SCOTUS Ends Term on Strong Note
In what can best be described as a mixed term for the current U.S. Supreme Court, in its final decisions before closing out, the justices issued two strong rulings in support of federalism and privacy rights.
In arguably the hottest issue of the moment, voting rights and election fraud, the Court issued a 6-3 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding the state of Arizona’s recently passed election integrity legislation. The Court’s majority rejected the claims that Arizona’s law ran afoul of the Constitution and that it was designed to suppress the ability of minorities to vote.
Justice Samuel Alito observed, “Neither Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates §2 of the [Voting Rights Act],” and in fact “generally makes it quite easy for residents to vote.” Alito also wrote: “Having to identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the ‘usual burdens of voting.’ On the contrary, these tasks are quintessential examples of the usual burdens of voting.”
The Court agreed with the lower court’s contention that the DNC had failed to provide any substantive evidence such as records or statistical data showing how many people actually relied on ballot harvesting to vote, specifically within minority communities. In other words, the DNC had nothing to support its loudly voiced claim that eliminating ballot harvesting effectively suppressed minority voting. As Alito noted, “None of the individual voters called by the plaintiffs had even claimed that the ballot collection restriction ‘would make it significantly more difficult to vote.’”
Predictably, Democrats and the Leftmedia reacted to the decision with the usual hyperbolic hysterics of “democracy under threat,” falsely spinning the Arizona law as designed to limit voting rights. bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden lamented, “After all we have been through to deliver the promise of this nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing voting rights laws, not weakening them.” That farcical framing is why his Department of Social Justice is suing Georgia, too.
Ironically, “enforcing voting rights laws” is exactly what the Arizona law does. Ditto for Georgia. This ruling serves to reinforce federalism — states’ authority to run their own elections and to set the rules for ensuring the integrity of the vote.
The second big ruling was in the case of Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. With the same 6-3 split, the Court struck down California’s donor disclosure law for violating the First Amendment. The case was over California’s law mandating that nonprofit advocacy groups must provide a list of donors to state authorities. National Review explains:
Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta arose from the California attorney general’s office, mainly under
scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra, trampling the First Amendment rights of nonprofit advocacy groups to the privacy of their donors. It was not a coincidence that California launched that initiative at the height of the Tea Party movement. Its draconian scope applied not only to California charities but to any nonprofit that solicited donations in the state — even Chinese dissident groups. In an age of cancel culture and ever-increasing digital surveillance, the Court found, the risks of harassment and reprisals “are heightened in the 21st century and seem to grow with each passing year, as anyone with access to a computer can compile a wealth of information about anyone else, including such sensitive details as a person’s home address or the school attended by his children.”
Even the bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration shied away from defending this one. scumbag/liar-Harris has yet to respond to the decision and likely will remain mum. After all, the trial revealed that scumbag/liar-Harris’s AG office “systematically failed to maintain the confidentiality” of donors and there was “ample evidence” showing that donors were exposed and suffered harassment, and that the law “demonstrably played no role in advancing the attorney general’s law enforcement goals for the past ten years.” In other words, it appears that the only reason scumbag/liar-Harris wanted the law was to gain access to donor information to be used for intimidation purposes when leaked.
The Supreme Court’s next term promises to be just as compelling as this last, with a challenge to Roe v. Wade looming on the horizon, all while Democrats increasingly move toward an effort to pack the Court. ~The Patriot Post
Patriots, Real and Pretend
In the headline of his column on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger asked a question to which the answer seems obvious: Who owns the Fourth of July?
All Americans own it, of course, but many will choose not to celebrate it — at least not beyond claiming a free day off. And there’s a particular party affiliation common to the vast majority of those who won’t be celebrating our Independence Day: the Democrat Party. It’s been that way for some time. Take last year, for example, when, as Henninger writes:
In the weeks leading up to last year’s Fourth of July — since 1776 always a time of planning for patriotic parades — a significant slice of the U.S. political left decided the moment had arrived to deface statues and monuments dedicated to the country’s most revered figures. Among those hauled down or hammered were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key, Christopher Columbus and Father Junípero Serra.
All were accused of racism of some sort. Indeed, the argument being made a year ago was that America was born not on the Fourth of July but in slavery in the early 17th century and that the country’s defining characteristic for 400 years had been systemic or structural racism.
The Democrats realize that they’re fast becoming the anti-America party — the party of kneelers, rioters, statue-topplers, and those who claim that our National Archives are imbued with “structural racism” because they laud “wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.”
To this list we might also add American presidents who scold us by saying, “We must address what remains the stain on the soul of America,” and that the hate which prompted the Tulsa massacre “never went away,” and that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”
We’re not sure who’s putting words into bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s mouth, but they’re clearly not the words of a Patriot.
Perhaps the Democratic National Committee senses the very real weakness in its party when it comes to patriotism, when it comes to loving this, the greatest country on earth. And perhaps that’s why it’s trotting out a 60-second TV ad that celebrates July Fourth — inasmuch as it’s able to celebrate it. The ad, for example, doesn’t use the word “Independence,” nor does it show even a fleeting image of our Founding Fathers, or of Independence Hall, or of the document for which the holiday is named.
As Henninger writes, it’s an ad “depicting a shoulder-slapping bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden as the main reason Americans feel better than last summer.” It’s titled “America’s Coming Back,” and the end of the video features bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe and Jill Biden overlaid with those words and a new, more ironic word: “Together.” This comes from the party that endlessly drives us apart — over race, over income, over sex, over morals.
This is bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden. The guy who didn’t say “boo” last summer when those on his side were wrecking our cities and defiling our monuments — indeed, when his own future vice president was actually encouraging the riots, saying, “They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.” In fact, the whole party spent the last year waging war on “systemically racist” cops and looking the other way as BLM and antifa thugs tore apart our cities.
Rather than address this rise in crime honestly, Democrats want to take away guns from law-abiding Americans. And last week, bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden derided our Second Amendment while taunting us with fighter jets and nuclear weapons. “Independence,” indeed.
They’re the party of Critical Race Theory and “equity,” racist and Marxist ideas meant to divide Americans. They’re the party of open borders — a policy that mocks our immigration laws, floods our country with illegal migrants, costs many Americans their jobs, and drives down the wages of many others. They’re the party that turns a blind eye to the trafficking of children and the smuggling of drugs that devastate our communities.
They’re the party of destroying women’s sports and putting men in women’s locker rooms. They’re the party of forcing Catholic adoption agencies and convents to violate church teachings.
These are not the precepts and policies of a party that loves its country.
In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington warned his fellow Americans to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,” and that “the name of American … must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”
And what better embodiment could there be of “pretended patriotism” than this 60-second spot, this desperate effort by the Democrats to claim some share of our Independence Day holiday, while at the same time denouncing the very country that it celebrates?
Real Patriots love this country, warts and all. And they honor its Founding Fathers, and its Constitution, and its Declaration of Independence. ~The Patriot Post
Does Teaching CRT Violate the Constitution?
Just when we thought life had returned to normal, a sinister and dangerous virus is spreading through our social, academic, and political institutions. It threatens to leave the United States unrecognizable. But this isn’t another coronavirus. We’re talking about Critical Race Theory.
We know that those adhering to CRT are attempting to undermine our institutions and tear apart the fabric of our society. More than just being a divisive ideology, however, Dr. Carol Swain, former professor at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities, believes CRT provokes some serious constitutional questions. According to The Epoch Times, she says that “Critical Race Theory training, which pressures people not to say certain things, take a certain stance, or forces them into some segregated settings, may infringe on people’s constitutional rights and even violate civil rights laws.”
“[Whites] are blamed for setting up a system of systemic racism,” she said of CRT’s premise. “The demonization of a group of people because of the color of their skin is something that is discriminatory.”
As Swain puts it, “We’re not a country where it’s acceptable to bully and shame people because of the color of their skin.”
Yet in many schools and workplaces, CRT programs require students and employees to confess their “white privilege,” to participate in activities segregated by race, and to fear speaking out against it. Thus, CRT is a direct threat to the First Amendment, which protects free speech and association; the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and disability.
Fortunately, some steps are being taken at the local, state, and federal level to stop the advancement of CRT. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a bill this week banning federal funding for CRT training in the workplace. In a press release, Cruz remarked, “The federal government has no right to force a political agenda onto Americans, especially one that aims to tear down our institutions and divide us based on race.”
The text of the bill also bans federal agencies from promoting ideas such as “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist,” “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist,” or “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”
The bill further informs the public of the broader objectives of CRT, including its connection to Marxist ideology, its discriminatory nature, and its ultimate objective of destroying and replacing “Western Enlightenment Liberalism” with a “Marxist-influenced government.”
Finally, parents and even some teachers across the country are beginning to wake up and realize the impact of CRT on their children.
Loudoun County, Virginia, has made national headlines in recent weeks as parents battle a “woke” school board pushing CRT. Now, a Chicago middle school teacher has filed a lawsuit against her school district, alleging that, according to The Wall Street Journal, “teachers and students are required to participate in racially segregated antiracist exercises and that teachers are required to teach material depicting white people as inherently racist oppressors.”
The lawsuit claims that the district’s policies violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which, again, prohibits discrimination by race, color, or national origin in public schools.
Let’s hope the pushback against Critical Race Theory isn’t too little, too late. Clearly, the Marxist foundations of CRT are incompatible with our Constitution or a society that values freedom of speech and equal treatment of all citizens.
Those pushing CRT claim that it’s all about racial and social justice, but there’s no justice in using hate and racism to divide a country that’s come a long way since Martin Luther King Jr. challenged us to judge others by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. ~The Patriot Post
Democrats, Donald Trump, and the Criminalization of Politics
When, many years ago, the Democrats began to criminalize politics, their logic was simple. If ya can’t beat ‘em, charge 'em.
That’s certainly the case with their Ahabian quest to get Donald Trump. The Democrats have become downright monomaniacal about it, and we can only hope that it’ll be their undoing, just as it was for the ill-fated captain in Melville’s Moby Dick.
How can we tell that the Left is obsessed with Trump? Because it has been after him ever since he and Melania came down that escalator. And because, in its frustration at not yet having perp-walked its Bête Orange, it has been targeting his associates.
Take former U.S. attorney, New York City mayor, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, for example. First, they raided his home, then they suspended his law license. And the mainstream media, for its part, peddled falsehoods about it.
Before Rudy, it was Paul Manafort and Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn. And yesterday, it was Donald Trump’s business enterprise and its 73-year-old CFO. As Fox News reports:
The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan court after being charged with fraud and tax crimes Thursday. The longtime CFO pleaded not guilty to grand larceny, which in the state of New York is the unlawful taking of funds or property valued at $50,000 or more and is punishable for up to 15 years in prison. The former president’s family business also pleaded not guilty to tax-related crimes, which included a scheme to defraud.
The Trump Organization was quick to respond:
Allen Weisselberg is a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather who has worked at the Trump Organization for 48 years. He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President. The District Attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics.
It is politics. Or, as Donald Trump Jr. put it: “This is what Vladimir Putin does. … 3 million documents, countless witnesses, and hours of grand jury testimony, outside forensic auditors, this is what they come up with. They’re going to charge a guy who’s [73] years old for crimes of avoiding paying taxes on a fringe benefit.”
“This is banana republic stuff,” Trump Jr. continued, “and if our press was even a little bit intellectually honest, they’d be calling it that.”
Again, though, Donald Trump is the white whale, and everyone knows it. This includes National Review’s Andy McCarthy, who’s not impressed with the charges, and who wonders whether Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. and his fellow harpoon-chuckers are trying to get Trump reelected.
McCarthy calls the charges against Weisselberg “puny,” noting that they amount to little more than a failure to pay taxes on corporate perks such as cars and apartments. “If that’s all prosecutors have,” he says, “then they have nothing. Donald Trump is not being charged, nor are his adult children who are the business’s top executives.”
McCarthy also hits on the bigger point — the point that bears more directly on the long-term health of our republic: “[Trump’s assailants] are angering fair-minded people who can’t help but see a two-tiered society, with its two-tiered justice system, in which Democrats and the radicals with whom they sympathize have immunity, while no infraction by a Republican — and especially, a Trump supporter — is too trivial for a good drawing and quartering.” ~The Patriot Post
‘Defund Police!’ Who Said What?
The leftist Democrat Oakland California city council joined other crime-infested Demo urban centers across the nation this week by defunding $18 million from its police budget. Violent crime in Oakland is up significantly from this time last year when so-called “Black Lives Matter” celebrations were heating up — including homicide rates, which have doubled.
What could go wrong? Shortly after Oakland’s PD Chief LeRonne Armstrong ripped the council for the cuts, the media crew interviewing Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, Guillermo Cespedes, at city hall, was robbed at gunpoint.
But according to Democrats, the “defund police” movement is the Republicans’ fault — Thomas Gallatin highlighted that pivot Monday, starting with bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s spokesperson, liar-Jen “Circle Back” Psaki. The Demos’ Leftmedia propagandists then parroted that lie.
Responding to that colossal canard, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) made things clear: “Everybody knows it was Democrats who started this crazy, radical, extremist move to defund police. All the big city mayors that defunded their police, whether it’s New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — they’re all Democrats. … Speaker scumbag/liar-Pelosi just recently called police ‘stormtroopers.’ … You had one of her top lieutenants in Congress [say] police are inherently racist and need to be abolished. Now they’re seeing the dumpster fire they created. … They never admit they were wrong. They’re just going to try to blame somebody else.”
Senator Ted Cruz added, “Democrats now claiming it’s Republicans who want to defund the police is like an arsonist showing up at a fire and blaming the firemen, it’s like the Chinese blaming Americans for the Wuhan virus, and it’s like O.J. saying he’s going to help find the real killer.”
Fact is, Democrats in the House and Senate were the beneficiaries of the pandering congressional protagonists and Demo mayors nationwide, who led the defund-police chorus.
Of course, the congressional defund mantra was led by de facto House leaders scumbag/worthless-Sandy Cortez, scumbag/ worthless-Ilhan Omar, scumbag/worthless-Rashida Tlaib, scumbag/worthless-Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush (collectively known as “The Squad,” who started their anti-police crusade during last year’s summer of rage.
The loudest of those mouths, and it is quite a competition, is scumbag/worthless-Cortez. What did scumbag/ worthless-Cortez say about defunding police? “Defunding police means defunding police. It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”
Now she hysterically claims that concern about escalating crime is driven by “hysteria” over media reports. She insists, “I want to make sure that this hysteria, you know, that this doesn’t drive a hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context.” She doubled down on her insistence that the hysteria must not distract from the efforts to defund police.
Second up in the loud-mouth category is islamist scumbag/worthless-Ilhan Omar, the Jew hater. She declared: “What we are saying is the current infrastructure that exists as policing … should not exist anymore, and we can’t go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place. … Not only do we need to defund, but we need to dismantle and start anew.”
Third in the lineup is scumbag/worthless-Rashida Tlaib, who said, “Policing in our country is inherently and intentionally racist. … No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”
scumbag/worthless-Ayanna Pressley insisted she is “ready to continue the systemic work necessary to radically reimagine a system of public safety in our country that finally censures the dignity and humanity of all.” She declared, “Yes I support the defund movement.”
And last, Cori Bush says, “Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real. … I am for defunding the police.”
Notably, each of these Demo reps have paid thousands for their own personal security, compliments of taxpayers. Cortez shelled out $5,000 per month.
There was no collective condemnation of their defund-police advocacy by their Democrat congressional leaders, or objections to all the Demo mayor defund initiatives. Their silence was deafening.
Of course, other key Demos signed on to the defund movement but stayed in the shadows. bumble/ socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden affirmed “reallocation” of policing resources. scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris also expressed her support for reallocating police funding, saying, “We have to reimagine public safety.” Their urban center mayors defunded tens of millions from police budgets.
In his national address on crime last week, bumble/ socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden attempted to lie his way out of Demo responsibility for the violence and carnage. But all the evidence leads right back to his socialist Democrat Party. Clearly, Demos are attempting to tone down their defund rhetoric while keeping that agenda on track.
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes, “Even energetic media revisionism will not be able to help Democrats in the short run. They are stuck with their "defund the police” rhetoric, and they will be hurt by it…“ But he cautions: "Over the long haul, though, the battle is not going to be about defunding the police but defining the police. Republicans should be against funding the progressive vision of law enforcement, which would give the country what it has given Democrat-run cities: non-enforcement and rising crime.”
The fact that anyone is actually questioning who advocated for defunding police departments and, consequently, who is responsible for the surge in violence is asinine.
As for bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s latest excuse for a “crime bill,” it’s worth noting that the last major Democrat crime bill was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, and soon thereafter Democrats lost majority control of the House for the first time in 40 years. The author of that bill: bumble/socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden. ~The Patriot Post
NYC’s Bungled Election Underscores GOP Push for Integrity
The Left’s latest voting concoction — “ranked choice voting,” or RCV — has not produced greater clarity. Just the opposite, in fact. New York City’s adoption of RCV for its mayoral contest has resulted in greater complication for voting tabulation and increased confusion, ruining the possibility for more public confidence in the integrity and accuracy of an election’s outcome.
So, what is RCV? For one thing, New Yorkers were sold on the idea that it’s an attempt to avoid expensive and low-turnout runoffs. As National Review’s editors note, it was also supposed to “decrease negative campaigning and produce winners who had proved successful at building coalitions.”
Well, confusion reigns. As The Wall Street Journal explains, “The city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday released an updated tally, meant to show where the candidates stood after several rounds of recounting. Each round eliminated the candidate with the fewest votes, and reassigned votes to the next-ranked candidate on each voter’s ballot.”
In this instance, after the first round of counting, the Democrat mayoral primary candidate garnering the most votes was former NYPD officer Eric Adams, who enjoyed a sizable 14-point lead over the second-place contender. Indeed, he appeared last week to be the likely winner. However, following the elimination counting round, third-place candidate Kaythryn Garcia closed the gap to within two percentage points, which amounts to 14,755 votes with more than 124,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted.
What on election day, June 22, was presumed to be a clear win for Adams has been thrown into doubt. But it’s not just the RCV system of tallying votes. On Tuesday, the election board also announced that a mistake had been made in the vote count — some 135,000 test run votes were included in the actual vote tally, throwing off the number. There is still no official vote number, and it will likely take at least another week before a winner is announced.
The error elicited this response from the Adams campaign: “There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric — and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied. … Every candidate should respect the democratic process and be committed to supporting whomever the voters have selected to be the Democratic nominee for Mayor.”
This serves to underscore the reason why several GOP-run states have been passing election integrity laws. As voter fraud and mistakes happen during elections, it would be wise to shore up any areas of deficiency or unintentional loopholes to produce greater election integrity as a matter of fact, as well as to improve public confidence in those results.
The New York Post reports, “Tuesday’s epic fail has sparked calls for reform that include disbanding the 10-member Board of Elections, which is composed of five Democrats and five Republicans — one each from the city’s five boroughs — who are hand-picked by their local party leaders.” This further takes the wind out of the sails of bumble/socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s false smear of Republican election integrity laws as “Jim Crow 2.0,” because the Democrat bastion of New York is a huge problem too. ~The Patriot Post
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