Submitted by: Edward Moore
>Cheval –
>Victor Davis Hanson - The Exasperated American
> Richard A. Epstein - Roe’s Awkward Departure
>E.P.Unum – Some Important Things to Remember
When It’s Time to Vote Next November
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This essay is SO IMPORTANT
National Popular Vote
By: Cheval
Cheval’s Rendezvous with Reality @ Substack.com
May 9, 2022
The Left is at it again and conservatives need to be on high alert. The Left is pushing for a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States. This should be a grave concern because it directly undermines the electoral system established by our Constitution.
Specifically, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is being pressed for enactment by several US states. As of April 2022, a national popular vote bill was proposed or enacted by 16 legislatures comprising 195 electoral votes. Recall that the number of electoral votes needed to secure the presidency is 270. The states that have or are in the process of enacting a bill are Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington, Illinois, California, New York, and the District of Columbia – Democrat strongholds. The bills, if successfully passed in more states, will guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most total votes across all 50 states and DC.
The underlying thought is, that since we conduct our elections by democratic process, it would make sense to elect our nation’s executive according to the will of the majority. However, that is not the way the electoral college works.
Democrats have long been unhappy what the electoral process, unless, of course, their candidate wins. When their candidate loses, the debate begins anew about how unfair the electoral college is to select our president. The typical argument is how can we elect a candidate as president when the plurality of citizens vote for a different candidate. This actually happened in the elections of Polk (1844), Taylor (1848), Buchanan (1856), Lincoln (1860), Garfield (1880), Cleveland (1884, 1892), Wilson (1912, 1916), Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), Clinton (1992, 1996), Bush (2000), and Trump (2016). The hue and cry is always the same. It is not fair. But, both Republicans and Democrats have benefited throughout history.
Regardless, many of the more liberally-minded individuals in the country fail to understand that we are not a democracy. The United States is a republic, comprised of states joined by the ratification of a common constitution. The electoral process provides that the candidate who receives the most votes within each state is granted the electoral votes from each state. This is by intentional and deliberate design to accommodate states’ and regional interests.
What is not fair, however, is if the president is elected based on a plurality, then the minority never has a chance of having their candidate elected. The result would be that only the concerns and interests of the more heavily populated areas, such as the East and West coast cities, would be represented. Interests of the minority and less populated areas would naturally be set aside and of little interest to future presidential candidates because their votes would be insufficient to propel them into office. We see this behavior occurring today, where candidates tend to spend most of their time in the states with the highest number of electoral votes.
The most commonly heard sentiment during any election is it every vote matters. We are led to believe that this statement is true. However, if we shift to a process where we elect our president based on a national plurality, the truth is that every vote will not count. In essence, the votes of the minority will not count, nor will those voters be represented by the executive because the president will then be beholding and accountable to the views and concerns of the majority.
This condition was not the intent of our founders. They intended to ensure that the nation’s highest executive, as well as the executive branch, represented the interests of all Americans regardless of political affiliation. A future president would need to appeal to those concerned with regional issues, not just national issues. Their goal was to have a president elected that understood the sense of the people, cutting beyond Federal government influence in our national elections.
The electoral college process was embedded into the Constitution to disburse and decentralize power to ensure all states and regions are represented. Further, state electors are elected just before elections, unknown until just before an election, to prevent undue influence on electors to stay true and cast their electoral votes according to the people’s votes in their states. Our founders framed it so to prevent collusion and cabalist (their word) behavior, preclude violence, and thwart the involvement of foreign powers in our elections.
As a result of the 2020 election and since then, it is now understood that a wave of fraudulent election activity occurred. The concerns of the founders have come to full light and fruition. We have now witnessed cabalist behavior, undue influence, numerous forms of cheating, as well as foreign interference in our elections.
The highly anticipated Dinesh D’Souza documentary, 2000 Mules, was just released and provides indisputable evidence of election fraud, i.e., felony acts, across the nation, particularly in the swing states. The documentary was also able to trace the fraudulent activity and funding to Leftist sources and operatives. Ultimately, it demonstrates and debunks claims by Left-wing politicos, activists, and the media that there was no widespread evidence of fraud and that 2020 was the most secure election ever. Quite the contrary. It was a cacophony of all possible forms of cheating employed in a decentralized manner and to such an extent as to provide plausible deniability and to cover up the fraud.
The founders intended to disassociate the executive branch from the other branches of government. That principle has been abridged and the tyranny they feared has come to pass via the collusion of the executive and the legislative branches, provided Democrats and RINOs remain in the driver's seats.
For a good overview, refer to Federalist Paper 68, written by Alexander Hamilton. He stated, “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of the president will never fall with a lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue and a little art of popularity may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first owners of a single state, but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union.” Hamilton would have a hard time grasping what has happened in and to our nation with Biden’s installment.
So why does all this matter?
It matters because the idea of a national popular vote is gaining steam and if adopted by enough states, the electoral college will become irrelevant. Interests of the minority, other than at a local level, will no longer matter at the national level. Further, a vote for the minority candidate will, in the end, not matter. Only the votes of the majority will matter. And the result will be precisely why Socrates was against a democratic form of government. Once a majority is established, it finds a way to remain permanent, and the majority class will become oppressive to the minority class. The whims of the majority will supersede the views of the minority, and there will be no means to overturn the majority, no matter how far off-kilter the majority’s view may be.
Imagine now if the instances of ballot harvesting and dropbox stuffing proven by 2000 Mules are not fixed, and then overlayed by a national popular vote arrangement. Game over. And the Democrats know it. These tactics explain why the Left is pushing so hard for early and mail-in voting. It is the easiest and best way to cheat, and to generate a plurality, even where one does not exist. Such was the case in 2020.
The implications for the country are vast and would make the US very similar to other oppressive tyrannical regimes. The ultimate reason for the success of the United States is that it owes its founding to men who had a belief and understanding that we are created and guided by a higher power, and recognized that men are inherently corruptible. They implemented controls to prevent those with oppressive ambitions from achieving outright power over the minority; thus, making the US unique among nations.
Adoption of a national popular vote nullifies the electoral college and represents yet one more strategic and agenda-enabling change being initiated and perpetrated by the Left. Their tactics are now in high gear, accelerating in an attempt to overwhelm conservatives and Republicans to a tipping point at which the Left seizes control, and the Right becomes powerless.
The Left’s all-out assault has become abundantly clear since Biden took office. As soon as Democrats achieved even with the narrowest of majorities in the House and Senate, they pressed forward with the agenda, nearly unimpeded, had it not been for a handful of representatives and perhaps divine intervention.
Imagine if every four years we had to face the situation, again and again, following the institutionalization of a national popular vote coupled with a free-for-all mail-in voting system. The executive branch would constantly fall into Democrat hands – and we have seen how well that turns out.
What is absolutely necessary at this point is, first, for first citizens to become aware of the Left’s push for a national popular vote and understand the impact it would have on this nation if enough states adopt it. Second, it is incumbent upon individual citizens to contact the representatives at the state level, in their state legislatures, to make it known that it is not the desire of the people to circumvent or bypass the constitutional process for electing our president.
Whether it is a matter of changing voting laws in the Left’s favor, creating crises to circumvent the laws that are already in place, continually flooding the courts with garbage litigation designed to throw sand in the gears of transparent elections, or changing the electoral process altogether, the Left’s efforts to gain and hold control, by any means necessary, will not relent.
It is incumbent upon conservatives to constantly push back with a collective voice to beat back all attempts to create unfair conditions in our future elections.
Failure to do so is unthinkable, and it would take generations to change or reverse the course.
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The Exasperated American
Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies
into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
May 8, 2022
A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.
Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.
So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?
Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.
The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.
Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.
If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?
The bullied people also know the Biden problem has no remedy. The 25th Amendment that Democrats and the Left raised nonstop in efforts to remove Trump—from the Rosenstein-McCabe wear-a-wire embarrassment and former Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s congressional tomfoolery to the incessant Montreal Cognitive Assessment demands—won’t apply to Biden.
Either the media will continue to rebrand his incapacity as Ciceronian eloquence or it will privately gloat that Kamala Harris is so off-putting, so uninformed, so unpopular that the people would prefer an amnesiac Biden to a nonimpaired Harris. The truth is the three doyens of Democratic progressivism—Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—all struggle with cognitive decline and rely heavily upon the media and the Democratic Party’s political attack machine to enjoy asymmetrical exemption. (Though, in Feinstein’s case, her support is wavering.)
Americans feel there is no remedy for this downward spiral until November. To get a sense of their dilemma, imagine a Richard Nixon in 1973 caught lying during Watergate but with Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings without a trace of scandal—except with one difference: the current media is now attacking not the president’s shortcomings, but the president’s critics who point them out.
Even if the Republicans were to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they would hesitate to impeach Biden simply because Harris is a more frightening prospect. And some Marquess of Queensberry centrist RINOs would not wish to codify the Democrats’ new standard of impeaching an opposition president the minute he loses the House of Representatives in his first midterm.
Most of the country has awakened to the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion story was essentially a Hillary Clinton campaign effort to destroy a political opponent, a presidential transition, and a presidency. And they know Clinton will never be indicted for her conspiracies and racketeering even if her minions rat her out to seek reduced charges for themselves.
That hoax was followed by an impeachment vote over a phone call based on two more lies:
1) the Biden family was neither corrupt nor used Joe Biden’s office as vice president, and his future political career to leverage payments from Ukraine, and
2) Donald Trump canceled military aid to Ukraine rather than sending them critical Javelin anti-tank missiles put on hold by the Obama Administration.
Americans know Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors were all enlisted in the effort to destroy a former president and his outspoken supporters. And they know there is no real remedy unless two or three more enlightened billionaires follow Elon Musk’s lead.
If Roe v. Wade were to be repealed, many Americans in red states will remain appalled that some blue states will allow abortions, especially late-term abortions after 22 weeks. But nearly all will accept the rule of constitutional democracy and thus the states’ rights to make their own laws that do not conflict with federal legislation as passed by Congress and signed by the president.
These red-state citizens know the opposite is certainly not true: blue state officials will do all they can to attack those who disagree with them, who consider abortion the destruction of human life in the womb. Expect more California-style official travel bans.
Americans know that the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” will, by design, be run by an arch-disinformationist Nina Jankowicz. The board’s entire purpose is to coordinate with the media to brand oppositional expressions as “hate speech” and “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” so that critics preemptively self-censor and moderate their opposition.
In this regard, they know that the Biden regime awards positions of great power in the U.S. government to those who do the very opposite of the intended offices’ purview. The goal is pure nihilism.
Thus, a mythographer and propagandist will adjudicate “truth.” A homeland security secretary will do his best to make the border entirely insecure. The secretary of transportation will see to it that freeways and bridges are not built. The department of energy’s task will be to ensure less energy is produced and its transportation is more expensive and more dangerous than ever. And the secretary of defense will oversee the most humiliating retreat in modern American history in Afghanistan as he cites our chief existential threat to be either climate change or “white supremacists.”
The people know the Left eventually always loses the support of the voters. But leftists still believe they can achieve and retain power, given that they control America’s cultural and informational institutions.
The Left remains hell-bent on radically changing the demography of the United States. And it always manufactures new hysterias—from the claim that Trump was “100 percent responsible”for every American death during the COVID-19 pandemic, to border officers “whipping”innocent illegal aliens, to Vladimir Putin single-handedly causing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation since the 1970s. Each week brings another prairie fire hysteria. No sooner than it is exposed and refuted, and the Left is on to another conflagration.
Americans have a rough idea that the tragic death of George Floyd was not proof of an epidemic of lethal police shootings of black males. Yet that single death set off the entire woke conflagration of 2020 and, with the hysterias of the lockdowns, has nearly wrecked the country.
Yet in 2021, out of more than 10 million arrests in the United States, police shot about six unarmed black men. The same year, 346 police officers were shot, 63 fatally—to left-wing indifference. Moreover, roughly 8,000 blacks were murdered mostly by other blacks—to callous media and political silence. Thousands of lost black lives mattered little—except the fewer than 1 in 1,000 of that total who were tragically and lethally shot while unarmed by police.
Finally, Americans were angry at the rioting inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But they cannot forgive the needless lies surrounding that illegal act in an effort to fabricate an insurrection out of a spontaneous buffoonish riot.
So they recoil at the lies about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. They are baffled about the silence surrounding the number of FBI informants among the January 6 protestors. They are angry about the lies surrounding the lethal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. They don’t understand the refusal to release all videos or communications pertinent to the government’s reaction to the riot. And they do not fathom the disproportionate treatment of those charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol versus those 14,000 arrested during the summer of 2020 when rioting led to more than 35 deaths, some 1,500 police officer injuries, and $2 billion in property damage and massive looting.
They shake their heads when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) directly threatened two Supreme Court Justices by name outside the court, ginning up an angry protest group at the doors. They are baffled that the White House press secretary sees nothing wrong with disseminating the private addresses of Justices to ensure mobs of protestors show up at their homes to intimidate them.
Of course, exasperated Americans are furious over the open border. They are angry their lives are being insidiously destroyed by the Biden inflation and energy prices. They are humiliated by the Biden debacle in Afghanistan and angrier still over his spiking crime wave and his mean-spirited senility. They resent Biden’s efforts to blame all these self-inflicted miseries on Donald Trump, or the “Putin price hikes” or the inability of a presidency to do anything about supposedly organic forces beyond his purview.
But behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the untruth they are assaulted with day after day. In other words, bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation’s institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them.
Let us hope that they channel this historic exasperation in November in a manner we have never seen before in the modern era.
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Roe’s Awkward Departure
By: Richard A. Epstein
defining ideas
May 9, 2022
Politico rocked the nation with its recent exclusive and explosive publication of a mysteriously leaked copy of Justice Samuel Alito’s February 10, 2022, draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the apparent decision by at least five Supreme Court Justices to uphold Mississippi’s law banning elective abortions after the fifteenth week of pregnancy. That opinion makes it likely that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, which crafted a constitutional right to an abortion forty-nine years ago in 1973. The defenders of the Dobbs opinion regard it as a triumph of originalism worthy of “three very enthusiastic cheers.” In sharp contrast, the progressive critics of the decision go to exquisite lengths to express their complete and utter contempt for a decision that according to the League of Women’s Voters “not only strips women and pregnant people of their personal autonomy but opens the door to erode more fundamental rights,” leading “to collective shock and outrage” by pro-choice advocates.
Clearly, with stakes this high, it is important to set aside both exultation and despair to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the Alito opinion. On the positive side, Alito’s opinion adopts a tone of workmanlike seriousness that is quite circumspect about overruling past precedents and explicitly disclaims any intention to overrule any other precedent on either women’s or LBGTQ rights. Instead, it treats abortion as “a unique act” that does not impact “in any way” Lawrence v. Texas (2003), dealing with private consensual sexual behavior, or Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), constitutionally protecting same-sex marriage. Instead, it articulates a two-stage argument that dismantles the establishment in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey of a constitutional right to abortion. The first part notes that abortion is not explicitly protected in the Constitution. The second part contends that Roe cannot be defended on some implied “substantive due process” grounds because it does not meet the standard set out in the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s decision in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), refused to recognize any right to assisted suicide, namely that “any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ . . . and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’ ”
As Alito exhaustively documents, that standard cannot be met given the impressive array of common law and statutory criminal prohibitions of abortion in effect before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, at the time of its adoption in 1868, or at any time thereafter. Yet at no point does Alito find any constitutional prohibition against the decriminalization of abortion. Instead, his chief complaint is that Roe “short-circuited the democratic process” that would otherwise lead to some political resolution in the same state legislatures that controlled the law on abortion before Roe. Recall that at the time of Roe, states had dramatically different abortion laws, from Texas’ very restrictive law (at issue in Roe) to New York’s 1970 law, which legalized abortion up through twenty-four weeks of pregnancy and whenever the mother’s life was in danger. Alito then shows that Roe’s legal reasoning “was exceedingly weak,”, especially in light of its internal confusions, including its inability to justify different constitutional rules for each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. Alito leveled the same criticism at Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey (1992), which affirmed Roe’s establishment of a right to abortion whenever state regulations impose an “undue burden on that right.” Hence, he struck down an opinion that could not be justified by the mere passage of time, and that had never gained political legitimacy during the past forty-nine years.
At this juncture, Alito wades into deeper water when he explains how Roe meshes with three previous dramatic overrulings by the Supreme Court. First, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), whose “infamous” support of the “separate but equal”doctrine legitimated in one fell swoop anti-miscegenation laws, segregated schools, and segregated railways. Alito then couples Plessy with “the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York,” a 1905 ruling that struck down a New York maximum-hours law prohibiting employees from working more than ten hours per day or sixty hours per week in certain classes of bakeries because these laws did not fall within the state’s police power to regulate health and safety. Plessy was of course overruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that separate but equal had “no place” in our constitutional order. None of Brown’s many defenders treated Plessy (unlike Roe) as a super-precedent just because it was on the books for fifty-eight years. And Lochner in turn was effectively overruled in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), on the ground that the “liberty of contract” did not prevent states from providing relief to ordinary helpless workers via minimum wage or overtime laws.
Finally, Alito notes that West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) overruled the court’s earlier decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), which had allowed Pennsylvania to expel two students, ages twelve and ten, both Jehovah’s Witnesses when they refused to salute the United States flag because of their sincere religious scruples. Barnette emphatically held that the First Amendment precluded the state from forcing any students to salute the flag.
Alito’s analysis is deeply discordant in harmonizing these pairs of cases. His overall premise is that “rational-basis review is the appropriate stand for such challenges.” That standard has traditionally imposed only modest burdens on state governments to defend silly laws. He thus cites Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma (1955), which found constitutional a flawed anticompetitive statute that forbade opticians from fitting or duplicating lenses without first obtaining a prescription, which was wholly unneeded for the task. Given that standard, Alito could not explain how Brown and Barnette were right to strike down oppressive laws. Neither Brown nor Barnette paid the slightest respect to the democratic process. Instead, both made it clear that there were certain individual rights under the First Amendment or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that were shielded from the political processes of the state by requiring a far higher standard of review of legislative requirements. It was therefore incumbent on Alito to explain why the statutes that fell in Barnette and Brown did not pass the rational-basis test, which would have left both these issues with the democratic processes of the state. The standard short answer holds that these political processes are so rigged against some “discrete and insular minorities,” to use the felicitous phrase from footnote 4 of United States v. Carolene Products (1938), that the courts must step in to protect them from the same political process that Alito wanted to overturn.
The respect that Alito shows for long-term practices works very well to explain why Barnette was justly celebrated at the time for striking down a novel and insidious law. But segregation, and indeed slavery, had longer well-established pedigrees that were rightly disregarded in Brown precisely because any natural conception of individual liberty cannot allow the state to subordinate any part of its citizenry. Yet unfortunately, the Alito opinion goes badly astray when (unfortunately in line with Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell) it links Roe to “erroneous decisions like Plessy and Lochner.” But that equivalence between polar opposites—Plessy and Lochner—cannot hold. Brown treats segregation as an offense against the Constitution, especially when imposed by the legislature. But no one thinks that New York would commit a constitutional evil if it decided to narrow, or even repeal, its minimum-wage or maximum-hour laws to increase competition in labor markets. The “erroneous” nature of Lochner hamstrings the state, but it does so only to vindicate the well-established rights of all individuals—rich and poor—to practice a lawful occupation, so much so that the so-called Lochner era arguably led, I believe, to the greatest increase in human welfare in the United States, a phenomenon that was well documented in Robert Gordon’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
Unfortunately, therefore, Alito’s draft opinion has to work a whole lot harder to explain why his theory of legislative dominance explains cases that strike down laws that he regards as odious while allowing others to stand. As I have long believed, he can only make that case by looking more closely at the individual rights that are obscured by the judiciary’s comprehensive reliance on the rational-basis test. Indeed, both the Texas and Pennsylvania supreme courts have recently held that economic liberties under their state constitutions merit more protection than the rational-basis test provides. In Dobbs, that tougher approach means that Justice Alito has to address the question “when does human life begin?” and defend more stoutly the traditional health and safety justifications for protecting unborn (or potential) children. After all, if these rationales supposedly support comprehensive wage and hour laws, why not fetal protection? Indeed, ignoring them in Dobbs will not prevent them from coming up with full force if the current version of Alito's opinion is published, without explaining how Roe was wrongly decided precisely because the states could offer strong justifications for their anti-abortion laws. Indeed, ignoring these tough questions in Dobbs will not prevent them from arising anew in the political context once the case is officially decided. But in the subsequent legislative debates before Congress and in the states, Alito’s defenders will be hard-pressed to explain why Roe was a weak opinion when he refuses to discuss the same normative and practical issues that the Alito opinion also sidesteps.
The institutional stakes are enormous. Once Roe is overturned, these latent issues will come front and center in the state debates over whether to keep or reject Roe. Nor will that debate be confined, as Alito seems to think, to the state arena as it did before 1973. Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already put before the Senate a bill that goes far beyond Roe and pitched battles at the state level encompass both the hard normative questions that Alito’s draft ignores and the insistent claims that criminalization of abortion will lead to a return to back-alley abortions and discrimination against poor women and women of color. Add in the likely prospect that some pro-life states may well seek to punish their local citizens who seek to help local women obtain abortions elsewhere. Justice Scalia’s powerful Casey dissent noted that pre-Roe “[n]ational politics were not plagued by abortion protests, national abortion lobbying, or abortion marches on Congress.” But those days are gone forever. What will come in their place, no one today can say.
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SOME IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER
WHEN IT'S TIME TO VOTE
NEXT NOVEMBER
By: E. P. Unum
May 10, 2022
You may want to reflect on this essay just before the Mid Term Elections in six months.
Amid a nation struggling against the complexities of inflation and countless other self-inflicted wounds by the Biden Administration comes the news out of the Justice Department of a scandal that makes Bernie Madoff look like a Boy Scout. Inspector General Michael Horowitz today announced that of the $800,000,000,000 (That’s billions, friends.) funds authorized by Congress in “Pandemic Relief” to be used to provide loans to small businesses and individuals around the country, over $100 Billion ($100,000,000,000) was the subject of outright fraud. 57,000 people/businesses in the Treasury Department database highlighted on their “Do Not Pay” list received payments and loans from the Pandemic Relief Fund. Many of those receiving funds were international fraudsters making the chances of recovery very slim indeed. Chalk up one more example of wasted taxpayer dollars to go along with the billions of dollars in materials to be used to finish the Border Wall now rusting in the Texas sun.
Just to be clear….that’s 57,000 people receiving $100 Billion in taxpayer money with one fraudster and his wife scamming $18 million over a few months. Happily, they were arrested by the FBI, tried, convicted, and are now serving prison sentences. And $100 Billion divided by 57,000 is $1.75 Million per person (and change) remaining to be recovered. Good luck with that.
It will be interesting to see how the Biden Administration attempts to spin this sad story in the media but it is yet another tale of woe and incompetence of the Biden Administration. Keep this one in the forefront of your mind as the Mid-Term Elections arrive in six months.
Now, let’s focus on some other issues:
What a difference sixteen months makes! Since the day Joe Biden became President on January 20, 2021, our nation has had to endure the following:
· Rampant inflation wiping out all wage gains. Gasoline at the pump is up over 60%; food is up over 20%. Inflation is running at 8.5% while wages are up only 4.0%. That’s not a good picture. Just for the record, we did not have inflation under President Trump.
· Open Borders resulting in a flood of over 2.0 million illegal immigrants into the U.S. in 2021 not to mention drugs and deadly fentanyl killing over 100,000 young Americans. This year we are on pace to be overrun with another 3.0 million illegal immigrants. These illegal immigrants are being clandestinely flown and bussed by the Biden Administration into American cities while receiving free housing, financial assistance, health care, and, if they are sixty-five or older, payments from the Social Security System not having paid a dime into that system.
· A crisis with infant formula related to “supply chain” problems. Families are now struggling to find infant formula to feed their babies. Does anyone know where Pete Buttigieg is?* So touching was the image of him feeding his adopted baby with a strap-on artificial breast.
· Food shortages….food shortages here in the USA! Exacerbated by a shortage of truckers and problems with a lack of fertilizer, which in turn is dependent on…you guessed it….petroleum products.
· Escalating crime in our city streets augmented by State Attorney Generals reluctant to prosecute criminals and a “no bail’ policy
· Biden’s foolhardy exit from Afghanistan resulted in the loss of thirteen Americans and left behind over $85 billion in state-of-the-art military equipment and technology not to mention countless numbers of American citizens and allies. Make no mistake, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea were watching and taking note of the weakness and stupidity of the Biden Administration, and this most assuredly led to the recent aggression of Russia invading Ukraine.
· Speaking of Ukraine, we have now provided hundreds of billions in military aid to Ukraine while Germany still is buying oil and gas from Russia despite sanctions on that nation.
· As of today, the little fat guy running North Korea just test fired his 15th missile. That’s 15 more than he fired when Trump was President. And Iran is rapidly on pace to develop a nuclear weapon while Biden diddles with this terrorist nation for another agreement. What do you think Iran will do…or try to do…when it finishes developing a nuclear weapon? Do you really believe their intent is peace?
· China and Taiwan; it is just a matter of time before China makes a move on Taiwan. We are mired down in Ukraine so it is questionable just how much support we can provide to Taiwan but make no mistake; America owes support to this nation going back as far as WWII so it remains to be seen if Joe Biden is even aware of this commitment.
· Our nation continues to be plagued by productivity declines on any number of products from chips to lumber. Does it beg the question of just where is Pete Buttigieg, our Secretary of Transportation? Is he back from Family Leave yet?
*How about an Operation Warp Speed to deal with the infant formula crisis so we can feed our babies? Heck, Trump did this with the vaccines; why not with infant formula?
Faced with all of these issues and challenges, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorcas continues to lie to the American people…and get away with it. Then, he announces the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” that closely resembles the “Ministry of Truth” envisioned by George Orwell. Instead of doing his job and protecting the homeland, Alejandro’s answer is to go after Americans who may disagree with him or his party by labeling them as spreading “disinformation’…you know, like the “disinformation contained on the Hunter Biden laptop computer” or the “Russiagate” nonsense!
What’s next…The Ministry of Thought? Hell, let’s just scrap the entire U.S. Constitution. It may have served us well for 245 years and hundreds of thousands of young men and women have sacrificed their lives and sacred honor to protect it, but it’s a bit outdated, don’t you think? Isn’t it time to try to make it a more woke document? Yes, I’m sure that’s what we should do.
We seem to be laser-focused on things like teaching gender classes to first and second graders; inundating the military, high schools, and colleges with critical race theory and the absurd 1619 project; making sure abortion on demand is a Constitutional right, and removing God from the town square. I’m just spitballing here but do you think that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are concerned about these things?
We have lost our moral compass! Worse, the idiots are now in charge of the asylum.
This leads me to my final point. All the TV pundits, pollsters, and conservative thinkers are predicting a red wave in the Mid Term Elections…a veritable tsunami of Republican elections. I sure hope so but I think harboring those thoughts is a dangerous thing. It would be well to remember that we are dealing with the democratic party which has proven itself to be accomplished liars with a track record of duplicity and arrogance. Their hatred towards conservatives is palpable. Indeed, I have not heard Democrats this upset since Republicans voted to take away all their slaves when Abraham Lincoln was President. I also am still trying to figure out why this whole issue was not settled over the eight years when the messiah Barack Hussein Obama was President! But that is a topic for another essay.
My concern is this: The world is sitting on a powder keg and, nearby, people are playing with matches. The Biden Administration has been a train wreck since January 20, 2021. Everything Biden touches seems to turn to s$%t (and I do mean everything!). But, amid all this turmoil, what is left for Joe to solidify his power position? He lacks vision, is incapable of leadership, does not command respect, is not a good communicator, and has never run or managed a business before let alone a country, so what is left if he is to salvage his Presidency?.
You will not like this answer, and I pray to God every day that it never comes to pass, but the one thing, maybe the only thing, that can save Joe Biden and the Democratic Party is….. War.
God help and protect us from Biden leading us into a two-front war. But, as I survey the terrain, I fear that is exactly where we are heading, and the media will help lead us down this path. Can’t happen you say? Impossible you say? Unthinkable you say? Then consider this:
When was the last time you saw or read about the U.S. Media printing several stories about U.S intelligence providing targeting information to the Ukraine military enabling them to kill Russian Generals on the battlefield? Or was American intelligence given to Ukrainian Special Forces to target a Russian warship in the Black Sea ultimately sinking it? Such stories by responsible media, even if true, should never make it into the news. Never! But that is exactly what happened last week. Wars have started from this kind of yellow journalism. It is irresponsible and likely infuriated Vladimir Putin. He is already telling the Russian people that they are at war with NATO and specifically the United States.
Think about it. Then think about what can be done to find a way to hasten the resignation of Joe Biden from office along with Kamala Harris…for the good of the country.
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If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato
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