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As part of its continuing crackdown on Christians and other religious believers, the Communist government of China seized a reported 100 members of the Early Rain Covenant Church, an underground Protestant church, on Dec. 9, including its pastor,  Wang Yi and his wife. 

In addition, Communist authorities seized another 60 members of the church on Dec. 16 and placed a lock on the gate to the church. 

The Early Rain Covenant members’ cell phones and social media accounts were blocked before they were arrested, reported the South China Morning Post. In addition, the telephone line at the church in Chengdu, Sichuan was cut. 

Assistant Deacon Zhang Guoqing was arrested on Dec. 9 and then released on Dec. 10. He is being watched by “security personnel” in his home, according to the Morning Post. 

“The police said our church is an illegal organisation and we cannot attend any more gatherings from now on,” said Zhang. He also said that Pastor Wang’s house had been “ransacked” by Communist officials and “was a mess.”

Bob Fu, head of the non-profit Christian relief group ChinaAid, was reported by the Morning Post as saying there have been “more than 10,000 cases of detention of Christians this year,” in China, “compared with just over 3,000 cases for the whole of last year.”

“In September, Beijing police closed the Zion Church, one of the largest Protestant churches in China with more than 1,500 regular church-goers,” stated the Morning Post. 

Concerning the 60 Early Rain Covenant members who were arrested on Dec. 16, ChiaAid reported that “authorities took the Christians into custody for attending their weekly Sunday service. A baby is among the detained, as is Minister Cao Qingen, who was beaten.”

“Sichuan’s government has been targeting Early Rain Covenant Church consistently throughout the year, even persecuting them for remembering the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the victims of a deadly 2008 earthquake,” said ChinaAid. 

Regarding all 160 people arrested, authorities have released some of them but charged others with criminal offenses. As ChinaAid reported, “Pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, have been detained on ‘inciting subversion of state power’ charges; Elder Qin Defu, Fu Lijun, Lü Jinheng, Li Xiaofeng, and Deacon Ge Yingfeng were charged with ‘illegal business operations’; and Huang Yaling, Wang Fei, Elder Li Yingqiang, and Elder Li Zhu were accused of ‘stirring up trouble.'”

“Officials have prevented all of them from meeting with their lawyers, a tactic that violates Chinese law but is often employed during procedures targeting prisoners incarcerated for political or religious reasons,” said ChinaAid. 

Christians and other religious believers have been persecuted in China since the Communist Party takeover in 1949-50. Under the Communist dictatorship in China, scholars estimate that at least 65 million people have been killed for political reasons. 

Federal employees will not necessarily feel the effects for weeks after the partial government shutdown went into effect Saturday, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Federal workers are still set to receive their holiday paychecks for the Dec. 9 to 22 biweekly pay period on time, no matter what happens in Congress. Holiday paychecks are expected to be issued between Dec. 28 and Jan. 3, according to Office of Management and Budget guidance. The new Congress will convene Jan. 3.

The first federal payday that will cover workdays affected by the shutdown will not be until Jan. 11, reported Politico. Many departments have funding despite the shutdown and reopened Wednesday like normal, but nine departments are without government funding.

The departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, State, Transportation, and Treasury are currently caught in the crosshairs of the shutdown, as are agencies like NASA and the Food and Drug Administration.

Many federal employees deemed non-essential are furloughed or expected to work during the shutdown but have received pay anyway after shutdowns in recent years, according to an Office of Management and Budget blog post.

Meanwhile, both the Senate and the House are scheduled to be in session Thursday afternoon, although they are not expected to strike any deals with the White House that will end the partial government shutdown, reported Politico.

Congress helped trigger a partial government shutdown after a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government expired on Dec. 21. At the center of the funding battle is the border wall that President Donald Trump wants to build.

The federal government employs more than 2 million people full time excluding U.S. Postal Service employees, according to Governing.com. Roughly 80 percent of them work outside the Washington, D.C., region. More than 420,000 essential federal employees would be expected to work without pay, according to a press release from Vice Chairman Patrick Leahy’s Senate Appropriations Committee staff.

Trump has faced criticism from Democrats and union leaders over the shutdown.

A union that represents high-paid federal employees, including NASA rocket scientists and federal immigration judges, accused Trump of “gambling with the lives of federal workers” over the partial government shutdown.

“As the nation’s top administrator [Trump] should be deeply concerned about the morale of his employees, the productivity of government agencies, and the ability of the government to attract and retain the best and the brightest,” Paul Shearon, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said in a statement Wednesday.

The ball is now in the Democrats’ court though, according to Trump.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck,” Trump said on Dec. 11 during a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

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It’s for the children.

Via Washington Examiner:

Watch the CNN interview that aired Thursday with Rep.-elect Xochitl Torres Small, D-N.M, and you come away with two things: A migraine and the inescapable conclusion that Democrats want to turn border patrol agents into caretakers and babysitters for illegal immigrants.

The national news media show no interest in hundreds of Americans killed by illegal immigrants but shift into high gear when two sick Guatemalan children die after being dragged by their fathers 2,000 miles to the U.S. border.

Fortunately, however, the wall-to-wall coverage of the border issue means we’re eventually exposed to Democrats’ true feelings on the issue.

Torres Small, when intelligible, said on CNN that the immediate priority on “border security” (Democrat code for: “do nothing to deter illegal immigration”) should be fixing up detention facilities and dumping more taxpayer resources into caring for illegal border crossers.

“All of our safety depends upon on having an agency that’s quickly able to adapt to changing circumstances and that’s exactly what we have here,” she said. “So we have to prioritize, of course, medical equipment, as well as personnel, appropriate facilities for these families that are being detained, because that’s important to save children’ lives, to make sure that detainees are safe and healthy.”

She also said she’s “willing to work with anyone to make sure that we have real border security and that we are relying on this border that keeps all of our communities vibrant.” ( What?!)

Keep reading…

The people democrats avoid.

Via Mediaite:

Rachel Campos Duffy, the wife of GOP Rep. Sean Duffy, said on Fox News Thursday that people keep stopping her husband in supermarkets to demand a wall on the southern border.

Duffy said that Trump should give an “Oval Office address” to explain why the wall is “so important.”

“We’re not going to get a wall,” fellow panelist Doug Schoen retorted. “It’s not going to happen.”

“My husband and I were in Walmart and Sam’s Club over the holiday — he’s a member of Congress, as you know — he was stopped every few feet by people saying ‘Keep fighting for the wall,’” Campos Duffy said.

“Those are mostly Republicans,” Schoen countered. “Democrats and Independents don’t take that position.”

“Democrats don’t shop at Sam’s Club?” Campos Duffy asked.

“No, I said they don’t want a wall!” Schoen replied.

Keep reading…

As the partial government shutdown affecting about a quarter of the federal government nears the one-week mark, President Donald Trump is escalating his battle for the border wall with Democrats, pushing for more funding for the barrier.

In a series of tweets on Thursday afternoon, President Trump called out congressional Democrats for opposing securing the border with a wall–and pointed out that the Democrats scuttled a previous opportunity for a deal that would have funded the wall in exchange for a permanent legislative solution on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA is the illegal Barack Obama-era executive amnesty, through which the previous president bestowed–without legislative approval–amnesty upon approximately a million illegal alien youths.

Earlier this year, a number of legislative proposals exchanging in part the border wall for a permanent DACA amnesty, including some deals where Democrats were open to the pillars in principle that were floated–but none made it through Congress.

The Democrats OBSTRUCTION of the desperately needed Wall, where they almost all recently agreed it should be built, is exceeded only by their OBSTRUCTION of 350 great people wanting & expecting to come into Government after being delayed for more than two years, a U.S. record!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2018

The reason the DACA for Wall deal didn’t get done was that a ridiculous court decision from the 9th Circuit allowed DACA to remain, thereby setting up a Supreme Court case. After ruling, Dems dropped deal – and that’s where we are today, Democrat obstruction of the needed Wall.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2018

I totally agree! https://t.co/KO8E3bfWfn

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2018

The White House issued a new statement late on Thursday afternoon, too, putting the heat on congressional Democrats. The White House said, per a press pool report:

The President has made clear that any bill to fund the government must adequately fund border security to stop the flow of illegal drugs, criminals, MS-13 gang members, child smugglers and human traffickers into our communities – and protect the American people. The Administration understands this crisis and made a reasonable, common-sense solution to Democrats five days ago – we’ve not received a single response. The President and his team stayed in Washington over Christmas hoping to negotiate a deal that would stop the dangerous crisis on the border, protect American communities, and re-open the government. The Democrats decided to go home. The only rational conclusion is that the Democrat party is openly choosing to keep our government closed to protect illegal immigrants rather than the American people. The President does not want the government to remain shut down, but he will not sign a proposal that does not first prioritize our county’s safety and security.

When those deals fell through, Trump pushed to have $5 billion in border wall funding included in a spending bill that Congress was supposed to approve after the midterm elections – before Christmas, heading into the new year. In the week leading up to Christmas, the GOP-led House of Representatives passed the funding bill that including $5.7 billion in border wall money Trump sought–but the bill was blocked in the Senate, which passed a different spending bill with zero dollars for the border wall.

The deadline passed last Friday at midnight, leading to a lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security and a number of other federal departments and agencies and what has now been a slow-burning partial federal government shutdown. The military and other parts of the federal government are funded via separate spending bills, so the nature of the shutdown being only part of the government–along with the timing of it starting the long weekend leading into Christmas Eve and Christmas and continuing into the long weekend leading into New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day next week–have mitigated much of the normal consequences of a prolonged government shutdown. In other words, as the public is not feeling the effects of the shutdown as they had in previous shutdowns like one during the Obama administration, that gives Trump more leverage with which to batter Democrats.

The president, however, is racing the clock. If he does not obtain some kind of victory by Jan. 3–which is next Thursday, just one week away–the new Democrat majority in the House elected in November’s midterm elections takes over. While Republicans were able to add a net two seats to their Senate majority on Nov. 6, they lost control of the House–meaning Trump’s ability to leverage this battle for border wall funding significantly decreases when power changes hands.

The Senate returned on Thursday after the Christmas holidays, and the House is not expected to have any votes this weekend into early next week, per the GOP leadership.

JUST IN: Notice sent to House members says “Members are advised that no votes are expected in the House this week.”

Translation: Barring some kind of breakthrough, the partial govt shutdown will last into next week.

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) December 27, 2018

Here’s the notice just sent to House members saying “Members are advised that no votes are expected in the House this week.” pic.twitter.com/a3KOD8sSGq

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) December 27, 2018

As such, this shutdown is very likely to last through New Year’s Day and even likely to bleed into the next Congress. Democrats are blaming Republicans and particularly Trump for the lingering shutdown, but assuming it lasts into January, when Democrats take over they start bearing responsibility and cannot just throw political attacks Trump’s way. Given the minimal impact of the shutdown on the public, and the lack of consequences in Washington for the president at least for now, he may seek to drag this out as long as he can while continually battering the Democrats politically like he is doing on Twitter on Thursday afternoon.

To get to a deal that reopens the government, both chambers of Congress–the House and the Senate–will need to pass a spending bill in agreement with each other. The Senate, per rules that there are not enough votes to change, requires 60 votes for such legislation to make it to the president’s desk. If the deadline lurks past when the new Congress elected in November comes in on Jan. 3, any bills passed by either chamber become null and void, so Congress would need to start over.

The high-stakes political battle for funding for the border wall is one of Trump’s central campaign promises, and his re-election is under two years away. Meanwhile, on the Democrat side of the aisle, as many as 40 or more potential presidential candidates are considering bids for the Democrat nomination and the chance to take on Trump in a process likely to accelerate at the beginning of the year.

Conservatives and anti-establishment forces on the right are digging in, too, and pushing Trump to fight harder and harder for the wall. In a letter to the president obtained by Breitbart News, for instance, Rally Forge’s Jake Hoffman asks the president to step up and deliver a national address on the crisis at the border – to speak directly to the American people on the need for a wall. Hoffman writes:

On behalf of the entire conservative/America First movement, let me begin by applauding your dedication to doing what’s right for America and being willing to stand up for a sovereign America in the face of tremendous astroturfed opposition from both the Left and the establishment Right. America is greatly blessed by your sacrifice and steadfastness. Make no mistake, you will win this government shutdown. The time is now to take the truth about illegal immigration and the effectiveness of border walls directly to the American people. Today (12/24), you began this effort with your Facebook post on the White House Facebook page, as well as, your Donald J. Trump page. This was an excellent first step, but we need to reach further given the coming Leftist attacks.

Request for National Addres… by on Scribd

It remains to be seen where this battle goes from here, but it looks for now like both sides are dug in for the long haul in what could be one of the defining fights of 2019–right off the bat at the beginning of the year–all while Trump escalates his fight from his end, rallying the people to his side.