the department had previously threatened schools “that you better be registering students or you could lose your federal funds.”
When asked by RealClearInvestigations to respond to Walter’s claim, the Department of Education would not. Over two dozen Pennsylvania state legislators challenged the order via a lawsuit in January. Citing alleged unlawful attempts by several agencies to register Keystone State voters, the lawmakers asserted:
By engaging in a targeted voter registration effort of this magnitude, focused specifically on these agencies and the groups of potential voters they interact with, leveraging the resources and reach of the federal government, this effort appears to be a taxpayer-funded get-out-the-vote effort designed to benefit the current President’s political party.
Echoing this view, Whitson’s Foundation for Government Accountability submitted an amicus brief noting that “all of the federal agencies FGA has identified as taking active steps to carry out EO 14019 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.”
The plaintiffs alleged the executive order violated both Pennsylvania law limiting voter registration efforts to non-federal actors and constitutional provisions reserving election laws to the states.
On March 26, a district court dismissed the case, claiming the plaintiffs lacked standing. Whitson told RealClearInvestigations that others would likely lodge similar lawsuits, building on the Pennsylvania legislators’ case in the wake of the dismissal. Days later, The Federalist reported that the plaintiffs intended to appeal their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A White House spokesperson did not reply to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries regarding the executive order.
Republicans have had more success opposing the use of Zuckerbucks and other private monies used to finance public elections. More than two dozen states would move to ban or restrict such grants in response to the activities observed during the 2020 election.
Most recently, Wisconsin, where some of the most controversial Zuckerbucks-related efforts took place, was added to that list when, on April 2, voters approved a constitutional amendment barring the private funding of elections.
Despite this crackdown and the feds seemingly stepping into the breach, efforts to privately finance election administration persist. The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence bills itself as an initiative to bolster “woefully unsupported” election offices to “revitalize American democracy.”
The organization says it services jurisdictions—11 listed on its website, ranging across states from Arizona to California and Wisconsin—with “training, mentorship, and resources.” Alliance officials did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiry about whether it would be terminating the relationship with the city of Madison, Wisconsin, in light of the passage of the recent ballot measure that would seem to have barred it. Nor did it respond to RealClearInvestigation’ other inquiries in connection with this article.
Most of these partnerships were initiated with jurisdictions in states that have not banned Zuckerbucks, though it has sought to circumvent such prohibitions in Georgia and Utah. The stated goal of the Alliance for Election Excellence is to support voters via measures like assisting participating centers in “redesigning” forms to make them more intuitive and purchasing infrastructure “to improve election security and accessibility.”
Alliance launch partners include entities such as:
Critics argue this seemingly more modest effort is, in reality, an ambitious Zuckerbucks rebrand.
Snead’s Honest Elections Project published a report in April 2023, based in part on documents received from FOIA requests, indicating “that the Alliance is a reinvention of CTCL’s scheme to use private funding to strongarm election policy nationwide.”
Among other takeaways, it found that:
The report shows that many of the alliance’s launch partners, starting with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Civic Design, are funded by major Democrat-tied, so-called dark money groups such as the Democracy Fund and Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund and Hopewell Fund.
The Democracy Fund is led by Democrat tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, which has granted some $275 million to like-minded organizations from publications like Mother Jones and ProPublica to the Voter Registration Project since its founding.
The District of Columbia recently closed a criminal investigation into Arabella, whose fund network reportedly spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 alone, after probing it over allegations its funds were pursuing political ends in violation of their tax-exempt statuses. The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, the Honest Elections Project says, pushes “left-wing priorities like automatic voter registration” and is run by the New Venture Fund. The Elections Group’s CEO and co-founder, Jennifer Morrell, previously served as a consultant at the Democracy Fund.
The Capital Research Center’s Walter uses a football analogy to explain why he sees these efforts as untoward. He told RealClearInvestigations:
Election offices are the refs in elections; the parties are teams trying to score. You’d be puzzled if you heard Super Bowl refs say they’re trying to boost points scored. You’d be outraged if you learned those refs had received money and training from people who previously worked for one team’s offensive coaching staff. That’s what left-wing political operatives, using left-wing money, are doing, and it’s clearly unfair.
Democrat-aligned groups continue to engage in litigation, like that brought by chief election lawyer Marc Elias, aimed at loosening election laws to their benefit. Snead told RealClearInvestigations, “There are more than 70 active lawsuits right now targeting voter ID laws, anti-ballot harvesting laws, signature verification, drop box regulations, and more.”
After securing victory in a lawsuit requiring signature verification for mail voting in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Committee touted its engagement as well in 81 election integrity cases this cycle. Swing-state Wisconsin is another major battleground for such efforts.
There, Elias’ legal team has challenged witness signature requirements and bans on election clerks filling address information on mail-in ballots. It and others are also working to overturn a state Supreme Court decision finding drop boxes illegal. The Badger State’s now liberal-majority Supreme Court announced in March it would take up the case.
Cutting against these efforts are not only the state’s citizen-approved Zuckerbucks ban, but another Badger-passed April 2 ballot measure amending the state’s constitution to prohibit those other than “an election official designated by law” from carrying out election-related tasks.
Watchdogs like Howell are concerned that left-leaning electioneers and lawfare forces collectively are pursuing an “election ‘dis-integrity’ strategy … to greatly expand the universe of ballots while limiting any ability to ensure that they are fairly cast and counted.”
“It’s a basic recipe for fraud.”
Elias says those seeking to combat such efforts are engaged in “voter suppression and election subversion.”
Democrats also have the federal government working on their side on the litigation front—and in ways extending beyond the veritable lawfare barrage the Biden Justice Department has leveled at Trump.
Speaking in Selma, Alabama, on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 police assault on civil rights marchers, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that “the right to vote is still under attack.”
Garland vowed the Department of Justice was punching back, including “challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements.”
The post How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Standing next to former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced legislation to require proof of citizenship to vote.
Non-U.S. citizens are already banned from voting in federal elections now. However, the National Voter Registration Act—better known as the Motor Voter Law—doesn’t allow states to check because the federal forms already contain a check box.
Johnson said that polling showed 78% of Americans supported requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote. He suggested he would put the bill straight to the full House for a vote, bypassing the committee process.
“When we put this bill on the floor, you’re going to see a recorded vote by Republicans and Democrats. You’ll see that Republicans stand for election integrity,” Johnson said. “We’ll be able to ask this very important question of the Democrats. They are going to have to go on record. Do you believe that Americans and Americans alone should be the ones who vote in American elections? We are about to find out.”
Since Biden took office, more than 7.2 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border.
During his opening remarks, Trump addressed both issues.
“We have a border that’s open. We have a lot of problems in our country. We have an election problem and that’s really what we’re here to talk about today,” Trump said. “I would like to demand that our border be closed because we have millions of people coming into our country, millions and millions of people at levels that nobody is reporting, nobody is going to talk about.”
Johnson said the legislation will require states to remove noncitizens from their existing voter rolls, with help by allowing states access to databases from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how several watchdog groups found voter registration rolls filled with ineligible foreign citizens, dead people, and people who have long moved out of a state despite the National Voter Registration requirement to update voting lists.
Johnson referred to the border crisis resulting from dozens of executive actions from President Joe Biden. He says he constantly gets questions about why it’s happening.
“Why would they do this? It’s chaos. Why the violence?” Johnson said, before answering his own question. “Because they want to turn these people into voters. Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits. Guess what? When you go to a welfare office, they also ask you if you would like to register to vote. Many people, we think, are going to do that.”
Weeks after coming into office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency, including social service offices, to boost voter registration.
Earlier this week, the House advanced legislation that would require a citizenship question on the census form and that officials no longer count noncitizens of jurisdictions when drawing up congressional maps.
The post Speaker Johnson to Put Democrats on Record With Vote on Proof of Citizenship to Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—President Joe Biden’s efforts to deflect blame for the border crisis and high cost of living aren’t working with swing voters, according to new polling from Echelon Insights.
An even higher percentage view his administration as a failure.
The survey of 2,401 registered voters in six battleground states—shared exclusively with The Daily Signal—reveals key insights about swing voters, a segment of the U.S. population who aren’t strongly aligned with either political party.
Asked to rate the Biden administration, 65% of swing voters described it as a failure. A majority of Hispanic men, young voters (18-35), and married women also give the Biden administration a failing grade.
The poll finds 59% of swing voters blame Biden’s policies for the crisis at the southern border, compared with 23% who say it’s due to factors outside of his control, while 18% are unsure or don’t view it as a problem.
On the issue of inflation and the high cost of living, 51% of swing voters blame Biden’s policies. According to the survey, 37% think the problem is outside of Biden’s control, while 13% are unsure or don’t view it as a problem.
Of the issues surveyed, violent crime is the only one that a majority of swing voters don’t blame on Biden’s policies. In that specific case, 38% attribute a rise in crime to Biden, compared with 39% who think it’s not his doing.
These issues are regularly cited as Americans’ top concerns. They are also contributing to a gloomy outlook on America’s future and have resulted in Biden’s dismal disapproval rating.
Echelon Insights conducted the survey for The Heritage Foundation in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
When asked about the 2024 presidential election, swing voters give former President Donald Trump higher marks on America’s biggest issues: addressing immigration and border security, ensuring a strong U.S. economy, maintaining world peace, bringing down the high cost of living, keeping their families safe, supporting the middle class, instilling confidence in America, and protecting rights and freedoms.
Biden outperformed Trump on just two issues: health care costs and student loan debt.
Trump’s dominance on a wide range of policy issues translates into a strong showing in five of the six states where the survey was conducted. Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Biden had the edge in Wisconsin.
A whopping 73% of swing voters in those six states disapprove of Biden’s job performance, compared with 40% for Trump. In each of the individual states, Trump holds the advantage.
When asked to rate a conservative governing agenda compared against a liberal agenda, swing voters in all six states favored a plan that grows the economy, reduces the cost of living, cuts government spending, secures the border, and implements tougher penalties for violent criminals.
The conservative agenda performed best in Michigan, followed closely by Georgia.
Swing voters cited the high cost of living as a major concern, worrying about the economic future of their kids, ability to save for retirement, and the cost of health care.
With a national debt of more than $34 trillion and government spending exploding on Biden’s watch, these voters are more receptive to spending cuts than other ideas such as combating corporate greed and junk fees or increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.
On the issue of border security, swing voters are more likely than the overall population to worry about social services being stretched thin. They also cite drug trafficking and rising crime as problems connected to the massive influx of illegal aliens.
Some of the Trump administration’s priorities—instituting the Remain in Mexico policy, completing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and closing the southern border to asylum seekers—rate positively among swing voters.
The survey also asked swing voters about education and the role of parents. By a significant margin, 63% to 30%, they think parents are in the best position to address controversial issues, such as sexuality, with their children.
Echelon Insights conducted the survey March 12-19 among approximately 400 voters in each of the six states. It has a margin of error of +/-2.3 percentage points overall.
The post Swing Voters Deliver Harsh Verdict: Biden Administration Is a Failure appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The federal government increasingly looks like an Ivy League classroom, combining therapy for fragile souls with indoctrination into specious ideology.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the State Department, where employees are encouraged to take courses in the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEIA, that stress their differences, trauma, and status on the victim-oppressor continuum.
As reported by The Daily Wire, the State Department spent a whopping $77 million on DEIA programs last year for its staffing shop, the Bureau of Global Talent Management.
Just this past month, the State Department offered a training session called “Unveiling the Hidden Wounds: Exploring Racial Trauma and Minority Stress.” It promised a “space for empathy” where “voices are heard, wounds are acknowledged, and action is taken towards justice and equity.”
Then there was “A Conversation on Racial Equity and Social Justice” with Bryan Stevenson, who pulled in $55,000 in donations per minute for a single TED Talk.
Employees could also take the half-day course “Intersectional Gender Analysis Training,” which “explores how gender and systems of power shape an individual’s lived experience.” Alternatively, they could attend a seminar called “Embrace Equity and Inspire Change” or a series of female empowerment sessions such as “Elevating Women in Technology and Beyond.”
Anticipating resistance, the State Department offered the course “Understanding Backlash to DEIA and How to Address It,” in which psychologist Kimberly Rios claimed to “highlight evidence demonstrating that DEIA initiatives can challenge the power, values, status, belonging, and cultural identity of dominant group members, particularly White Americans whose racial identity is important to their sense of self.” Rios will do this, the announcement said with unwitting irony, “to promote intergroup harmony.”
Government employees are required to take a variety of training courses to advance in their careers. Even five years ago, most of these were about doing your job better—courses on leadership, management, and other skills. But in the “woke” era, employees are also subjected to ideological sessions such as those mentioned above.
Given what all these courses and speakers cost taxpayers to provide, is there any evidence that they are based on sound information or that they improve the workforce?
Let’s examine one offering more closely.
The State Department runs a “DEIA Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series” that “highlights cutting-edge scientific research,” under which the agency recently brought in Yale professor John Dovidio to give a talk titled “Racism Among the Well-Intentioned—Challenges and Solutions.”
In a 2013 speech, Dovidio said: “About 80% of white Americans will say they are not sexist or they’re not racist … but work with the IAT will show that 60% to 75% of the population are both racist and sexist at an implicit level.”
So, what is this “IAT” that Dovidio cites?
Harvard’s Implicit Association Test is a favorite tool of social scientists who want to prove that people are inherently racist and sexist. This is a necessary premise for critical race theory, which posits that nebulous concepts such as “structural bias” and “systems of oppression” can explain all variances in performance between racial groups rather than individual factors such as education, industry, and behavior. The Implicit Association Test offers the evidence the Left needs to support this theory.
But the Implicit Association Test isn’t an accepted measure of bias. One of its own inventors said, “I and my colleagues and collaborators do not call the IAT results a measure of implicit prejudice [or] implicit racism.”
And in a 2015 review, Hart Blanton of Texas A&M wrote that “all of the meta-analyses converge on the conclusion that … IAT scores are not good predictors of ethnic or racial discrimination and explain, at most, small fractions of the variance in discriminatory behavior in controlled laboratory setting.”
In a 2021 academic paper, Ulrich Schimmack came to the same conclusion, writing that “IATs are widely used without psychometric evidence of construct or predictive validity.”
As far back as 2008, in an article for the American Psychological Association, Beth Azar wrote that a person’s scores on the Implicit Association Test “often change from one test to another.” German Lopez, writing for Vox, took the test two days apart and found that in the first, he “had a slight automatic preference for white people,” and in the second, “a slight automatic preference … in favor of black people.”
Summing up, Greg Mitchell of the University of Virginia said, “The IAT is not yet ready for prime time.”
That’s hardly a firm foundation for using taxpayers’ money to train federal staff in a worldview that will affect their careers and lives. And of course, all of the hours employees spend auto-flagellating with critical race theory is paid time they are not working on matters of national interest.
One can’t put too much blame on race merchants such as Dovidio, Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones for simply trying to sell their product. But the question is: Why is the government buying it with our money?
Taxpayer-funded institutions shouldn’t pay for courses and speakers whose premises are contentious and whose efforts won’t measurably improve the workforce.
Federal employees are free to explore social theory on their own time. On our dime, they should get on with their real job.
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
The post Taxpayers Shouldn’t Have to Fund State Department’s DEI Pseudoscience appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., announced on social media Tuesday that he’s co-sponsoring a motion to vacate the chair against House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
In doing so, Massie joined the motion to vacate push against Johnson launched by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in March. Massie is the first other Republican to back Greene in the effort.
“I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m co-sponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene],” Massie wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.” That’s a reference to another former House speaker, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.
I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m cosponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by @RepMTG.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 16, 2024
He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.
Johnson, according to NBC’s Jake Sherman, said that he’s not resigning.
“I am not resigning. And it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs,” Johnson said.
.@SpeakerJohnson responds: "I am not resigning. And it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs." https://t.co/XAwQWDanh5
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 16, 2024
Johnson—who became the speaker after the ouster of his predecessor as speaker, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., by a motion to vacate in October—has been facing increasing pressure from conservatives in the House. In particular, Johnson has been criticized for working with Democrats on a bill to fund the Ukraine war effort.
Johnson continues to receive the support of former President Donald Trump. Trump said on Friday that Johnson is doing a “very good job” when the two appeared together at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Friday.
“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said.
Johnson was elected House speaker in October with 220 Republicans supporting him. Johnson’s election came after McCarthy was removed as speaker after eight Republicans and all Democrats voted against him.
Since Johnson became speaker, McCarthy and Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., resigned and left Congress. Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was expelled in a House vote, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., will resign effective on Friday. After Gallagher leaves office, there will be 217 Republicans and 213 Democrats, a razor-thin Republican majority.
The post Johnson Vows Not to Resign, as Second GOP Lawmaker Announces Support for Ouster appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House delivered the two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday afternoon.
The articles are expected to be acted on quickly by the Democrat-controlled Senate, but not in the manner House GOP lawmakers are seeking.
“We want to address this issue as expeditiously as possible,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a floor speech Monday discussing the articles of impeachment.
Republicans who backed the impeachment of Mayorkas are concerned that Schumer will hold a vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment altogether. Dismissal only requires a simple majority, which is not out of the question, given Democrats’ control of the upper chamber.
Schumer also has the option to refer the articles to committee, where they would likely die, or to hold a full Senate trial, which Schumer is not expected to do, given his own vocal opposition to Mayorkas’ impeachment.
“Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement,” Schumer said, adding, “That would set a horrible precedent for the Congress.”
House and Senate Republicans supporting impeachment have maintained a pressure campaign on Schumer to force a Senate trial.
“Under the Constitution, the responsibility of the Senate is simple and straightforward: The Senate must hold a trial,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
“Chuck Schumer doesn’t want to do that,” Cruz added. “Instead, he wants to move to table the entire thing for three reasons. First, he does not want to allow the House managers to present evidence of Mayorkas’ willful decision to aid and abet the criminal invasion of this country. Second, he does not want the American people to see the facts. Third, he does not want Senate Democrats on the ballot in November to have to vote ‘not guilty’ because the evidence is indisputable—Alejandro Mayorkas is guilty.”
Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and led the impeachment effort against Mayorkas.
“The American people demand accountability,” Green wrote on X, in response to House Speaker Mike Johnson signing the articles of impeachment Monday.
Tomorrow I’m joining @SpeakerJohnson to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate. The American people demand accountability. https://t.co/PLkTs9yOyL
— Rep. Mark Green (@RepMarkGreen) April 15, 2024
The Republican-controlled House voted 214 to 213 on a party-line vote to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13 after a failed attempt a week prior.
The House’s first article alleges that the homeland security secretary has failed to secure America’s border and enforce immigration laws, and instead has executed policies that incentivize illegal immigration.
The House’s second article of impeachment contends that Mayorkas is in breach of the public trust and knowingly has made false statements to Congress and the American people.
Like his conservative colleagues in the House, Cruz says Mayorkas bears much of the responsibility for the record high number of encounters of illegal aliens at America’s borders.
“Mayorkas has aided and abetted the criminal invasion of the United States,” Cruz said. “This is a humanitarian, public safety, and national security crisis.”
Schumer told his fellow senators in a “Dear Colleague” letter on April 5 that when the articles of impeachment arrive in the Senate, senators will be sworn in as jurors the following day and that Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, D-Wash., will preside over the chamber.
The House was originally going to deliver the two articles of impeachment to the Senate on April 10, but Johnson delayed the delivery after a group of GOP senators asked him to do so to allow more time for debate on the Senate floor before the weekend.
Schumer said Monday that his plan of action in the Senate has not changed despite the arrival of the articles being delayed six days.
The post Long-Awaited Articles of Impeachment Against DHS Secretary Mayorkas Arrive in Senate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra refused on Tuesday to condemn or even distance himself from abortions of unborn babies who are ready to be delivered.
During a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Becerra repeatedly told Sen. John Kennedy that he supports the abortion limitations that were encompassed in Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in June 2022, when asked if he supports aborting babies up until the moment of birth.
Kennedy, R-La., pressed Becerra: “Would you support making it illegal to abort a baby, if the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, on the day before that baby is scheduled to be born?”
WATCH:
.@SenJohnKennedy to HHS Secretary Becerra: "Would you support making it illegal to abort a baby, if the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, on the day before that baby is scheduled to be born?"
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 16, 2024
Becerra refuses to directly answer.
pic.twitter.com/uSuX9RO1NI
The HHS secretary would not directly respond to the question, claiming that no one wants to get abortions so late in pregnancy.
“I certainly would support the reestablishment of Roe v. Wade,” he responded, adding, “Senator, if you talk to any woman, she’ll tell you that she uses common sense in making her decisions.”
Republican Alabama Sen. Katie Britt similarly pressed the HHS secretary on Kennedy’s line of questioning.
“If Roe v. Wade were the law of the land, and a woman wanted to take the life of her child the day before her child was due, or the day after her child was due, then you support her ability to do that?”
She followed up on this by adding: “There’s seven states in this country, and the District of Columbia, that allow you to take the life of a child the moment before a child is born, so clearly you support a woman’s right to choose to do that?”
Becerra told Britt that the example she gave was “fiction.”
“Can you give me a particular example?” he asked.
“If it actually is fiction, then why not say no?” she asked. “That that is out of the realm of possibility?”
WATCH:
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra refused today to condemn the abortion of a baby that is about to be born: “The example you gave is fiction.”@SenKatieBritt: “Then why not say no?”
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 16, 2024
pic.twitter.com/kLQFnZl1HS
Britt then went on to passionately describe a graphic abortion procedure in which the abortionist crushes and dismembers the unborn baby, delivering the baby breech, opening the baby’s head with scissors, and sucking out the baby’s body.
“If that child is then delivered alive, do you believe that the child on that table, that we should be able to save that child, or do you believe that our taxpayer dollars give this woman the right to say, ‘Don’t save my child?’” she asked.
Becerra is among many officials in President Joe Biden’s administration who refuse to specify what abortion restrictions, if any, they support. Becerra did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal.
The post WATCH: HHS Secretary Won’t Condemn Abortions Up Until Birth appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Rep. Ralph Norman reintroduced a bill Wednesday aimed at stopping a form of federal spending known as earmarks.
“I’ve always said that earmarks are evil,” Norman, R-N.C. told The Daily Signal. “They are sneaky in the way that they get tacked onto big, important spending packages to be automatically passed by the ‘uniparty’ with the hope that no one looks into the details.”
Lawmakers use earmarks, often referred to as “pork,” to receive funding for projects in their districts. Earmarks are often inserted into large spending bills where they are likely to largely go unnoticed. A congressional earmark dedicates federal funds for a specific purpose, such as the construction of a bridge, the restoration of a city landmark, or a local program.
“Basically, an earmark is taxpayer funding for a personalized pet project for a particular district or special interest group,” Norman said.
The six-page bill he reintroduced Wednesday prohibits Congress from considering legislation that contains earmarks, thus banning the practice.
Norman introduced the bill, known as the Earmark Elimination Act, twice before, and most recently in February 2021.
Five Republican lawmakers are currently co-sponsoring the bill, including Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Tom McClintock of California, and Andy Ogles of Tennessee.
Earmarks have long been debated and were even temporarily banned in Congress from 2011 to 2021. Among the most notorious congressional earmark schemes was in 2005 when two lawmakers from Alaska earmarked $223 million to build a bridge from Ketchikan to the island of Gravina, which at the time had a population of about 50 people. The project was nicknamed the “Bridge to Nowhere.”
“Attaching earmarks to large spending packages doesn’t allow for public discussion,” Norman criticized. “Congress, with the power of the purse, should be primarily looking out for the people’s tax dollars and getting federal spending down as soon as possible.”
Bloomberg Government reports that among the federal government’s 2024 spending bills, Republican and Democrat lawmakers inserted 8,099 earmarks accounting for $14.6 billion.
“To me, this is the most wasteful, abusive way to use hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Norman said.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Congressman Calls on House to Pass Bill Banning Earmarks appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Brussels authorities shuttered the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, sending police to block entry to the conference and announcing that those inside would be permitted to leave but not to return.
However, the action was not the result of any public disturbances or threats. It was a political action by left-progressive politicians who do not like the views being ventilated at the conference—and who fear the increasing success of nationalist and conservative ideas in European politics.
Initial coverage of the incident is posted here and here, with no doubt more to come. And see this article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the incident.
I am a trustee of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is sponsoring the conference, and I have been chairman of its regular “NatCon” conferences in the U.S., U.K., and Europe for the past five years.
My colleagues and I have strong views on such urgent issues as uncontrolled immigration; the corruption of schools and cultural institutions by race and gender ideologies; the transfer of government authority from nations to international bureaucracies; and the erosion of freedoms of speech, religion, and inquiry. These are the central issues on the agenda at this week’s conference in Brussels.
All of our conferences are carefully planned to include top-tier conservative thinkers, writers, scholars, activists, and political figures, and to provide a good mix of speeches, panel discussions, and debates (with a few brave souls on the Left to keep us sharp).
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who agrees with some NatCon positions but disagrees with others, has given terrific addresses at earlier conferences and has been received with enthusiasm and appreciation. Several other Heritage friends are at this week’s Brussels conference, although I have had to miss it myself because of commitments in the U.S. (now to my special regret!) (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
That an earnest gathering of political officials, activists, and thinkers should be bullied by a mayor and sequestered by the police is, of course, outrageous and worthy of severe condemnation. And few liberal as well as conservative leaders have issued critical statements.
But there is a larger meaning to the incident. It demonstrates that forthright, unapologetic conservatism is gaining serious momentum in Europe as well as the U. S.—and that the progressive Left, in its desperation to stop us, is increasingly willing to employ means that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Unfortunately, the progressives’ effort to anathematize national conservatives as a “far right” threat to democracy and civil order is being adopted by others who should know better. Some on the moderate left and right are portraying the Brussels “controversy” as a case for standing on principle for freedom of speech—even for those with so-called deplorable ideas and values, as if NatCons were Nazis marching through Skokie. Thanks for your support, guys, and have a nice free-speech day yourself.
The incident is actually the latest example of establishment timorousness and liberal decay. Two fancy Brussels venues, Concert Noble and a Sofitel hotel, abruptly canceled the NatCon conference at the insistence of city officials before the no-nonsense Tunisian owner of the Claridge event hall agreed to host us, refused to back down, and treated us to warm hospitality to compensate for the hostility of the city fathers.
This gentleman is in today’s avant-garde. The progressive strategy of meeting conservative ascent with shallow demagoguery and forceful suppression, rather than forthright argument or reform of their ruinous policies, is coming in for a richly deserved political reckoning.
The post Brussels Authorities Shut Down Conservative Conference, Afraid of Conservatism Gaining Momentum in Europe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Democratic officials are throwing billions at California high-speed rail projects that have yet to be built, funding thousands of jobs specifically for union members.
Despite funding initially being approved by a referendum in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail project currently has less than a quarter of its expected length under construction and was initially supposed to have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 48 local unions and more than 150,000 members in California, boasted of the creation of 13,000 unionized construction jobs due to continued funding of California’s high-speed rail project.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority, in its community benefits agreement regarding the construction of the rail, lays out that it will exclusively bargain with union representatives for craft labor and that no employee will be required to join a union, but workers who are at the site for more than eight total days will be required to pay union dues.
The agreement outlines that union members will be the primary source of labor and that the local unions will be given the opportunity to refer employees for the job.
“The project has been a windfall for the union workers who’ve been on the job,” Kerry Jackson, William Clement fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “By some counts, as many as 13,000 have been hired. The California High-Speed Rail Authority itself even brags about the ‘steady union jobs that provide union wages and benefits’ they get. That’s not to mention the benefits the union bosses everywhere always enjoy when they have more dues-paying members supporting their salaries and perks.”
The Biden administration announced $3 billion in federal funds for the project in December to push along the first phase of the project connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield, adding to the $9 billion already appropriated by the state and the approximately $3.5 billion in grants given by the Obama administration.
The project has been estimated to need between $88 billion and $128 billion to be fully completed, and the rail authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it is aiming to be operational from Bakersfield to Merced between 2030 and 2033.
“Of course, project costs are affected by higher, nonmarket wages,” Jackson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “When you have so many workers making these wages over the years, it adds up. The unions are a force behind the rail and one of the reasons, if not the main one, that this project has not been halted even though it’s far behind schedule, way over initial cost projections, and looks like a failed enterprise.
“The community benefits agreement that serves as the Project Labor Agreement requires unions to be the primary source of all craft labor.”
The California High-Speed Rail Authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, so far, 22.5 miles in the Central Valley have reached substantial completion, but that efforts are underway to design stations and track systems, complete environmental reviews and procure trains.
“The project is very much happening and continuing to make progress with our commitment unwavering as we remain active and aggressive in moving the project forward while actively pursuing federal funding,” the authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Big News: Today, President Biden announced funding to build the first high-speed rail projects in our nation’s history.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 9, 2023
These investments will get people and goods where they need to go more quickly, reduce emissions, increase passenger safety, and create good-paying union jobs. pic.twitter.com/zxR6SQawIw
“Even if we didn’t have the Project Labor Agreement, there would be prevailing wage and benefits on this project, both because of state requirements and federal funding requirements,” Anne-Marie Otey, communications and editorial director at the LA/OC Building and Construction Trades Council, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So, they’d be there no matter what, so we might as well make the best of it. I think it is better for the workers when there’s also a union agreement on the project.”
Otey pointed to the Davis-Bacon Act, which is a federal law that requires the government to pay at least the local rate to workers when constructing public projects, as the reason why using union workers on the project would not raise labor costs.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the Davis-Bacon Act were repealed in 2020, it would have reduced government spending outlays by $10.7 billion by 2030.
“It’s benefiting workers,” Otey told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And these workers are represented by unions, but no, we didn’t look at it as ‘What can we do for unions?’ We said, ‘What can we do for workers in the state?’ Especially again, in areas like the Central Valley, where they can’t just drive to San Francisco, Sacramento or L.A. for jobs, they live in the great heartland of our state.
“So, we wanted to figure out a way to keep them employed and keep them working at least somewhat near where they live. So, we think it’s a positive.”
Around $3 billion in federal funding was also announced in December for a high-speed railway between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Rancho Cucamonga, California, with Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., claiming that 35,000 union jobs would be created as a result. The funding for the project comes from the $1.2 trillion in new spending that was approved by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.
“We disagree that the California high-speed rail project has yet to make substantial progress,” a spokesperson for the California State Transportation Agency told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Quite the contrary. There are 119 miles currently under construction, with one construction package already substantially complete, and preconstruction work is underway to complete the initial 171-mile operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield. The nation’s first high-speed trains will be tested by the end of the decade, and we expect service to begin between 2030 and 2033.”
California is one of the more unionized states in the U.S., ranking sixth in terms of the share of workers in unions, exceeded only by five other blue states (Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Washington), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The share of California workers who were members of unions declined from 16.1% in 2022 to 15.4% in 2023.
The Biden administration’s push for high-speed rail funding in California is part of a larger national push for increased passenger rail access for Americans. President Joe Biden announced in November that $16.4 billion would be given to Amtrak, the national passenger railroad of the U.S., to fund 25 passenger rail projects along the East Coast.
“Although in California, public works projects are always union labor, so I think their biggest reason they like high-speed rail is that it’s just such a long-term project,” Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy at the California Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The unions get behind these projects because they’re big. The other reason, though, that they get behind these projects is because these are projects that the environmentalist community won’t vehemently oppose. They ought to be building things that are more practical; they ought to be upgrading freeways. But the environmentalists want us on a road diet.”
Biden has also boasted of new train sets for the California rail project being all-electric, resulting in zero emissions and powered through renewable energy, according to a White House fact sheet.
The president claims that all of his proposed rail projects will create “tens of thousands” of union jobs. As of September, the state of California had spent more than $600 million on environmental reviews for the rail project, not including a 78-mile stretch out of 500 miles that had not yet been evaluated.
“The environmentalists are so powerful that the unions go, ‘Well, if we’re going to get our guys working, we’re going to have to play ball with the environmentalists,’” Ring told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And so, the environmentalists will buy off on projects that really have no practical value. High-speed rail has no practical value in California. You could also argue that it has no environmental value, and I think you could argue that very convincingly.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post California’s High-Speed Rail Project Far From Finished, but It Is Putting Money in Unions’ Coffers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
House Democrats released an agenda Thursday that includes a vow to codify a right to so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers.
The promise came within the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ agenda, which House Democrats first shared with NBC News. That agenda includes a slew of left-wing interests, including promises of a higher minimum wage and stronger antitrust laws.
“If the progressive base is not excited and enthusiastic—and if they don’t feel like we are trying to earn their votes and that they are important—then I think the horrific idea of a second Donald Trump presidency could become reality,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who chairs the progressive caucus, told NBC News in an interview. “We cannot afford to let that happen. And we won’t.”
Although NBC claims that the agenda goes “lighter on cultural issues,” under the category “advancing justice,” it promises to “codify the rights of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, including gender-affirming care and health care.”
Jayapal did not respond to requests for comment for this article explaining what, exactly, codifying a right to “gender-affirming care” would entail.
In March 2023, she joined with other Democrats in introducing a “Trans Bill of Rights,” citing the rise in parental rights laws, laws protecting kids from gender transitions, and laws prohibiting boys from participating in girls and women’s sports.
“Day after day, we see a constant onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation coming from elected officials. Today, we say enough is enough,” Jayapal said at the time. “Our Trans Bill of Rights says clearly to the trans community across the country that we see you, and we will stand with you, to ensure you are protected and given the dignity and respect that every person should have.”
That legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gender identity as “protected characteristics.” It would also amend federal education laws to say that they protect kids from being discriminated against based on gender identity.
The Trans Bill of Rights also called for ensuring that “every child has the right to grow up in a supportive environment by having their authentic identity respected in the classroom, ensuring they can participate in school sports with their peers, and ensuring access to an inclusive curriculum.”
It further called for “expanding access” to trans surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers and codifying rights to abortion and contraception.
Jayapal told NBC News that progressive Democrats assume “this is an agenda for a Democratic president with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.”
She added: “We have to excite our base. We have to show them what the path forward is—not just say, ‘This is the most important election of your life, and we expect you to vote.’ I don’t think that’s going to turn people out. And so, I think this agenda, really, speaks to the needs of poor people, working people, progressives across the country who want us to make that case to them.”
“We are not seeing the momentum that we would like to see,” she told NBC. We’re going to have a tough election. … We know we’re going to have to put together that progressive coalition. And I think this is the thing that allows us to say, “‘Look, here’s what we’re fighting for.’”
The post House Democrats Vow to Codify ‘Rights’ to Trans Surgeries, Hormones, Puberty Blockers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
If those in federal office are willing to pay attention, the states are displaying the best—and the worst—of our republican form of government.
Every four years, American citizens get the opportunity to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, endorse a policy agenda for the nation, and hold the occupant of the highest office in our federal government to account for his leadership or lack thereof.
But in the intervening years between what some treat as a national Rorschach test, lawmakers are the policymakers entrusted to express the will of the people.
Fifty laboratories of innovation provide Americans with the freedom to vote with their feet by living in states that reflect the priorities around which their pursuit of happiness seems most reliably cultivated. The states also provide an effective case study for varying policy initiatives upon which our federal government can rely for evidence-based decision-making for the nation.
As an example, the Tennessee General Assembly recently passed landmark legislation addressing the disturbing trend of debanking. Once signed by Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, this law will provide consumer protection by prohibiting big banks from canceling accounts based on the constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and religious exercise.
Applying to the largest financial institutions, those with at least $100 billion in assets, the law provides a road map for other states to follow. Since the federal government is where banks that are “too big to fail” look for taxpayer-funded bailouts, Congress should follow Tennessee’s lead as well.
Contrast this approach of protecting access to basic financial services regardless of ideology with the state of New York. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard from the National Rifle Association, which is seeking to stop New York state officials from using political power to coerce banks, insurers, and other service providers to refuse service to the Second Amendment advocacy organization.
In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, signed HB 578, which will ensure that faith-based adoption and foster care providers are free to serve children in need and work with the state to find loving, forever homes for kids.
Meanwhile, next door in Oregon, Jessica Bates is prevented from adopting children because she won’t agree to the state’s demand that she promote gender ideology. Apparently, Bates doesn’t have a high enough “social credit score” to be deemed a worthy parent by the state.
Idaho simultaneously protects the right of conscience and promotes the best interests of children in need of loving homes, while Oregon prioritizes politics over people.
One might look at these polar-opposite expressions of policy preferences and despair of a nation plagued by irreconcilable differences. But to the federalists among us, these differences are not a bug but a feature of our system.
Our national political culture is divided, but no more so now than it was at our founding. Today we simply have divisions of 50 instead of the 13 that existed when our Constitution was adopted. Then, as now, life in the states can look drastically different across our internal borders.
From the beginning, these United States of America were a hodgepodge of varying ethnicities, religions, economies, and political beliefs. What united the states then can still unite them today—the recognition of our fundamental God-given rights and the implicit American compact to protect those rights for all, regardless of which direction the political winds may blow across a state or the nation.
If an executive or legislative branch of state or federal government, even with popular support, goes so far as to implement policy that conflicts with these fundamental rights, our judiciary is empowered to rein in the wayward whims of the democratic process. This ensures that our fundamental rights are recognized in all 50 states while allowing for policy differences on other matters.
American journalist H.L. Mencken once said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Thankfully, our Founders were keenly aware of the fallen nature of man, the seductive trappings of power, and thus the perils of pure democracy for the God-given rights of the individual. They had the foresight to give us, as Benjamin Franklin reportedly quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
When our federal government is focused on protecting fundamental rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution’s principles while respecting the role and differences of the states, we improve our chances of “keeping it.”
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 Differences Among States Are a Plus, Not a Bug, in Our System appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A third House Republican has announced he will co-sponsor a motion to vacate introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., that, if passed, would end Mike Johnson’s tenure as House speaker after fewer than six months.
If all 213 House Democrats vote in support of the motion to remove Johnson, R-La., as speaker, only three Republicans would need to cross over for the motion to carry, 216-215, once Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., resigns, as he plans to do imminently.
Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., announced that he would join the Georgia Republican’s effort to oust Johnson, saying in a written statement:
[R]ather than spending the resources to secure our southern border and combating the invasion of 11 million illegals and despite repeated promises there would be no additional money going to Ukraine without first securing our border, the United States House of Representatives, under the direction of the speaker, is on the verge of sending another $61 billion to further draw America into an endless and purposeless war in Ukraine.
“Our border cannot be an afterthought,” Gosar added. “We need a speaker who puts America first rather than bending to the reckless demands of the warmongers, neocons, and the military-industrial complex making billions from a costly and endless war half a world away.”
My statement joining .@RepThomasMassie on cosponsoring .@RepMTG Motion to Vacate:
— Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS (@RepGosar) April 19, 2024
Gosar Statement on Supporting the Motion to Vacate the Speaker
Washington, D.C. — Congressman Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. (AZ-09), issued the following statement after cosponsoring H.Res. 1103,…
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., announced earlier this week he supports Greene’s motion to vacate.
Gosar’s decision comes as Johnson relied on House Democrats’ votes to pass a series of foreign aid bills opposed by many conservative Republicans.
Johnson brushed off the threat of Greene’s motion to vacate Wednesday, saying: “I am not resigning. And it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs.”
Johnson became House speaker in October after the ouster from the post of his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., by a motion to vacate. The Kentucky Republican has faced increasing pressure from conservatives in the House.
Johnson continues to have the support of former President Donald Trump, who said Johnson is doing a “very good job” when the two appeared together April 12 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said.
Johnson was elected House speaker with the votes of 220 Republicans. His predecessor, McCarthy, was removed as speaker after eight Republicans and all Democrats voted against him.
Since Johnson became speaker, McCarthy and Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., have resigned and left Congress. Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was expelled in a House vote, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., plans to resign soon.
When Gallagher leaves office, that will leave 217 Republicans and 213 Democrats, a razor-thin Republican majority.
Jarrett Stepman contributed to this report.
This article has been corrected to reflect which state Johnson represents.
The post Third Republican Announces Support for Ousting Johnson as House Speaker appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Eva Edl turned 10 years old in a World War II-era death camp.
She believes she may die in a United States prison.
Charged by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, Edl faces up to 11 years in prison and $350,000 fines. She is about to turn 89 years old.
“When I was indicted, I began to prepare to die there,” she said thoughtfully in a phone interview with The Daily Signal. “Right now, I am ambivalent. … I’m doing the best I can to get ready. Haven’t talked to a funeral director yet.”
“I’m just being sensible,” she added. “There’s no guarantee that I survive it.”
Drawing on her brutal experiences with communism in what was then Yugoslavia, she refuses to underestimate those who have the power to oppress her, recalling how her mother couldn’t believe they were in danger until it was too late.
“We haven’t done anything wrong! Who would harm us?” she remembered her mother saying.
“Then our whole people was destroyed,” Edl said. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, as far as I know.”
As Danube Swabians, an ethnic German-speaking group, Edl and her family were rounded up in the aftermath of World War II by soldiers under the direction of Yugoslavia’s communist leader, Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito.
She described how she was shipped off in cattle cars to a concentration camp in Yugoslavia at age 9: “We were packed body to body, and being a small child, I could hardly breathe. We had no food, no water … .”
The camp (named Gakowa, or Gakovo, according to Edl) was “primitive,” she said, and its purpose was the extermination of the Danube Swabians. Many of those in Gakowa with Edl died from starvation or disease and were buried in mass graves.
She slept on straw. She had her one dress. Very little food.
“You couldn’t wash your clothes because all you have is that one dress,” she explained. “So, you were filthy. And then we had diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, and rats and anything you could imagine, and we had no toilet facilities to contain all that. We had an outhouse. Well, how do you have masses of people with diarrhea just go to one outhouse? So, you know what happened. And filth and disease went rampant.”
Her mother, forced to work as a slave laborer in the fields, escaped and smuggled herself into the camp in a wagon full of corn, determined to find her young daughter among the thousands of prisoners, Edl says. Soldiers poked through the load of corn with bayonets, just barely missing her mother.
Edl’s mother finally found her young daughter lying on a pile of rancid straw, starving, too weak to walk, “festering” with lice and other creatures.
The scene was so horrific that it caused Edl’s mother to rush outside and vomit, although Edl did not learn this until years later. At the time, she was so weak she could barely register her mother’s presence, and she could scarcely recognize her mother, thin and emaciated as she was. But it seemed to Edl a miracle that they had been reunited—even in a concentration camp.
“I just couldn’t believe it was her,” she explained. “It took a while.”
Edl’s stories of her time in the death camp feature many brave women: her grandmother, who voluntarily chose to go to the concentration camp with her in order to protect her; her mother, who repeatedly risked death to reunite her children and get them safely to the United States; and her sister, who, forced by a soldier to dig her own grave, looked him in the eye and dared him to kill her. (He didn’t, according to Edl.)
So, it should come as no surprise that Edl, after she came to the United States in 1955 and was exposed to a human rights crisis she had never before heard of, decided that she must do whatever was in her power to save lives.
Edl took an English course around 1968, and during the course, someone brought up whether or not the United States should legalize abortion. (Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that there was a constitutional right to abortion, did not come about until 1973.)
“I didn’t know what [abortion] meant,” Edl said. She was blown away by the explanation she received. As she spoke with The Daily Signal, she reflected that an unborn baby is not a tumor, but a life. No one should have the ability to just end a baby’s life, she said.
“I tried to speak up in that subject, but I must have done a very bad job because I don’t think I convinced the person that I was speaking with. And after that, I just brought the subject up all the time because it bothered me that people would actually think of killing their own children.”
During the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, she first learned that abortions don’t take place in a secretive, underhanded fashion; rather, that unborn babies are aborted within abortion clinics, places that openly advertise their gruesome services. Edl was shocked.
Hundreds of pro-life protesters demonstrated outside the convention beginning in July 1988. In October 1988, police arrested about 400 protesters in connection to those demonstrations, The New York Times reported.
It was during that time period, after discussing the matter with her husband and getting his blessing, that Edl joined the protesters as they prayed outside an abortion clinic in Atlanta and attempted to dissuade women from going inside and aborting their babies.
“We are doing what we are condemning others for,” Edl says she told her husband at the time. “This is what people should have done for us.”
She was arrested that day with many others, led by Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry.
Edl says the police treated them brutally, dislocating the arms of many of the protesters arrested. The pro-life activists had been warned that police were prepared to be brutal, she explained, and to avoid any appearance of accosting police, the activists crawled on their knees rather than walked.
“I was weeping the whole time,” she said. “I must have left a trail of tears … .”
She was inconsolable that America would even consider aborting its unborn.
“America, in my eyes, was this country of justice and opportunity and everything that is good,” she said. “A beacon for us, over there, that didn’t know what all that meant, because we had nothing but oppression from whoever was ruling us at the time.”
When an officer put his hand on her shoulders, she froze, as she had been instructed.
“I heard somebody say, ‘Just use your nightstick,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, here they come. They’re going to club me.’ They just put the club, the nightstick, behind my arms. They hung me on it and nearly dislocated my shoulders, and just threw me on the bus. Other people got their shoulders totally dislocated; others got their heads bashed in. Some ended up in the hospital.”
That was her first “rescue”—the term that pro-life activists use for their attempts to stop abortions from taking place at an abortion clinic. Under the FACE Act, such activity is considered a crime.
The FACE Act prohibits use of force, obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with “reproductive health care services.” Though it theoretically protects houses of worship and pregnancy resource centers, as well as abortion clinics, the Biden administration’s Justice Department has largely used FACE to prosecute pro-life activists like Edl.
Since 2022, the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Justice Department has hit a total of 40 pro-life activists with FACE-related charges at five different rescues, or “blockades” as the DOJ calls them.
Edl describes a rescue in the following way: “We would put our bodies in front of the entrance of the abortion clinic, which I call the ‘death camp,’ so nobody could come in and kill the babies.”
Since that October 1988 incident, Edl says, she has been part of more than 50 rescues throughout the United States. She also says that she has been arrested about 50 times.
Now, she faces prison time.
“To the best of my knowledge, I am facing around 11 years in prison and $350,000 fines,” she said.
The Justice Department has thrice charged Edl with violating the FACE Act, first for an “August 2020 blockade” of a Sterling Heights, Michigan, abortion clinic; second for an April 2021 “blockade” in Saginaw, Michigan; and third for a March 2021 incident at a Nashville, Tennessee, abortion clinic. The DOJ charged eight defendants in the Sterling Heights incident and 11 defendants in the Nashville incident.
Edl maintains that she never committed any violence against those at the abortion clinics. (The DOJ would not respond to requests for comment about its charges against her.) She says that her actions are completely justified, given that she is trying to save the lives of babies about to be aborted.
“Let me liken it to something,” Edl explained thoughtfully as we discussed her arrests around the country. She referred back to her time in Gakowa. “When we were rounded up to be killed, we were placed in cattle cars, and our train was headed toward the extermination camp. What if citizens of my country would have overcome their fear, and a number of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train? The train would have to stop. And while the guards on those trains would be busy rounding up the ones that were in front of the train, another group could have come in, pried open our cattle car and possibly set us free, but nobody did.”
She has heard stories that people stood by the roadside and wept as the cattle cars went by. “But that didn’t help us any,” she said.
“So, when we place our bodies between the woman and the clinic, we buy time to get our sidewalk counselors the opportunity to speak with women, and hopefully open their hearts with love for their babies and let their babies live,” the death camp survivor said.
“After all,” she added, “we offer them everything there is, including adoptions. I’ve offered to adopt babies on the spot … we’re standing between the killer and the victim.”
Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994, and then-President Bill Clinton signed it into law that same year. Spearheaded by the now-deceased Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., the legislation was a response to attacks on abortionists and abortion clinics. Pro-life advocates made sure that the legislation included clauses stating that it also protects churches and pregnancy resource centers.
In recent months, some conservative lawmakers and activists have called for the legislation to be repealed, arguing that it has been weaponized against pro-life activists.
They point to the large number of DOJ FACE charges against pro-life activists, noting that hundreds of churches and pregnancy resource centers have been attacked by pro-abortion vandals since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned. The DOJ has charged only five pro-abortion vandals in connection with attacks on Florida pregnancy centers and an Ohio pregnancy center.
It appears that no vandals have been charged with FACE for attacking churches.
Edl, who has followed the FACE Act and its application since its inception, said she was arrested in Kennedy’s office when she went to talk to him about it in the 1990s.
“Instead of talking to us, he had us arrested,” she said of Kennedy.
She believes that she and her fellow pro-life activists are being targeted through the FACE Act because they “are in the way of [the Biden administration’s] agenda.” She has lived through 13 presidents in her lifetime, and she says that Biden is the worst of them.
Edl and the other defendants accused of violating the FACE Act have said that they are not allowed to show images or pictures in their trials. They are not allowed to say that they acted in order to save lives—the lives of unborn babies.
At the end of the day, however, she seems very at peace about the possible penalties. She’s getting her affairs in order. She had a bench trial in federal court in Nashville, where a federal judge found her and several others guilty of violating the FACE Act.
Edl and the other three defendants face a maximum of six months in prison, five years of supervised release, and fines of up to $10,000 in this case, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee.
She will be sentenced July 30, she said. And her next trial is in federal court in Detroit on Aug. 6.
“I feel very strongly, because of my background, that human life is sacred,” she said simply. “Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids.”
“And murder is forbidden by God.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: She Survived a Death Camp. Facing Biden DOJ Charges, She Is Prepared to Die in Prison appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The attorney general of Ohio has asked the state’s Supreme Court to intervene in a matter involving an Ohio judge who temporarily blocked a law protecting children from “transgender” surgeries and procedures.
Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Michael Holbrook had issued a temporary restraining order for House Bill 68, the Saving Ohio Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, on Tuesday.
That law bars physicians from performing “transgender reassignment” surgeries on children and from prescribing cross-sex hormones or drugs to block children’s puberty. It also would allow students to sue if they are deprived of a fair playing field in sports due to transgender activism (such as a boy who “identifies” as a girl playing on a girls’ volleyball team) and would protect parents’ rights to raise their children according to their biological sex.
A supermajority of Republican lawmakers voted to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s controversial veto of the bill in January, and before Holbrook blocked it, it was scheduled to go into effect on April 24.
On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, the Medical Board of Ohio, and the state of Ohio filed an emergency motion for a writ of prohibition, asking that Holbrook be ordered to modify his temporary restraining order to “comply with Ohio statutory and procedural limitations.”
“Ohio statutes, civil rules, and equitable principles authorize Ohio courts to grant preliminary injunctive relief only to parties before the court and only as to provisions that allegedly harm them,” the complaint says. “Respondent’s injunction vastly oversteps those express limitations on the court’s authority.”
The Ohio attorney general also argues that immediate relief is required because the judge and the Common Pleas Court of Franklin County “patently and unambiguously lack jurisdiction to grant preliminary equitable relief to millions of individuals not before the court, or to enjoin statutory provisions that plaintiffs do not allege harm them.”
Additionally, the filing states the judge’s order “foments uncertainty” in a “broad array of institutions and actors” that are affected by the law, including hospitals, schools, and universities.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio had filed a lawsuit on behalf of a child who allegedly identifies as transgender and that child’s family. When Holbrook temporarily blocked the law, ACLU of Ohio’s legal director, Freda Levenson, said in a statement that the ACLU was “thrilled and relieved” that “transgender youth can continue, for the near term at least, to access medically necessary health care.”
“Our legal battle will continue until, we hope, this cruel restriction is permanently blocked,” Levenson said. “Ohio families have a constitutional right to make personal health care decisions without government intrusion.”
Yost’s Monday filing came a week after the United States Supreme Court paved the way for Idaho to enforce its law protecting children from so-called gender-affirming care, or transgender surgeries and procedures. A judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, had temporarily blocked Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act in December, The Washington Post reported.
After Idaho appealed the block and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit refused to change the lower court opinion, Idaho asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
“Denying the basic truth that boys and girls are biologically different hurts our kids,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador said in a statement praising the ruling, The Washington Post reported. “No one has the right to harm children, and I’m grateful that we, as a state, have the power—and duty—to protect them.”
The post After Judge Blocks Law Protecting Kids From Transgender Surgeries, Ohio Calls on State Supreme Court to Intervene appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss spoke Monday at The Heritage Foundation about how the United States and the United Kingdom are facing very challenging forces in the global Left, not just in terms of their extremist activists, but also in the power they hold in our institutions. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
She warned that conservatives must create a stronger infrastructure to take on the Left—which is well-funded, activist, and has many friends in high places—by recruiting more conservative activists and candidates who can fight in the trenches in the ideological war that we now face.
Excerpts from her remarks are below.
Why am I launching “Ten Years to Save the West” in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom? Well, I like to think of the United States of America as Britain’s greatest invention, albeit a slightly inadvertent invention. And if you look at our history, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights to the American Constitution, we have developed and perfected representative democracy.
And if you look at what is going on in our societies, first of all, the Brexit vote back in 2016 and then the election of President Donald Trump later that year, you can see the same desires of our people for change and the same desires for those conservative values and that sovereignty.
And if you look at the battle for conservatism now and the frequency with which we get new prime ministers in the United Kingdom and the frequency with which you get new speakers of the House here in the United States, we can see again that there is a battle for the heart and soul of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. And I think that battle is very important. Because, let’s be honest, we have not been winning against the global Left.
If you look at the history since the turn of the millennium, the Left have had the upper hand. And it’s not the old-fashioned Left who used to argue about the means of production and economic inequality. It’s the new Left who have insidious ideas that challenge our very way of life.
Whether it’s about climate extremism that doesn’t believe in economic growth, whether it’s about challenging the very idea of a man and a woman and biological sex, whether it’s about the human rights culture that’s been bedded into so much of our society that makes us unable to deal with illegal immigration—those new ideas have been promulgated by the global Left and they have been successful in infiltrating quite a large proportion of society and a large part of our institutions.
Let’s just look at the state of economics. I am a supply-sider. I know that it works. We saw it work under [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan and [U.K. Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, and yet we’ve seen the domination of Keynesian economics in recent years, bloated size of government, huge debts in both of our countries.
On the immigration and human rights culture, look at what is going on now on American university campuses where it is not safe anymore to be Jewish, or the streets of London where a Jewish man could not cross the road during yet another appalling protest, or the fact that we can’t seem to deport illegal immigrants either from your southern border or the small boats that are crossing the channel.
Or take wokery, another bad neo-Marxist idea developed from [Michel] Foucault and all those crazy post-modernists in the 1960s, the idea that biological sex is not a reality.
We now have President [Joe] Biden introducing regulations around Title IX, which means that girls could see biological boys in their changing rooms, in their locker rooms, in their school restrooms and not be able to do anything about it. And if they complain about it, they could be the ones guilty of harassment. How on earth can that be happening in our society?
Or the climate extremists who aren’t satisfied with just stopping coal-fired power stations here in America, [liquefied natural gas] terminals being built, fracking in the United Kingdom, but want to go further. Whether it’s imposing electric vehicles or air-source heat pumps or extra taxes on the public. Meanwhile, our adversaries in China are busy building coal-fired power stations every week.
I see that as unilateral economic disarmament in the middle of what is a various, serious threat to the West.
So how has it ended up that after the turn of the millennium, despite the fact that we have many conservative intellectuals and politicians, why have our institutions, why has so much of our public discourse shifted to the Left?
Well, first of all, too many conservatives have not been making the argument. Now, I call them conservatives in name only, CINOs. I know in America you call them RINOs. But these conservatives in name only, rather than taking on those ludicrous ideas, instead have tried to appease and meet them halfway.
Why have they done this? Well, first of all, they don’t want to look mean. They don’t want to look like they’re against human rights. They don’t want to look like they’re against the environment. They don’t want to be mean to transgender people. They’ve allowed those arguments to affect their views on what is right and wrong. But it’s also more cynical than that.
If you want to get a good job after politics, if you want to get into the corporate boardroom, there are a group of acceptable views and opinions that you should hold. And most of them are on that list. If you want to be popular and get invited to a lot of dinner parties in Washington, D.C., or London, there are reviews on that list that you should hold. And people have chosen dinner parties over principle.
But the other thing I think we’ve missed on the conservative side of the argument, and I put my hands up to this, is the rising power of the administrative state. The fact that power—which previously lay in the hands of democratically elected politicians, like them or not they can be voted out of office—is now in the hands of so-called independent bodies, whether it’s central banks, whether it’s government agencies, or whether it’s the civil service themselves.
And what we’re seeing in bureaucracy in the United Kingdom, and I think here in the United States as well, is a growing activist class of civil servants who have views on transgender ideology or climate or human rights, which they are keen to promote in their roles.
I saw this firsthand and one of the key points the book is about is my battles that I had with that institutional mindset. And there’s a phrase that we use in Britain called “consent and evade.” Quite often the officials will be very polite on the request, but it will take a very long time to do if it’s something like helping deport illegal immigrants or sort out the Rwanda scheme. If it’s something that they like, like dealing with climate change, that will be expedited.
And I think it’s very difficult for people who haven’t worked in government to understand just how cumbersome and how treacle-like it has become. And I don’t know if that’s a product of the modern era, if it’s a product of the online society, but it is very, very difficult now to deliver conservative policies.
Now, I did many jobs in many different government departments. I was in the justice department, the environment department, the education department, the treasury, I was in trade, I was in the foreign office, and I faced battles against activist lawyers, against environmentalists, against left-wing educationalists.
But what I thought when I ran to be prime minister in 2022 is I thought I had the opportunity to change things because that was surely the apex of power. I hadn’t been able to change it as environment secretary or trade secretary, but as prime minister, surely that was the opportunity for me to be able to really change things.
Now, there’s a bit of a spoiler alert about the book. It didn’t quite work out. I ended up being the shortest-serving British prime minister as a result of trying to take on these forces. And the particular thing that I tried to take them on was the whole issue of our economy.
***
I come today with a warning to the United States of America. I fear the same forces will be coming for President Donald Trump if he wins the election this November. There is a huge resistance to pro-growth supply-side policies that will deliver economic dynamism and help reduce debt.
What the international institutions and the economic establishment want to see is they want to see higher taxes, higher spending, and more big government, and more regulation. They do not want to see that challenged. And we’ve already heard noises from the Congressional Budget Office and elements of the United States market about the financial stability situation.
So, what have I learned from my experience? What have I learned from my time in office? I have learned that we are facing really quite challenging forces of the global Left, not just in terms of their virulent activists making extremist documents, but also the power they hold in our institutions. And that leads me to believe that what conservatives need is what I describe as a bigger bazooka.
Now, what do I mean by a bigger bazooka? Well, first of all, I mean that we need really strong conservative political infrastructure to be able to take on the Left. They are well-funded, they are activists, they have many friends in high places. And we need strength and depth in our political operation.
That’s why I’m working on a new political movement in the U.K. called Popular Conservatism, which is about bringing in more activists, more candidates, more potential legislators, more operators who can actually fight in the trenches against the Left in the ideological warfare that we now face.
The second thing we need to do is we need to dismantle the administrative state. And there are lots of people I speak to who say, “It’s just because you ministers aren’t tough enough. If only you were a bit bolder in taking on things, if only you had a bit more political will, you would be able to deliver.”
Those people are not right. Until we actually change the system, we are not going to be able to deliver conservative policy such as the depths of resistance in our institutions and our bureaucracy that we do have to change things first.
And what does that mean? Well, you’re ahead of us in the United States in that the president gets to appoint 3,000 people into the government positions. In Britain it’s only 100 people. And those 100 people are relatively junior. They’re not in charge of departments. So, I believe we need to change that in Britain. We need to properly appoint senior figures in our bureaucracy.
We also need to deal with the proliferation of unaccountable bureaucratic bodies. They have to go. There has to be a real bonfire of the quangos.
But even here in the United States, policies like Schedule F are going to be very, very important in order to be able to deliver a conservative agenda. And the project that Heritage is sponsoring, Project 2025, is another vital part of building that institutional infrastructure that can actually deliver conservative policies. Having seen what I’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, I think both of those things are vital in order for conservative policies to deliver.
But we can’t just deal with the administrative state at a national level because what we’ve also got is the global administrative state. We have the United Nations, the World Health Organization, we have the [Conference of the Parties] process.
And one of the things I tried to do was stop Britain hosting COP in Glasgow. I failed. But I want to see us in the future abandon that process. The best people to make decisions are people that are democratically elected in sovereign nations. It is not people sitting on international bodies who are divorced from the concerns of the public.
The final thing conservatives need to do is end appeasement. And by ending appeasement, I’m talking about the appeasement of woke Orwellianism at home as well as the appeasement of totalitarianism abroad. We have to do both of those things because both of those things are threatening our way of life.
Totalitarian regimes like China, Russia, and Iran have to be stood up to, the only thing they understand is strength. And now the military aid budget has been passed through Congress. There needs to be more clarity about how Russia can be defeated and how China and Iran will also be taken on. And in order to achieve that, we are going to need a change in personnel at the White House.
Now, I worked in Cabinet whilst Donald Trump was president and while President Biden was president. And I can assure you, the world felt safer when Donald Trump was in office. 2024 is going to be a vital year, and it’s the reason that I wanted to bring my book out now. Because getting a conservative back in the White House is critical to taking on the global Left. And I hate to think what life would be like with another four years of appeasement of the woke Left in the United States, as well as continued weakness on the international stage.
But my final message is that winning in 2025 or winning in 2024 and going into government in 2025 is not enough. It’s not enough just to win. It’s not enough just to have those conservative policies. That there will be huge resistance from the administrative state and from a Left in politics that has never been more extremist or more virulent.
And that is why it will need all the resources of the American conservative movement, think tanks like Heritage, and hopefully your allies in the United Kingdom to succeed. But you must succeed because the free world needs you.
The post Former British PM Liz Truss Warns About Global Threat of the Left appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House passed a four-bill $95 billion foreign aid package over the weekend that includes $60 billion in additional aid for Ukraine. The bill could cost House Speaker Mike Johnson his job.
The aid package passed in a 311-112 vote with the unanimous support of Democrats and 101 Republicans voting in favor of the bill.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., threatened to introduce a motion to remove Johnson, R-La., from his position as speaker if he brought the funding for Ukraine to the House floor for a vote.
“I think she’s looking at the totality of what’s come across the floor over the past few months, and she is expressing extreme disappointment with that,” Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, says of Greene. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, of which Heritage Action is the grassroots arm.)
Greene left Washington at the end of last week without introducing the motion to vacate the speaker but said during an interview Sunday on Fox News that she still planned to try to oust Johnson.
“Mike Johnson’s speakership is over,” Greene said on “Sunday Morning Futures,” adding, “He needs to do the right thing—to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process. If he doesn’t do so, he will be vacated.”
Less than one year after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the role, Capitol Hill is bracing for the potential of another speakership battle when Congress returns to Washington next week.
Walker joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the reason for the sharp divide in Congress over the foreign aid package and the likelihood Johnson will face removal as speaker. Walker also explains where Congress is getting the money to send to Ukraine.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Why Speaker Johnson’s Job Is on the Line After House Votes $60 Billion for Ukraine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The only two states that apportion Electoral College votes in presidential races by congressional district are poised to scrap what makes them unique.
In these systems, presidential candidates get one electoral vote for each congressional district they win in the state. Unlike in other states, the Democratic, Republican, and other party candidates could end up splitting a state’s electoral votes among them.
The usually blue Maine and generally red Nebraska each had one battleground congressional district that would sometimes draw presidential candidates.
But the Maine Legislature moved to give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote—regardless of who carries the state.
Nebraska lawmakers are considering becoming like 48 other states with winner-take-all elections, meaning the candidate who captures the majority of the state’s popular vote takes all of the state’s electoral votes. Nebraska’s change—if adopted—would affect the 2024 presidential election, while the Maine change likely wouldn’t.
Last week, Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would let a bill making Maine the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact become law without her signature after it narrowly passed the state Legislature.
Maine Joins National Popular Vote Compact https://t.co/e6tvfYRH6H via @democracynow
— NationalPopularVote (@NatlPopularVote) April 21, 2024
Under the multistate compact, Maine agrees to give its four electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote. The states that make up the compact thus far represent a combined 209 electoral votes. Those votes will only activate when the compact reaches the required 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.
Meanwhile, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen is considering calling a special session of the state Legislature, which already adjourned on April 18, to adopt a winner-take-all system for the state’s five electoral votes.
Pillen said he would only call a special session “when there is sufficient support in the Legislature to pass it.”
Prominent conservative commentators such as Charlie Kirk and Mark Levin have supported the change in Nebraska.
JUST IN—The Great One, Mark Levin, gets behind turning Nebraska into a winner-take-all electoral college state.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 9, 2024
The coalition is growing. Listen to @marklevinshow break down why this is critical ahead of November? pic.twitter.com/97PbsKAp3P
Maine enacted its rule to divide its electoral votes by congressional district ahead of the 1972 election. It took another 20 years for Nebraska to follow suit, which it did ahead of the 1992 election.
However, split votes have been rare.
The first time Nebraska had a split came when Democrat Barack Obama won the swing Nebraska district in the Omaha area in the 2008 election, the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won an electoral vote in the state.
In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of the state outside of Portland or Augusta, netting one electoral vote from the state. He was the first Republican since 1988 to win a Maine electoral vote.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden captured Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District and its electoral vote.
The post These 2 States Are Poised to Scrap Fractured Electoral College System—in Different Ways appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is not going to allow one lone judge to dictate whether the children of Ohio are protected from “transgender” surgeries and hormones, he shared in an interview with The Daily Signal.
Yost asked the state’s Supreme Court to intervene after Judge Michael Holbrook issued a temporary restraining order for House Bill 68, the Saving Ohio Adolescents From Experimentation, or SAFE, Act, on Tuesday.
That law bars physicians from performing “transgender reassignment” surgeries on children and from prescribing cross-sex hormones or drugs to block children’s puberty. It also would allow students to sue if they are deprived of a fair playing field in sports due to transgender activism (such as a boy who “identifies” as a girl playing on a girls’ volleyball team) and would protect parents’ rights to raise their children according to their biological sex.
A supermajority of Republican lawmakers voted to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s controversial veto of the bill in January, and before Holbrook blocked it, it was scheduled to go into effect on April 24.
On Monday, Yost, the Medical Board of Ohio, and the state of Ohio filed an emergency motion for a writ of prohibition, asking that Holbrook be ordered to modify his temporary restraining order to “comply with Ohio statutory and procedural limitations.”
The Ohio attorney general discussed the move and what he hopes will ensue from here in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“This is actually a trick that the Left has been using for a long time,” he explained. “Go to court with a couple of sympathetic plaintiffs, get a court order restraining the law from applying to anybody anywhere, and then use it to avoid majority rule and democratic processes that we have here in America.”
“It’s contrary to the law, it’s a misuse of the judicial process, and its fundamentally anti-Democratic,” he said.
Listen to the interview below:
The post Ohio Attorney General Breaks Down Leftist Legal ‘Trick’ to Block GOP Efforts to Protect Kids appeared first on The Daily Signal.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who do not like former President Donald Trump yet nonetheless smell prosecutorial overreach in Manhattan.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
The case began with Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, making a “hush money” payment to the former adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels to keep her from revealing information about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump in 2006. Bragg used the fact that Cohen paid $130,000 to Daniels in 2016, when Trump was running for president, as a pretext to turn a moldy misdemeanor offense into a felony.
But is it even illegal? This trial showcases something rich men and big corporations have been doing for years—paying off mistresses or wronged staffers with cash settlements with little public scrutiny, thanks to nondisclosure agreements.
I don’t like it, but it’s not a crime.
On Tuesday, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified that during a 2015 meeting in Trump Tower, he told Trump, Cohen, and campaign stalwart Hope Hicks that he wanted to help the Trump campaign, if behind the scenes.
What followed was “catch and kill,” the term for the scheme of paying to get dirt on a public figure, then killing the story, as happened with another alleged Trump gal pal, Karen McDougal. The National Enquirer paid her $150,000 for a story that never ran.
Trump has denied that anything extramarital occurred with McDougal and Daniels. But as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN, “You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
Back to Cohen. He’s a flawed witness to be sure, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to charges that included tax evasion and lying to Congress when he testified about Trump, his former master. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison.
Then, last year, Cohen claimed that he lied when he admitted to tax evasion. A more careful prosecutor would not hang a case on an accomplished liar.
Given his capacity for self-pity and self-sabotage, it’s no surprise that Trump told reporters after the second day of trial, “I’m not allowed to defend myself.”
Trump also continued to throw shade at Judge Juan Merchan, whose gag order, Trump maintained, robbed him of his “right to free speech.” Trump also offered that Merchan “should recuse himself.”
Pecker testified that he was glad to help by running “positive stories about Mr. Trump,” as well as negative stories about his campaign rivals. I’m guessing many Big Media hotshots feel the same way—about President Joe Biden.
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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 Trump Faces 34 Felonies at Trial. But Was There a Crime? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
If a belligerent state launched 185 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would President Joe Biden call it a “win”?
Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?
This is what Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of the Jewish state.
And by “Iranian dupes,” I don’t only mean the Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens of the world, who worked to elevate the mullahs over Sunni allies and the Israelis, or even a Hamas bestie like Rob Malley or Israel hater like Maher Bitar. I mean assets of the Islamic State who promised the Iranian government to help out in any way possible.
Their worldview is a cancer that’s metastasized within the Democratic Party. To these people, Israel will always be the villain. And if the Iranian regime’s murder of more than 600 American servicemen couldn’t cool that bromance, 1,200 dead Jews certainly aren’t going to do the trick.
The Trump administration undercut Palestinian terror efforts, stifled Iranian ambitions, and created space for the Gulf states and Israel to enhance ties.
Biden immediately reversed those gains, reverting to Obama-era Iranian boosterism. We’re now experiencing the consequences of pacifying Islamic ideologues. Obama might have sent the mullahs pallets of cash in the middle of the night, but the Biden administration openly subsidized the Revolutionary Guard with a $6 billion ransom payment, at least $25 billion in sanction relief, including $10 billion via a waiver, and so on.
Let’s also remember that one of Biden’s first foreign policy decisions was to overturn Trump-era policy by releasing millions to Gaza that would be sifted off by Hamas, releasing funding to Hamas-allied United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and removing the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list.
It should be mind-boggling that Biden likely knew Iran was moving forward with its attack but still gave his goofy and impotent “don’t” when asked about it by the press.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s position seems to be that Israeli military and defense forces exist to allow Iran to have a hissy fit and save face. The Iranian attack is only “symbolic” because it failed.
Just because you shoot at someone and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.
Every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)
Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.
Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.
Now, it is something of a cliche to contend that Israel must be right 100% of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.
Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”
Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back, while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the Left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.
We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be on Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The post The World Is Paying a Deadly Price for Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Republican establishment doesn’t know it yet, but last weekend was a watershed moment for their party.
On April 20, House Republican leadership facilitated passage of a foreign-aid package that sends roughly $60 billion to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel and Gaza, $8 billion to Taiwan, and exactly zero dollars to the southern border. The bill has since passed the Democrat-led Senate and was signed by President Joe Biden.
The vote will be remembered for the choice Republican leadership made to brazenly reject its own voters in favor of the “uniparty” in Washington, D.C.
In a move that can only be described as “McConnell-esque,” House Republican leadership teamed up with Democrats to overrule the position of their own conference, their voters, and the will of the American people.
Democrats on the House Rules Committee made an unprecedented move by crossing the party line and overruling Republican opposition in committee, signaling an end to the typically Democrat versus Republican battle and the beginning of the conservative versus “uniparty” war.
The disconnect between “the Swamp” and small-town America could not be more profound. How can a political party be so tone-deaf to the plight of the everyday Americans suffering under inflation, crime, and societal rot?
How can a Republican-led House prioritize the borders of another country over our own border, even as American citizens are killed by illegal immigrants?
How can so-called fiscally responsible Republicans sign off on what is now $174 billion in direct Ukraine aid with a national debt of $34 trillion—more than $250,000 for every American household?
And how can House Speaker Mike Johnson, who had pledged repeatedly that no foreign-aid legislation would advance without first securing the border, so quickly be steamrolled by the Establishment?
In their desire to send billions of dollars to a conflict that our commander-in-chief has still, to this day, offered no plan for winning, the GOP’s leadership not only spurned their party’s own supporters but overlooked an opportunity to appeal to independent Americans frustrated by both political parties.
According to recent polling that The Heritage Foundation conducted with RMG Research, an overwhelming three out of four swing voters opposed sending any additional aid to Ukraine without also allocating funds for our own border. A majority (56%) of swing voters in key battleground states thought that the $113 billion the United States had already committed to Ukraine was too much.
The entire Heritage enterprise fought for over a year and a half on this issue. Heritage Action for America engaged our millions of grassroots members to voice their concerns to their representatives. Scholars at The Heritage Foundation presented a national security alternative package that included limited military aid to Ukraine but made border security the central focus. In an unprecedented move, we even issued a “key vote” on our legislative scorecard against Speaker Johnson’s convoluted rule, which was a gimmick that lowered the threshold to a simple majority (not a supermajority under suspension) and provided political cover for members to vote against individual pieces without jeopardizing the package.
Powerful interests were aligned against us, however, and we lost on the day. Though we lost this battle, all signs indicate that we are winning the war for the soul of the GOP. A majority of Republicans (112) voted against Ukraine aid on April 20. Younger and newer members are particularly fed up with leadership’s conciliatory approach and manipulative tactics that have led us to this point. The average age of the Senate Republicans who voted “nay” is 59, while the average age of those who voted “yea” is 66. The average “nay” vote has been in office since just 2016, while the average “yea” vote has been in Washington since 2010. The same dynamic was true with the recent $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill.
This generational shift can be ignored by the “uniparty,” but it’s not going away. Newer, younger representatives want a choice, not an echo; and increasingly, they’re adopting a populist form of conservatism that champions “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” above all else.
In other words, they want a GOP that puts America first, something a government in any healthy republic would do. They want a GOP that acknowledges the reality that America is a nation in decline but is not yet too late to save.
As Ronald Reagan said in his 1980 address accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, “For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!”
And that brings us to the importance of this year’s election.
In 2016, despite staunch opposition from the GOP leadership, Donald Trump rejected the Washington consensus and initiated a generational realignment in American politics. If the conservative movement leans into the politics and policies President Donald Trump made successful, the American people will again have the opportunity this fall to accelerate a new consensus in Washington, D.C. This is why I remain optimistic about the future of our great nation.
The GOP establishment’s actions this past week portend the end of the GOP establishment, not its survival. Conservatives will win the soul of the GOP, and with it, the hearts of the American people.
Reprinted with permission from The Epoch Times.
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It’s no secret that Congress is highly unpopular with the American people. For years, it consistently has ranked near the bottom of U.S. institutions. This month’s Gallup/Newsweek poll put its disapproval at 80%.
But how about its leaders?
Veteran pollster and TV host Scott Rasmussen, president of RMG Research, surveyed 2,000 registered voters last week to see how Congress’ four party leaders stack up.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the longest-serving party leader in the chamber’s history, fares the worst with a 58% unfavorable rating. His counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., comes in at 43%.
On the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the newest of the four congressional leaders, has a 31% unfavorable rating compared to 26% for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
More than 1 in 5 voters (22%) say they never heard of Johnson, while nearly one-third (31%) say they haven’t heard of Jeffries.
All four congressional leaders have a higher unfavorable rating than favorable.
Rasmussen also asked voters about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, neither of whom received positive marks. Disapproval was higher for Biden, at 57%, compared to Harris, who has a 53% unfavorable rating.
Biden’s numbers have hovered around the same mark for months, although they are slightly better today than a few months ago, according to Rasmussen’s tracker.
The president ended last year with a 61% disapproval rate. Harris’ approval, meanwhile, cracked 40% for the first time in nearly a year.
Among the congressional leaders, Johnson’s favorable rating is 29% compared to 31% unfavorable. Jeffries is viewed favorably by 24% of voters compared to 26% unfavorable.
Schumer has a 32% favorable rating and 43% unfavorable rating. McConnell, who tops the charts with a 58% unfavorable rating, is viewed favorably by 23%.
RMG Research’s survey of 2,000 registered voters was conducted April 22 to 25 as Congress was considering a $95 billion foreign aid package. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
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The left-wing Arabella Advisors network has raked in more money than either of the two major political parties and affects almost every element of public policy and elections, argues Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a Washington-based investigative think tank.
Walter’s new book “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America” shows that in the 2020 election cycle, Arabella Advisors’ nonprofits took in $2.4 billion. That’s $1 billion more than the combined fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.
That amount rose to $3 billion in the 2022 election cycle, Walter says. Moreover, he adds, nothing on the Right comes close to competing.
“Arabella does not discriminate. It is working on arcane regulatory issues … but it also is running Facebook ads, attacking certain congressional candidates and boosting others. It plays in environmental issues. It plays in abortion issues. It plays in election policy,” Walter says on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Walter is set to testify Tuesday before the House Natural Resources Committee about what he calls “left-wing dark money [used] to influence environmental policy.”
“Arabella also continues to be very active in the environmental policy area in all sorts of ways,” he adds.
Arabella-backed organizations have been involved in battles over abortion and Supreme Court nominations and advocated that biological males compete in women’s sports.
Walter’s book details how two Arabella-aligned groups, the Center for Secure and Modern Elections and the Institute for Responsive Government, are involved in shaping election policy at the local level.
He notes that an Arabella-sponsored group funded by billionaire financier George Soros helped formulate the Biden administration’s recent change in Title IX policy to make it easier for biological males to compete in girls’ scholastic sports.
“That was plotted through a highly secretive group in the Arabella network, funded entirely with Soros money,” Walter said. “Governing for Impact, which they started in 2019, two years before the Biden administration was even sworn in. And they worked with Harvard Law School folks to do very sophisticated legal strategy memos of how to overturn dozens of regulations in the federal government, the most famous being Title IX.”
What’s differentiates Arabella from other major donors on the Left is the level of secrecy, Walter says. The network is more secretive than most nonprofits financed by Soros and his family, he says.
“We have tracked the institutional donors, and we can tell you that for almost all of the Arabella nonprofits, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which provides donor-advised funds to wealthy people, is the largest,” Walter said. He added, “Other really big donors to the Arabella network have [included Microsoft co-founder] Bill Gates. He is one of the largest, mostly through his foundation. [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg has given tens of millions, mostly for criminal justice reform—quote unquote—[that results in] letting criminals back on the streets.”
A spokesperson for Arabella Advisors didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Listen to Walter outline Arabella’s reach in a discussion of his book in the podcast below:
The post Arabella Network’s Leftist ‘Dark Money’ Influence Expanding, Author Reveals appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Under new federal guidelines, 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 pronoun the person doesn’t want used.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.
“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,” the new enforcement guidance says.
The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.
The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.
“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.
“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”
In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas
vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “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 Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.
“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”
In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”
“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.
The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.
“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”
The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Perry added:
According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.
This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.
This story was updated to include comments from commission members of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
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Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets.
When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them.
In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15-and-a-half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign.
The pro-Biden “media reporters” were still upset last week about the Enquirer and how it played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it’s not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name.”
This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.”
When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter.
So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face—NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name.
Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end.
Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Pecker as a news man.
Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning President Joe Biden).
Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats.
So, does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy.
Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed, “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.”
That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact-check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior? Both sides suggest the other side of the media is fake. But both sides are slinging a lot of opinionated hot takes, and Stelter can certainly flip a flapjack on that skillet.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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For Rep. Chip Roy, it’s a frustrating conversation that happens all too often with fellow lawmakers on his side of the aisle.
“‘Chip, we have a razor-thin majority. We just have to win the White House; we just have to win the Senate,’” the Texas Republican recalled in a speech Tuesday.
When he hears colleagues concerned about the narrow 217-212 House Republican majority, he notes the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority—51 senators in the Democratic caucus compared with 49 Republicans.
“Well, when do they ever look across there and say Chuck Schumer has a razor-thin majority?” Roy said of the Senate Democratic leader from New York. “When do they ever look and say, ‘You’re actually in charge of the House of Representatives, which James Madison told you in [Federalist Paper 58] actually has the power of the purse. Do something with it. Stop making excuses.’”
That prompted applause from the audience at The Heritage Foundation at an event, “Defunding the Left.” (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Roy had earlier quoted Madison—father of the Constitution and later the fourth president of the United States—who wrote in Federalist 58:
The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. … This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
Though the GOP mostly prevented nondefense spending hikes, and kept the political focus on border security, he said irresponsible spending is a bipartisan problem that “infests the entire swamp” in both parties.
“The fundamental problem is not just the weakening of the dollar and the strength of our financial system. It’s actually the radical Left funding the tyranny, funding the government that’s at war with your way of life.”
He noted the Republican-controlled House approved $62 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid rising crime and fentanyl deaths in the U.S. resulting from the border crisis.
The House majority also went along with $200 million to fund a new FBI headquarters and overall about $40 billion for the Justice Department, despite concerns about politicized lawfare. He noted $824 billion went to the Defense Department with no demands to scrap its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that are hurting armed forces recruitment.
The House majority allowed $80 billion for the Department of Education; $9 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency; and $117 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, while requiring no accountability for mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic by departmental subordinate agencies, such as National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While his GOP colleagues often talk about the need to win the next election, Roy said, conservative control of both houses of Congress and the White House are not guaranteed to reverse the trend.
“Literally, on Day One, they are going to say, ‘Chip, we can’t do all you want to do because we don’t have 60 in the Senate. You’ve got to be reasonable.’” Roy predicted. “I promise you that’s coming. So, we have to win majorities. But we have to plan now for driving a steamroller over the weak-kneed individuals in Congress that will use 60 [as a premise] not to fight for you.”
In the Senate, 60 votes are required to end filibusters.
Roy noted there were some positive accomplishments, however. Since winning the majority, House Republicans have for the most part “kept the ball on our side of the field,” he said.
Nondefense spending was largely held flat, while increased defense spending in 2023 was initially paid for by taking money out of the Internal Revenue Service and unspent COVID-19 funding.
That occurred after then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., put caps in place, even though the caps were discarded in January. Further, Roy noted that House Republicans didn’t let Democrats redirect the border debate to one of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“Amnesty was off the table. All we talked about this last year was border security. We didn’t achieve it, but we didn’t allow the Democrats to start moving the ball down the field and have a debate about amnesty,” Roy said. “It matters where you set the goal post and how you set your mission.”
The Texas lawmaker criticized the recent $95 billion foreign aid package that passed without the support of most Republicans. He said that too often, members of Congress “default to fear” on defense spending.
“I want the strongest military that we can possibly produce. I want it to be sparingly used,” Roy said, adding:
I don’t want to use it often, but if we do, I want it to destroy everything in its path. But we just default to fear, and we use the national security-defense complex to run over everything else.
“People literally come into [House Republicans’] meetings and say, ‘We just can’t risk defense.’ Well, if that’s what you do, you’re never going to change the town,” he continued, “because they are always going to use defense as the leverage to say, ‘We’re not going to cut [the Justice Department]; we’re not going to cut education; we’re not going to make reforms.”
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FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Before becoming one of the Justice Department’s top leaders, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke was allegedly involved in a violent domestic dispute, according to court documents, records, and text messages—an incident that ended in her arrest and was ultimately expunged. During her Senate confirmation, Clarke specifically denied ever having been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime.
Clarke was nominated by President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 7, 2021, and later confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 25, 2021, to lead the DOJ’s “crown jewel,” as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. described the Civil Rights Division.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated Clarke as the first black woman to head the Civil Rights Division, promising she would focus on fighting voter suppression and hate crimes “across the country.”
During her confirmation, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked then-nominee Clarke: “Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person?”
“No,” she responded, according to responses she submitted under oath to “Questions for the Record” from U.S. senators.
Messages as well as records obtained and authenticated by The Daily Signal indicate that Clarke may have been less than forthcoming with this statement.
Clarke’s ex-husband, Reginald Avery, alleged to the American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones in 2021 that Clarke attacked him with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone, on the night of July 4, 2006, while they were married and living in Maryland.
According to messages and documents reviewed by The Daily Signal, police arrested Clarke that night. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Court records obtained by The Daily Signal show that a criminal case against Clarke was initiated in the District Court of Maryland for Prince George’s County, but on Oct. 17, 2006, the Maryland state attorney entered a request of “nolle prosequi” in the case, which effectively dismissed the charge without trial.
Approximately a year-and-a-half later, Clarke sought an “Order for Expungement of Police and Court Records” in the same case.
A document obtained by The Daily Signal shows that the district court granted that order in January 2008. The document specifically orders “expungement of police records pertaining to [Clarke’s] arrest, detention, or confinement” on or about July 5, 2006, by a “law enforcement officer of the Prince George’s County Police.”
Citing the “True Test” stamp on the expungement order, an official at the clerk’s office for the District Court of Maryland for Prince George’s County confirmed the authenticity of the expungement order to The Daily Signal.
“That’s a real document,” the official said.
Court records show that Avery and Clarke finalized their contentious divorce in 2009. Clarke had served as a trial attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division until April 2006, several months before the incident.
When the July 4, 2006, incident occurred, Clarke was leading the left-wing National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund’s voting and election efforts.
It is not immediately clear whether Clarke was legally required to disclose her arrest during her nomination process, though this seems to generally be considered the prudential course of action to take during such a process.
According to Maryland law, Criminal Procedure §10-109, “Disclosure of expunged information about criminal charges in an application, interview, or other means may not be required” by an employer or educational institution of a person who is applying for employment or admission or by a “unit, official, or employee of the State or a political subdivision of the State of a person who applies for a license, permit, registration, or governmental service.”
That Maryland code also says that a person does not need to reveal information about an expunged charge when answering a question concerning a criminal charge that did not result in a conviction.
However, the nonprofit law firm Maryland Legal Aid notes that it is probably prudent to disclose expungement records when applying for certain types of jobs that require a security clearance, such as government or military jobs, since these types of employers are still going to be able to see the criminal charges in a person’s background.
Mark Robbins, who served as general counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, believes that a DOJ nominee should indeed disclose an expunged arrest when specifically asked.
Robbins noted that though the expungement processes are typically determined by state law, presidential nominees for Senate confirmation go through a political process. There are two sets of paperwork relevant to a nomination, he said: the first from the White House for clearance before nomination, and the second from the relevant Senate committee.
Both of these sets contain questions about criminal and civil legal actions, Robbins said, as well as an open-ended question to the effect of: “Is there anything else that could even unfairly be seen as a potential hurdle to confirmation?”
“An arrest with an expungement likely has a background and explanation,” he said. “Why not disclose it? It isn’t particularly relevant what the legal consequence of expungement is. The issue is the political consequence of an arrest becoming public during or after the confirmation process, thus embarrassing the administration and Senate.”
Robbins concluded: “In my service as general counsel at two federal agencies, if a nominee asked me whether to disclose an arrest and expungement, I certainly would advise to either disclose in the paperwork with an explanation, or at the very least, note for the record that you would like to discuss this personally with someone in the White House or on the Senate committee staff.”
According to the Center for Presidential Transition, every person hired for a federal job is asked to complete a background check, and nominees are asked to complete either a “Questionnaire for National Security Positions,” the SF-86, or a “Questionnaire for Public Trust Positions,” an SF 85P.
The SF-86, for example, specifically says that applicants must report information “regardless of whether the record in your case has been sealed, expunged, or otherwise stricken from the court record, or the charge was dismissed” (though it notes that applicants don’t need to ‘report convictions under the Federal Controlled Substances Act for which the court issued an expungement order under the authority of 21 U.S.C. 844 or 18 U.S.C. 3607.'”
Every presidential administration has its own version of another form that supplements the SF-86—the SF-86 Supplement, according to the Center for Presidential Transition. That form includes questions about whether “you or your spouse” have been “the subject of any civil or criminal case, administrative proceeding, or government investigation, other than a minor traffic incident.”
It also asks: “With as much detail as possible, please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, which could suggest a conflict of interest, be a possible source of embarrassment, or be used to coerce or blackmail you.”
Clarke, as a nominee for a DOJ position, would have also been required to fill out a “Questionnaire for non-judicial nominees” from the Senate Judiciary Committee—questionnaires submitted before the hearing.
This would include a confidential section, accessible to the Senate Judiciary Committee staff and members, in which Clarke could have revealed the expunged information.
A source with prior experience in the confirmation process told The Daily Signal that it is unlikely Clarke disclosed the arrest and expungement in the confidential portion. If she had disclosed such an arrest, the source said, members would have likely taken the opportunity to request one-on-one meetings with her to discuss, to hold a closed hearing, or to ask her to discuss the matter publicly.
In 2022, for example, Republicans brought up 6th Circuit nominee Andre Mathis’ three traffic tickets and his “failure to appear in court” related to “extended periods of driving without a license”—information they learned about during his vetting process, as Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said at the time.
“Mr Mathis has agreed to discuss this issue publicly and that made possible his appearance today and I thank him for agreeing to do that,” Grassley said, according to a transcript of the hearing, acknowledging that Mathis had agreed to making the tickets public.
“It just speaks to how the process works–when something comes up in the FBI’s background investigation, it’s shared with all the members on the committee and if they want to ask about it either the nominee waives confidentiality or we have a closed portion of the hearing,” a source close to Clarke’s confirmation process explained to The Daily Signal.
A copy of Clarke’s questionnaire obtained by The Daily Signal does not contain any information or questions about possible arrests. The Daily Signal was not able to obtain a copy of the confidential questionnaire.
Multiple sources familiar with the confirmation process told The Daily Signal that they do not believe Clarke disclosed the arrest, not only because they would have been aware of the matter, but also given the nature of Cotton’s written questions, submitted after her confirmation hearing but before the committee voted on her nomination.
“It’s strange beyond strange that Clarke wouldn’t reveal this in the first place,” said appellate litigator Judd Stone, former Texas solicitor general of Texas and former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “Just deeply strange … if you reveal it, and it turns out you can’t get through committee, then they tell you quietly that you can’t proceed with the nomination, it doesn’t go out to the press, you don’t get tarred and feathered, and you go back to what you’re doing.”
“I can’t imagine a Republican nomination getting away with this,” he added.
Jones, head of the American Accountability Foundation, began digging into Clarke’s background during her Senate confirmation process. He reached out to Avery as part of his investigation, and text messages between Avery and Jones illustrate the alleged events of the July 4, 2006, incident.
“I was seeing another woman,” Avery shared in the May 2021 text message exchange. “She was angry. Attacked me with a knife. I instinctively grabbed it. As I said earlier, I’m not blameless.”
“That’s the story,” Avery insisted. “That’s what happened. She went to jail.”
Avery confirmed to The Daily Signal that his text conversations with Jones accurately represent what took place that night, including that he did not ultimately press charges and that he was not contacted by federal authorities about the incident. He declined to comment further.
Prince George’s County Police Department records show that the department was called on nine different occasions by someone at Avery’s and Clarke’s Upper Marlboro, Maryland, household between May 2003 and December 2007.
Seven of those calls were for a “threat” or some type of domestic violence, but most were cleared without a report. The July 4, 2006, call was made by “Mr. Reginald” (Avery’s first name) and accompanied by a 760 code, according to a mainframe print-out from Prince George’s County computer-aided dispatch system obtained by The Daily Signal.
That 760 code is the department’s clearance code for “arrest,” the Prince George County Police Department confirmed.
That call was not cleared for four hours, and Avery maintains it was Clarke who was arrested. Clarke has not addressed the matter, though given multiple opportunities to respond.
The DOJ official’s ex-husband also shared with Jones that on the night of the incident, he called 911 due to his injury and the “cops came because [his] finger was cut off.” (Avery clarified to The Daily Signal that the finger was sliced to the bone, not cut off.) Police allegedly decided to arrest Clarke, and Avery said he went to the emergency room in Bowie, Maryland, for the injury. He does not have photos of the injury.
Jones and Avery speculated via 2021 text messages about why Clarke would hide the arrest: “I assume she just thinks she won’t get caught,” Jones queried, to which Avery responded, “Yes, the arrogance has always been there. But I don’t understand lying on a federal application.”
Staffers who worked on Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarke’s confirmation say that, while they looked into rumors of an arrest and contacted Avery, they never had access to the expungement order or charge dismissal notice. The Daily Signal is reporting first on the existence of both documents.
Avery refused to speak to the Senate staffers who reached out to him in 2021, a Senate source familiar with Clarke’s confirmation process told The Daily Signal. Staff felt they could not just sling allegations at Clarke without more evidence, the source said, but Cotton’s question to Clarke about violent crime was a direct result of the numerous Republican judiciary committee staff discussions surrounding Clarke, Jones’ findings, and the July 4, 2006, incident.
Jones questioned why Avery’s story was not thoroughly examined during the Senate’s review of Clarke’s record and why Clarke’s ex-husband was never contacted by federal officials during the confirmation process.
Jones also published some of his findings online, in which he noted that “congressional staff” confirmed that Avery had never been contacted by the FBI. The FBI declined to comment on the matter to The Daily Signal.
“Speaking to an ex-spouse is some of the most basic type of investigations that one should do when vetting a senior official,” Jones told The Daily Signal.
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Clarke did face scrutiny during her nomination process for remarks and social media posts made before her DOJ role, such as calling Alliance Defending Freedom a “hate group” and Liberty University a “fundamentalist Christian school.” She also said that those protesting Dr. Anthony Fauci should be “publicly identified and named, barred from treatment at any public hospital if/when they fall ill and denied coverage under their insurance.”
Clarke similarly criticized Republican politicians from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to former President Donald Trump. She supported the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, submitted testimony to the U.S. Senate that Amy Coney Barrett was unfit to serve as a justice because she would likely rule to overturn Roe v. Wade, critiqued pro-life laws and courts that upheld them, and called a law protecting Down syndrome babies “draconian.”
Anti-choice activists are intensifying their work to end abortion.
— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) July 20, 2018
Conservative evangelical and Catholic groups are pouring money into the #Kavanaugh nomination battle.
Make no mistake — A vote for Kavanaugh, is a vote to overrturn #roevswade https://t.co/uo172qM1aj
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now heads the Tucker Carlson Network, ran multiple segments highlighting Clarke’s comments about racial superiority as well as her role in organizing a 1994 event while at Harvard University that hosted a professor who accused Jews of persecuting black people. Clarke, who was the president of Harvard’s Black Students Association, has since said it “was a mistake” to host the professor.
At the time of the event, Clarke defended professor Tony Martin when he received backlash, writing, “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”
The Daily Signal previously reported that Clarke, who oversees investigations into violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, has used FACE to charge dozens of pro-life individuals since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. This includes Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven arrested at gunpoint by the FBI and charged with violating FACE in September 2022 (a jury found Houck was not guilty in January 2023, and the DOJ has not commented on this verdict publicly).
Enacted in 1994, the FACE Act prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services. It applies not only to abortion clinics, but also to pro-life pregnancy centers and houses of worship.
Though Clarke is the helm of the DOJ’s FACE Act enforcements, she is a vocal abortion proponent who has denounced pro-life pregnancy centers, as the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross previously reported.
The DOJ has charged only five pro-abortion individuals with violating the FACE Act when they attacked pro-life pregnancy centers, even though hundreds of pregnancy centers and Catholic churches have been attacked since May 2022, when the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, indicating Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned.
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has charged zero individuals with FACE for attacking Catholic churches, though it has charged other individuals with hate crimes with defacing a synagogue with neo-Nazi symbols and attempting to burn down a church that planned to host drag show events.
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Testified She Was Never Arrested. Court Records and Text Messages Indicate She Was. appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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