Login
It is a presidential election year, and a leading candidate for president of the United States, who also happens to be a former president of the United States, is currently a criminal defendant chained to a dingy courtroom four days of the week—time that he should be spending interacting with voters out on the campaign trail.
That’s terrible. But it’s only the beginning.
The daughter of the presiding judge is a professional political operative for the presidential candidate’s opposition party, and the candidate himself is subject to an over-inclusive and unconstitutional gag order.
The George Soros-funded district attorney, who campaigned on a platform of prosecuting that candidate, only pressed charges after his own left-wing predecessor opted not to do so due to the frivolous nature of the charges. One of the Soros-funded district attorney’s subordinates curiously joined his team—just in time to prosecute the candidate—from a high-ranking perch in the Department of Justice that is headed by the candidate’s chief political rival.
And this week, the candidate was subjected to tawdry and salacious testimony from a discredited former porn star, who spoke openly in court about how she “blacked out” during their alleged 2006 sexual encounter. Due to the sprawling gag order, the candidate was not—and is not—legally permitted to defend his honor and contest her lurid, legally irrelevant claims.
Welcome to our American banana republic.
America has many real, glaring problems on its hands. Inflation remains stubborn, and Americans widely report feeling pessimistic about the economy, despite nominal low unemployment metrics. Our wide-open southern border is disastrous, leading to artificially suppressed working-class wages and the most rampant illegal alien crime in the nation’s history. Violent and property crime rates remain too high, especially in large urban corridors. Energy prices should be considerably lower, and they would be if our moronic leaders allowed producers to tap into America’s great natural wellspring of hydrocarbons.
Around the world, hostile regimes act against our interests in unrestrained and revanchist fashion. At home, childlessness, godlessness, anxiety, and depression are all rising, symptomatic of a broader civilizational rot and a society that has lost confidence in what it claims to stand for.
Amidst all this, it would be ideal to have a normal, competitive presidential race in which the flailing incumbent is directly confronted and his record is challenged for all to see. But Americans are now being deprived of anything remotely resembling a normal presidential race. Donald Trump is physically chained down to Judge Juan Merchan’s New York courtroom, unable to get out on the campaign trail and deliver his signature rallies to adoring fans across the heartland.
These often-forgotten Americans are, in a quite literal sense, denied the opportunity to hear the full argument against the Biden Regime due to these insidious workings of the Democrat-lawfare complex.
Instead of permitting the Regime’s challenger, Trump, to campaign for votes in Wisconsin, he is forced to silently endure the unhinged courtroom musings of a literal porn star and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen)—all in furtherance of a case that suffers from insuperable statute of limitations problems in addition to the structural absurdity of a local district attorney (the Soros-funded Alvin Bragg) prosecuting and attempting to prove a federal crime (a campaign finance violation).
Oh, and if Trump doesn’t shut up and keep quiet, Merchan might throw him in jail—as he has repeatedly threatened to do, if Trump keeps violating his unconstitutional gag order.
What a sick, cruel joke it all is.
Democrats seem not to have given any thought to what happens if they lose. If Trump wins, do Democrats seriously not expect him to respond in kind? Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
Just as Senate Democrats’ November 2013 invocation of the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster for lower-court nominees directly led to Republicans doing the same for Supreme Court nominees just a few years later, so, too, is it impossible to know what may ultimately come from the lawfare precedent Democrats are setting today.
The new rules have been established. Many of us didn’t want these rules, but here we are anyway. So, game on.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post The Making of an American Banana Republic appeared first on The Daily Signal.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not like Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record—and Donald Trump’s.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed that other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk; namely, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 156.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics—for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic—most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies—drove massive job losses. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So, Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
But that wasn’t Biden’s worst mangle. He claimed to CNN that “no president’s had the run we have had, in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”
That’s ridiculous! It’s a baldfaced lie. Inflation was 1.4%, again, due to the pandemic. Burnett didn’t check his facts, during or after the interview. She pushed him to acknowledge inflation was bad, but she didn’t suggest he was lying.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted: “And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward.”
And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward… https://t.co/1lgapFWYgp
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 9, 2024
That would be Daniel Dale, who’s almost entirely deployed on TV to “fact-check” Trump. Since Trump’s Manhattan trial began in mid-April, Dale has appeared nine times to “check” him. He has not appeared to check anyone else. On April 18, Jake Tapper said, “He’s handy to have around at times like this.”
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here and declaring it “false” is a lame spin.
On Tuesday, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor—and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying leftist billionaire George Soros is “a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
If a conservative DA received big money from a pro-Trump PAC, CNN would call him or her “Trump-backed” without hesitation. CNN deploys Dale not as a “fact-checker” as much as a spin spoiler.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Apart from the taxpayer-funded lawfare being waged against former President Donald Trump by leftist prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, there is no clearer proof that the Left has embraced “by any means necessary” as its credo than the politicization of Secret Service protection of President Joe Biden’s presidential rivals.
Not only has Biden’s Department of Homeland Security denied five requests for Secret Service protection from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the flimsiest of grounds, but now the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who chaired the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee is proposing to strip Trump of his Secret Service detail if he were convicted in any of the politically motivated trials he’s facing.
Never mind that this brazen legislation, championed by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has no chance of being enacted by Congress or that the courts would surely enjoin it as unconstitutional if it were. Its sheer cold-bloodedness is appalling.
Thompson knows full well that if any of Trump’s trials—which the former president calls “witch hunts”—were to end in a prison sentence and he had no Secret Service protection behind bars, he would have a target on his back for attack by other inmates. (Think Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd, who barely survived a Nov. 24 stabbing in prison in Arizona.)
Such is the Trump Derangement Syndrome that has suffused the Left. What other possible reason than bloodlust would motivate Thompson to sponsor such sociopathic legislation—even though he surely knows that it reeks of being an unconstitutional bill of attainder?
The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School states that courts apply a legal test to determine whether legislation violates the ban on bills of attainder under Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution by determining whether the law “targets specific named or identifiable individuals or groups.”
Thompson’s Disgraced Former Protectees Act, introduced April 19, includes only one “identifiable individual”: Donald Trump.
Thompson is the ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, which brings us back to disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ repeated denial of Secret Service protection for Kennedy since he announced his candidacy just over a year ago.
Given that the independent presidential hopeful’s father and uncle were both assassinated, it’s beyond appalling that Biden and Mayorkas can’t even be shamed into authorizing Secret Service protection for him.
Even many of Kennedy’s own relatives who have inexplicably endorsed Biden’s reelection bid over their own kin have asked for a security detail for him—to no avail.
At an April 18 event in Philadelphia at which Biden was endorsed for reelection by several members of the extended Kennedy clan (including two of RFK Jr.’s own siblings), the president obliquely alluded to the assassinations. “Your family … has endured such violence,” he said.
If they expected authorization of Secret Service protection as a show of presidential gratitude for turning their backs on their own relative, they were sadly mistaken.
Mayorkas asserts that Kennedy doesn’t qualify for Secret Service protection. As recently as March 28, the homeland security chief wrote to the Kennedy campaign: “Based on the facts and the recommendation of the advisory committee, I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.”
That’s patently false, inasmuch as Mayorkas and the president have wide latitude in authorizing the protection. You could ask then-President Jimmy Carter, who in 1980 extended it to then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s uncle, after he launched an insurgent Democratic primary challenge to Carter.
It’s as if Biden and Mayorkas actually want harm to befall the scion of the legendary political family because they fear his independent candidacy will siphon enough votes away from the incumbent to ensure Trump’s return to the Oval Office next January.
What is that if not “by any means necessary”? One thing is certain: It’s not as if Biden’s spendthrift administration is trying to save federal taxpayer dollars by withholding the protection.
Kennedy rightly characterizes the repeated denial of protection as the “weaponization of government” and “a political scandal.”
A day after the most recent denial, his attorney, Aaron Siri, in a letter to Mayorkas, called it “capricious, an abuse of discretion, and clearly politically motivated,” adding:
If any harm befalls Mr. Kennedy or any other member of the public who may be injured or killed in any incident that arises due to lack of Secret Service protection to the candidate and the deterrent it affords, we will seek to hold you accountable.
Translation: The president and his lackey Mayorkas will have blood on their hands.
Originally published by The Washington Times
The post Bloodlust: The Left’s Politicization of Secret Service Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Legislation adopted Wednesday by the House of Representatives would restore a question about U.S. citizenship to the 2030 census, potentially reshaping congressional representation and the Electoral College.
Lawmakers voted, 206-202, to pass the Equal Representation Act, a bill championed by Reps. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio. (See how your representative voted.) Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., introduced the Senate version, which Republicans overwhelmingly supported in a March vote.
With millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States—a problem exacerbated by the Biden administration’s border policies—the legislation aims to protect Americans’ electoral power and congressional representation by ensuring foreign citizens aren’t counted in the census.
“If you are an illegal immigrant, you should not be represented in the U.S. Congress,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., told The Daily Signal. “It’s a shame that House Democrats are allowing their open-borders agenda to get in the way of common sense.”
One of those Democrats openly acknowledged the benefits of counting illegal aliens. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., 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
After being in all but one census from 1820 to 2000, the citizenship question was abandoned in the 2010 questionnaire during the Obama administration. The Trump administration attempted to restore the citizenship question for the 2020 census, but a divided Supreme Court ruled against its approach, and the idea was abandoned.
The Equal Representation Act would require the citizenship question on the 2030 census and each decennial census that follows.
Heritage Action, an independent partner of The Heritage Foundation, advocated for passage of the Equal Representation Act. The organization scored Wednesday’s vote on HR 7109. (The Heritage Foundation created The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Ryan Walker, Heritage Action’s executive vice president, faulted the Obama administration for undoing nearly 200 years of precedent. Walker said the consequences of inaction are significant, given the ongoing border crisis.
“Illegal immigrants and other noncitizens cannot vote, and should not be given the power to sway our elections or congressional maps—especially in light of Joe Biden’s border crisis that has brought more than 10 million people into our country,” Walker said. “The Equal Representation Act puts electoral power back in the hands of those with the right to vote—American citizens—something every member of Congress must protect.”
The House version amassed 114 co-sponsors and was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in April on a 22-20 vote.
Illegal aliens should have ZERO influence in our electoral process.
— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) May 8, 2024
You don't get to come to our country, break our laws, and then be included in congressional apportionment.
That's why I cosponsored the Equal Representation Act, which the House will vote on tonight.
“Members of Congress represent U.S. citizens, not foreigners,” said Davidson, the bill’s co-sponsor. “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.”
Hagerty forced a vote on the Equal Representation Act in March. It ultimately failed, 51-45, although only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against it. Three other Republicans didn’t vote.
The post House Passes Bill to Restore Citizenship Question to Census appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Years before the prosecution called the former porn star to testify Tuesday in Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in Manhattan, Democrats viewed Stormy Daniels as an avenue for impeaching Trump when he was president.
My 2020 book “Abuse of Power” details the origins of Left’s lawfare against Trump, which began immediately after his 2016 election to the presidency.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, led the first criminal case against Trump, followed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and two federal prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith.
Indicted in four separate criminal cases for a total of 91 counts, Trump got some good news Tuesday when a federal judge in Florida postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case, one of Smith’s.
Below is an adapted excerpt from “Abuse of Power”:
It’s funny how “legal experts” who would pop up working for Democrats were talking and writing about Trump’s demise for other reasons months earlier.
Two lawyers whom the House Judiciary Committee hired for impeachment, Norman Eisen and Barry Berke, wrote a New York Times opinion piece along with Noah Bookbinder, also a lawyer, with the headline: “Is This the Beginning of the End for Trump?”
The lawyers suggested Trump could be taken down for a possible campaign finance violation tied to alleged flings with former porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Or, as the lawyers characterized it in their Times piece, federal prosecutors determined that “Mr. Trump, the Trump Organization, and the campaign were all directly involved in an illegal scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with Mr. Trump.”
The lawyers’ op-ed in the Times further says Trump “could be named as an unindicted co-conspirator” or “charged if he leaves office before the statute of limitations runs out (most likely in 2022).”
Still, regarding the hush money [for Daniels and McDougal], even House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi had said after the news of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s planned guilty plea that it wasn’t grounds for impeachment, even as some of her members were pushing for that.
“Impeachment has to spring from something else. If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” Pelosi said in 2018. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”
But impeachment was a priority for members of the House Democratic Caucus, which she led.
In December 2018, when Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for paying hush money to Daniels, the plea agreement referred to “Individual 1” as directing him to do so. It was clear that this individual was Trump.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other financial crimes and was sentenced to three years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In late 2019, with Democrats in control of the House, many of the hardliners in Pelosi’s caucus were pushing the speaker to go beyond Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as grounds for impeachment.
Democrats in the House Progressive Caucus wanted to include the ambiguous obstruction arguments from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the discredited Trump-Russia claims, the campaign finance allegation in the Stormy Daniels case, the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and potentially other matters. By this point, the House had launched 12 separate investigations into Trump.
But after initial resistance, Pelosi had already caved once to the members demanding Trump’s impeachment on the Ukrainian phone call. The other matters would only prolong the process.
Trump admitted he and Zelenskyy talked about Joe Biden. Now, Democrats just had to turn it into an impeachable case.
Nevertheless, keeping swing district House Democrats in the loop was one reason why, early in the process, leadership had considered progressives’ demands for a “kitchen sink” impeachment involving Russia, Stormy Daniels, emoluments, and anything else they could think of.
This would allow moderate Democrats to go home and say they had voted against some articles of impeachment while still voting to oust Trump in order to appease the base and avoid a potential primary challenger from the left. In the age of MAGA and #Resistance voters, primary challenges are a forefront concern for incumbents on both sides.
During the impeachment hearing, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee called former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to testify.
As with other witnesses, Yovanovitch’s legal counsel was steeped in Democratic politics. Lawrence S. Robbins represented both Republican and Democrat clients.
But in a December 2018 op-ed for Politico, Robbins called for either impeaching or prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violation regarding the Daniels hush money.
Robbins wrote: “The Department of Justice’s description of the role of Individual 1—the president himself—leaves no doubt that career Justice Department prosecutors regard Trump as a full blown co-conspirator. And most serious-minded criminal lawyers agree that, if these allegations are true, the president, but for his day job, would have been sitting in the dock with his long-time fixer.”
Robbins further wrote that Trump would use his office as president to shield himself from prosecution, so “Congress would surely have no choice but to hold him accountable in the way prescribed by the Constitution.”
That way, of course, was impeachment.
The post How the Left Tried to Use Stormy Daniels to Impeach Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The lead prosecutor for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “hush money” case against former President Donald Trump received thousands of dollars from the Democratic National Committee in 2018, Federal Election Commission records show.
Matthew Colangelo, who was President Joe Biden’s acting associate attorney general and spent two years in the current president’s Justice Department, joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as senior counsel in December 2022.
The lawyer received $12,000 from the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting” in two payments of $6,000 on Jan. 31, 2018, FEC records show.
Fox News Digital first reported the payments to Colangelo from the DNC.
Reports say Matthew Colangelo received $12,000 from the DNC for "political consulting" in 2018.
— Daniel Baldwin (@baldwin_daniel_) May 6, 2024
Colangelo delivered the opening statement for the prosecution in the Trump hush money case.
Yet Trump can't talk about this due to his unconstitutional gag order.
Trump is not supposed to speak about Colangelo because Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order that prevents the former president from speaking about prosecutors on the case besides Bragg.
Colangelo was appointed in 2022, while Bragg was still investigating Trump in relation to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her silent regarding an alleged affair. Colangelo delivered opening statements for the prosecution in April, arguing that Trump falsified business documents about the payment as part of a broader initiative to “corrupt the 2016 election.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo said.
Trump consistently has characterized the case as “election interference,” referring to it as a “Biden witch hunt” and the “Biden case.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding Colangelo, requesting documents and communications from his tenure at the Justice Department. Jordan demanded personnel files pertaining to Colangelo’s hiring, employment, and termination there, as well as records and correspondences related to Trump or his organization.
“Bragg is engaged in one such politicized prosecution, which is being led in part by Matthew B. Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official,” Jordan wrote. “Accordingly, given the perception that the Justice Department is assisting in Bragg’s politicized prosecution, we write to request information and documents related to Mr. Colangelo’s employment.”
While at the New York State Attorney General’s Office before Biden became president, Colangelo led the probe into the Trump Foundation, which resulted in its dissolution. He also led the investigation that eventually became Trump’s civil fraud case, according to The New York Times.
Neither Bragg nor the Democratic National Committee immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Former Biden DOJ Official Prosecuting Trump Received Thousands of Dollars From DNC appeared first on The Daily Signal.
As the veepstakes speculation grows, Donald Trump—Republicans’ presumptive nominee for president for the third straight time—has had plenty to say about the group of contenders for the second spot on the ticket.
Axios reported over the weekend on an audio recording obtained from a gathering at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in which the former president comments on numerous contenders for his choice to be vice president.
Those possible Trump choices include three fellow Floridians who are in Congress: Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Byron Donalds and Michael Waltz. Trump also talked about two former 2024 primary opponents, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
The names of three more senators also were in the mix: Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Lee of Utah, and JD Vance of Ohio. And Trump commented on the often-mentioned chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik of New York.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who made the news last week for telling a story in her new memoir about shooting and killing a 14-month-old farm dog, was among those that Trump commented on. (For her part, Noem said the dog posed a danger to her family and other animals after killing chickens.)
“Somebody that I love,” Trump says of Noem in the audio recording released by Axios. “She’s been with me, a supporter of mine, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.”
Axios reported that Trump’s “most prominent surrogates” went to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday to “audition for vice president.” At a private luncheon, Trump commented on the potential running mates, the outlet said.
In the recording,Trump doesn’t seem to resent by name any former opponents in the 2024 Republican primaries who reportedly have been in the running for his nod to be vice president. (However, he doesn’t mention Nikki Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, who didn’t drop out until March 6.)
As for North Dakota’s Burgum, governor of a state next door to Noem’s, Trump says: “I didn’t know this: He was a supporter of my two campaigns. He’s a very rich man.”
On Scott, the South Carolina senator, Trump says: “As a candidate, he did a good job, but as a surrogate, he’s unbelievable.”
In a press release Monday, BetOnline announced that it was updating its betting odds after the Mar-a-Lago meeting, giving Scott and Burgum the best odds at 4-1. Vance, once seen as a longshot, rose to 5-1. Rubio is 8-1.
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat in Congress who became an independent after leaving office, is at 9-1. Gabbard’s name, however, doesn’t come up in the Trump audio leaked to Axios.
Interestingly, none of the possible contenders mentioned by Trump were from battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.
Trump notes that Vance wasn’t always on board, according to the audio, but calls the junior senator from Ohio “great,” Axios reported.
“He wasn’t a supporter of mine at the very beginning [and] was saying things like ‘the guy’s a total disaster’… Anyways, I got to know him a little bit,” Trump says of Vance. “As a non-politician, he’s become one of the great senators.”
In the 2016 Republican primary cycle, Trump mocked Florida’s Rubio as “Little Marco.” Rubio at one point referred to Trump’s small hands.
In the audio, Trump only says of Rubio: “His name is coming up a lot for vice president.”
Significant news coverage has shown Trump gaining support among black men. Beyond Scott of South Carolina, Trump mentions two other possible black running mates in the audio recording.
Of Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, Trump says: “Another friend of mine … makes the best commercials … beautiful family.”
Of a potential choice that would create a team of Donalds, Trump says of Donalds, the Florida congressman: “Somebody who’s created something very special politically. … I like diversity. Diversité, as you would say. I like diversité. [Donors] worth millions of dollars … all want a piece of Byron.”
There has also been plenty of speculation about Trump picking a woman to close the gender gap.
Regarding Blackburn of Tennessee, Trump says “she was like the Energizer Bunny” in 2018, when she successfully campaigned to leave the House for the Senate. “She would go from stop to stop to stop.”
Of Stefanik, Trump says in the audio: “A very smart person. She was in upstate New York when I met her. … little did we realize she would be such a big factor.”
Trump is a former resident of New York City, where he built much of his real estate empire. He is now a resident of Florida.
There is some debate about whether the 12th Amendment allows a president and vice president to be from the same state, and that debate could come into play if Trump wanted to select Stefanik, Rubio, Donalds, or Waltz.
Of Waltz, Trump says in the recording: “A man that knows more about the military. When I want to know about the military, I call him.”
Lee is a one-time critic of Trump who supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 presidential primaries for the GOP nomination, when Lee also sported more hair.
In the audio, Lee gains some praise from the former president, who says of him: “I love your haircut” before adding: “And he’s a good man too.”
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
The post Do Trump’s Words on These Contenders Hint at His VP Pick? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden says, “I know how to make government work!”
You’d think he’d know. He’s worked in government for 51 years.
But the truth is, no one can make government work.
Biden hasn’t.
Look at the chaos at the border, our military’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable and record-high debt …
In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because “even the best person can’t implement change. … The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower.”
I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.
Yet politicians want government to do more!
Remember the unveiling of Obamacare’s website? Millions tried to sign up. The first day, only six got it to work.
As vice president then, Biden made excuses: “Neither [Barack Obama] and I are technology geeks.”
Stringham points out, “If they can’t design a basic simple website, how are they going to manage half the economy?”
While bureaucrats struggled with the Obamacare site, the private sector successfully created Uber and Lyft, platforms like iCloud, apps like Waze, smartwatches, etc.
The private sector creates things that work because it has to. If businesses don’t serve customers well, they go out of business.
But government is a monopoly. It never goes out of business. With no competition, there’s less pressure to improve.
Often good people join government. Some work as hard as those in the private sector.
But not for long. Because the bureaucracy’s incentives kill initiative.
If a government worker works hard, he might get a small raise. But he sits near others who earn the same pay and, thanks to archaic civil service rules, are unlikely to get fired even if they’re late, lazy, or stupid.
Over time, that’s demoralizing. Eventually government workers conclude, “Why try?”
In the private sector, workers must strive to make things better. If they don’t, competitors will, and you might lose your job.
Governments never go out of business.
“Companies can only stay in business if they always keep their customer happy,” Stringham points out. “Competition pushes us to be better. Government has no competition.”
I push back.
“Politicians say, ‘Voters can vote us out.’”
“With a free market,” Stringham replies, “The consumer votes every single day with the dollar. Under politics, we have to wait four years.”
It’s another reason why, over time, government never works as well as the private sector.
Year after year, the Pentagon fails audits.
If a private company repeatedly does that, they get shut down. But government never gets shut down.
A Pentagon spokeswoman makes excuses: “We’re working on improving our process. We certainly are learning each time.”
They don’t learn much. They still fail audits.
“It’s like we’re living in ‘Groundhog Day,’” Stringham jokes.
When COVID-19 hit, politicians handed out almost $2 trillion in “rescue” funds. The Government Accountability Office says more than $100 billion were stolen.
“One woman bought a Bentley,” laughs Stringham. “A father and son bought a luxury home.”
At least Biden noticed the fraud. He announced, “We’re going to make you pay back what you stole!”
No. They will not. Biden’s Fraud Enforcement Task Force has recovered only 1% of what was stolen.
Even without fraud, government makes money vanish. I’ve reported on my town’s $2 million toilet in a park. When I confronted the parks commissioner, he said, “$2 million was a bargain! Today it would cost $3 million.”
That’s government work.
More recently, Biden proudly announced that government would create “500,000 [electric vehicle] charging stations.”
After two years, they’ve built … seven. Not 7,000. Just seven.
Over the same time, greedy, profit-seeking Amazon built 17,000.
“Privatize!” says Stringham. “Whenever we think something’s important, question whether government should do it.”
In Britain, government-owned Jaguar lost money year after year. Only when Britain sold the company to private investors did Jaguar start turning a profit selling cars that people actually like.
When Sweden sold Absolut Vodka, the company increased its profits sixfold.
It’s ridiculous for Biden to say, “I know how to make government work.”
No one does.
Next week, this column takes on Donald Trump’s promise: “We’ll drain the Washington swamp!”
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
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 ‘Make Government Work’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
There are many reasons why legal experts are questioning the legitimacy of the criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump. But the major reason is that the main claim in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case—that Trump’s $130,000 settlement payment of a potential claim by Stormy Daniels was a campaign-related expense—is totally bogus.
Here’s a quick tutorial on why Bragg doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on—call it “Federal Campaign Finance Law for Dummies 101”—an apropos title, given what’s going on.
Daniels claims that she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, fully 10 years before the 2016 presidential election, which Trump denies. For the payment, Daniels agreed to sign a nondisclosure agreement, which is a standard provision in many settlement agreements of personal injury cases and other claims.
Bragg contends that Trump falsified business records, a misdemeanor, when this payment was listed as legal expenses instead of a campaign expense.
Supposedly, according to Bragg, that converted the misdemeanors into felonies because Trump was concealing another crime. That other crime, according to prosecutors, is a violation of Section 17-152 of New York law, which makes it a misdemeanor to “promote … the election of any person to public office by unlawful means.”
Besides the fact that it’s very strange to allege that the commission of a misdemeanor for the purpose of covering up the commission of another misdemeanor is enough to allege a felony, the only plausible theory that Bragg is pushing for the alleged “unlawful means” was a violation of federal law by concealing a campaign-related payment.
With me so far?
But Trump was running for president. The raising and spending of money for campaigns for president and Congress is governed by federal law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, not state law. Any wrongdoing related to federal campaign financing falls under the enforcement authority of federal officials, not a local prosecutor like Bragg.
In fact, the Federal Election Commission, on which I served as a commissioner, has civil enforcement authority and the U.S. Department of Justice has criminal enforcement authority over violations of this law.
For the nuisance-value settlement payment to Daniels to fit within Bragg’s rickety legal structure, it would have to be a crime under federal law. In other words, it would have to be considered a campaign-related expense that was falsely reported under the Federal Election Campaign Act.
If you want an example of such a violation, just look at the $113,000 civil penalty the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay in 2022. They listed the payments for the opposition research that formed the basis for the infamous Steele dossier, which fabricated the entire Trump-Russia collusion hoax, as legal expenses instead of opposition research.
But opposition research on the opposing candidate is obviously a campaign-related expense under applicable federal law, so the FEC had authority to investigate and enforce the law against this deception.
That’s not the case with the Daniels’ payment. For starters, the incident in question that led to the payment is alleged to have happened 10 years before the 2016 campaign. More importantly, the payment fails the test the FEC applies to determine whether an expense is campaign-related.
Under federal law and corresponding regulations, the FEC applies the “irrespective test” to “differentiate legitimate campaign and officeholder expenses from personal expenses.” As the FEC explains on its website, under the irrespective test, “personal use is any use of funds … to fulfill a commitment, obligation, or expense of any person that would exist, irrespective of the candidates’ campaign.”
In other words, if the expense would exist even if the individual were not a candidate, then it’s personal and not a campaign expense.
The payment to Daniels clearly fails that test. Trump was a celebrity long before he ran for office, and celebrities get these kinds of nuisance claims all the time. In fact, the prosecution’s first witness in the New York case, David Pecker, said he had helped settle similar claims to avoid legal costs and embarrassment by suppressing stories for numerous other celebrities, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.
The easiest way to understand this test is to take the example of a personal injury claim.
Candidate A has a car accident several years before he runs for Congress that injures another driver. After the campaign has started, the candidate decides to settle the personal injury claim made by the other driver by paying that driver $130,000 in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement.
Settling and paying the claim may help the candidate in his campaign by avoiding personal embarrassment. But that doesn’t make it a campaign expense. It’s a claim that would exist even if the candidate were not running for office and is thus considered a personal expense under federal law.
Daniels’ claim is also a personal claim that existed long before Trump ran for the presidency and, given his celebrity status, would have continued to exist even if he never ran for president.
That’s no doubt why neither the FEC nor the Justice Department ever filed an enforcement action against the Trump campaign or Trump personally over the payment; specifically, because it was not a campaign-related expense.
You know what would have led to enforcement actions? If Trump had actually claimed this was a campaign-related expense and had used campaign funds to make the payment, I have no doubt he would have been prosecuted by the feds for the illegal use of campaign funds to pay a personal expense.
That’s what former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., went to prison for after he pleaded guilty in 2013 to spending $750,000 on personal expenses.
Keep in mind that Bragg’s entire manufactured case of 34 counts of falsifying business records depends entirely on the legitimacy of his contention that the settlement payment should have been listed as a campaign-related expense.
It shouldn’t because it wasn’t.
And all of the other testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses about this payment and other settlement payments that are obviously intended to blacken the character of the former president and prejudice the jury doesn’t change the fact that none of these payments were campaign-related expenses. Period. End of story—or at least it should be.
The post Trump’s NY Prosecution Is a Bogus Case by a Bogus Prosecutor appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Leftist Reporters Pretend They’re Not Partisan News Squashers 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.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Trump Faces 34 Felonies at Trial. But Was There a Crime? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vaunce News 