President Trump’s defense team wrapped up their opening arguments on Tuesday.
Trump’s deputy counsel Patrick Philbin blasted the unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch who believe their foreign policy disputes with President Trump is an impeachable offense.
Intel community underlings like Eric Ciaramella, Sean Misko, who went from NatSec to work for Schiff, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman plotted to remove Trump from office because they disagreed with the President’s foreign policy related to Ukraine.
According to the Constitution, President Trump sets foreign policy, not unelected staffers who have no accountability to the American people.
“The President cannot defy agencies within the executive branch,” Philbin argued. “Article 2 section 1 of the Constitution vests all of the executive power in a president of the United States — he alone is an entire branch of government — he sets policy for the executive branch.”
Philbin explained that the president is given such vast power because he is elected and accountable to the American people.
The US has an election every four years to keep that power in check.
In contrast, the career bureaucrats are not elected and therefore have zero authority to set foreign policy.
“It inverts the Constitution,” Philbin said of giving unelected bureaucrats power over foreign policy. “The sole power is vested to the President of the United States.”
Case closed.
WATCH:
It comes down to this ➡️
House Democrats have impeached President @realDonaldTrump because career bureaucrats disagreed w/ his foreign policy direction.
However, the POTUS alone has the prerogative to set & execute foreign policy. No one else has that Constitutional authority. pic.twitter.com/DYbJKQHfgQ
West Point cadets attended mandatory events — framed by the military academy as educational curriculum — on “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “gender norms,” Breitbart News has learned. The programming included discussion groups led by upper-class cadets, labeled “facilitators,” making references to “toxic masculinity,” leading one cadet to comment, “I’m being taught how not to be a man.”
This was the military academy’s third “Honorably Living Day” hosted by West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams,” reported the Military Times, describing West Post’s characterization of “honorable living” as including “diversity, inclusion and acceptance of people from differing backgrounds, races and genders.”
Williams described the event as relevant to the development of combat “readiness.”
Cadets were obligated to view Miss Representation and The Mask You Live In, two documentary films produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, first lady of California and wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA).
Miss Representation features commentary from assorted left-wing and partisan Democrat figures, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Katie Couric, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Rachel Maddow, Rosie O’Donnell, and Gloria Steinem.
Debuted by the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), Miss Representation frames American society as broadly pathologized by anti-woman sexism.
“If people knew that Cuba, China, Iraq, and Afghanistan have more women in government than the United States of America, that would get some people upset,” said Newsom. He added, “One of the first things I did when I became mayor of San Francisco is that I appointed a female police chief, and then a female fire chief. … People thought I was trying to make some grand statement, when in fact I was actually just hiring the most qualified two candidates.”
“Without more women in politics, we just don’t really have democratic legitimacy,” alleged Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. “Something looks fundamentally wrong with our political institutions.”
Barbara J. Berg, author of Sexism in America, claimed, “Patriarchy, really, is America’s default setting where men hold the positions of privilege and power, and where women, very often, are treated as second-class citizens.”
The Mask You Live In derides “hypermasculinity,” and masculinity more broadly, as stultifying boys’ and men’s emotional development. Its features commentary critiques what its speakers characterize as arbitrarily socialized “gender roles” associated with manhood.
“Be a man,’ that’s one of the most destructive phrases in this culture, I believe,” stated Joe Ehrmann, former NFL defensive lineman.
“We’ve constructed an idea of masculinity in the United States that doesn’t give young boys a way to feel secure in their masculinity, some make them go prove it all the time,” opined Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.
“Masculinity is not organic,” claimed Caroline Heldman, a professor of politics at Occidental University. “It’s reactive. It’s not something that just develops. It’s a rejection of everything that is feminine … through our popular culture, through our parenting styles, through our educational style, and through assumptions of natural manhood and maleness.”
“Throughout most of history, there’s been this belief that men and women are fundamentally different creatures, and it probably begins with the Bible,” said Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University. “Sex is a biological term. It refers to which chromosomes you have. … gender is a social construct.”
After viewing the above-mentioned films, cadets attended workshops in which they were questioned about the films’ content.
In 2017, Jennifer Siebel Newsom derided Breitbart News as a “hate speech website,” calling on Amazon to withdraw its digital advertising from this news media outlet’s website. She disparaged Breitbart News as a publisher of “sexist, racist, xenophobic, and bigoted rhetoric.”
Bruce Stewart, a self-described “leading thought leader in the field of inclusive diversity”, was also hosted by West Point as a featured speaker. He lectures on “the New IQ,” which he claims is “a new way of thinking about and measuring inclusive diversity [and] a new kind of intelligence.”
Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, superintendent of West Point, described the curriculum as conducive to improving combat readiness:
Below is the text of a schedule issued to cadets for Tuesday’s “stand down” of standard curriculum:
Session 1 (gender-based Discussion):
Cadets will bring a 3×5 card identifying 3 things that make them feel included/valued and 3 things that make feel excluded/no valued
Cadets will discuss their gender socialization and how that socialization affects behavior and relationships (facilitator questions provided)
Live Honorably Lunch:
Facilitators will invite cadets to share their thoughts from the morning discussion and examine how society/culture/West point, etc. shapes their gender norms and expectations
Session 2 (Role Play Scenario Development)
Cadets will select from 8 topics per company and create role play scenarios
Settings or topics for role play scenarios: Sexism, Racism, Cyber bullying, Alcohol, Mental Health, Sexual harassment or Sexual assault, Discrimination based no Sexual orientation, Cadet choice (other topic)
Theater Arts Guild Club will further refine one or two scenarios and will create a video example of a role play
Top 25 scenarios will be further refined for future Honorable Living Events or Exercises
Breitbart News received comments from several West Point cadets on condition of anonymity. Cadets are prohibited from speaking with the press without the school’s authorization under threat of disciplinary action.
“I’m being taught how not to be a man,” said one cadet.
“I’m going to quit West Point. It’s no longer teaching me to be a leader of men. It’s teaching me how to be a victim,” said another cadet.
“The real bias we need to talk about [is] why it’s scandalous to be conservative in a professional environment by ‘brave’ to follow the crowd and be liberal,” a third cadet wrote.
A fourth cadet said, “The guest speaker had us all make a black power sign a yell, ‘Fight the power!’”.
Breitbart News asked West Point for comment about its “stand down” departure standard curriculum. No immediate comment was provided by the time of this article’s publication. Asked about cadets being encouraged to render a “black power” salute, West Point said it was unaware of anyone being encouraged or asked to do so.
In 2017, Second Lieutenant Spencer Rapone was discharged from the U.S. Army following his display of the message “Communism Will Win” while wearing his West point uniform. He also expressed support for Colin Kaepernick’s political activities.
Rasheed Hosein, a professor of Middle East history, was placed on administrative leave by West Point following revelations of Rapone’s political behavior. He was in charge of Rapone’s development at the school.
CDC Expands Coronavirus Screening for Travelers Entering US, Institutes ‘Quarantine Stations’ Around Country
Patrick Semansky / APHealth and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks at a news conference about the federal government’s response to a virus outbreak originating in China, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020, in Washington. (Patrick Semansky / AP)
By AP Reports Published January 28, 2020 at 10:35am
U.S. health officials are expanding their checks of international travelers for signs of a worrisome new virus from China.
So far, they say the risk to Americans is very low.
For “the individual American, this should not be an impact on their day-to-day life,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Tuesday.
So far, there are five confirmed cases of this new virus in the U.S.
There is no sign that they have spread the respiratory illness to anyone around them.
Reports from China suggest that people there may have spread the illness before showing symptoms.
However, Dr. Robert Redfield stressed there is no evidence of that in the U.S.
Are you worried about how fast this coronavirus is spreading?
0% (0 Votes)
0% (0 Votes)
And while some other viruses are known to occasionally spread before symptoms are obvious — such as the flu — health officials say that’s far less of a concern than the obviously contagious patients.
The CDC already has been checking arrivals at five U.S. airports that once had direct flights from the hardest-hit section of China.
While China has instituted broad travel bans, people who had been in other parts of China still may be arriving via other countries.
As the death toll from coronavirus rises above 100, companies are restricting travel to China for their employees. HSBC banned all staff travel to Hong Kong and mainland China, while Facebook too announced a travel suspension https://t.co/hF95A9sq0Spic.twitter.com/3yZ2OkcNX5
The CDC is now beefing up screening at 15 more “quarantine stations” around the country, airports and other places where health workers regularly check arriving travelers for signs of illness.
But travelers may not be sick right then, CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier said.
The screenings also are an opportunity to educate travelers that if they develop symptoms — such as fever or a cough — after returning from the outbreak zone, they should contact their doctor, she said.
That’s exactly what the first two U.S. patients did.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
While anchoring MSNBC’s pre-impeachment trial coverage on Monday, Chris Matthews continued his ignoble history with analogies as he resurrected his comparison of Republicans to North Korean soldiers. This time, it came in the aftermath of revelations about former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s memoir.
Federal law enforcement officials arrested a top Harvard scientist on Tuesday for allegedly lying to the U.S. government about his involvement in a massive Chinese program that authorities say is responsible for stealing proprietary information from U.S. institutions.
Authorities arrested Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, on charges of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement.
The New York Times reported that Lieber “was named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, one of only 26 professors to hold that status,” and that “he earned the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain” in 2017.
“According to court documents, since 2008, Dr. Lieber who has served as the Principal Investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard University, which specialized in the area of nanoscience, has received more than $15,000,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD),” The Department of Justice said in a statement. “These grants require the disclosure of significant foreign financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities.”
“Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017,” the statement said. “China’s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese Talent recruit plans that are designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security. These talent programs seek to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China and reward individuals for stealing proprietary information.”
Prosecutors say that Lieber was paid $50,000 per month and given $150,000 a year for living expenses by China’s communist government. He was also given $1.5 million to build a laboratory in Wuhan.
“The complaint alleges that in 2018 and 2019, Lieber lied about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan and affiliation with WUT,” the statement concluded. “On or about, April 24, 2018, during an interview with investigators, Lieber stated that he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program, but he ‘wasn’t sure’ how China categorized him. In November 2018, NIH inquired of Harvard whether Lieber had failed to disclose his then-suspected relationship with WUT and China’s Thousand Talents Plan. Lieber caused Harvard to falsely tell NIH that Lieber ‘had no formal association with WUT’ after 2012, that ‘WUT continued to falsely exaggerate’ his involvement with WUT in subsequent years, and that Lieber ‘is not and has never been a participant in’ China’s Thousand Talents Plan.”
Federal law enforcement officials have urged American institutions “to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia,” NPR reported last year. “Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies.”
Backer on Dems: Those Who Scream Loudest on Corruption Are Often the Most Corrupt
Mark Wilson / Getty ImagesHouse impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff of California walks to the Senate Chamber inside the U.S. Capitol for President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial on Jan. 28, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
By Dan Backer Published January 28, 2020 at 1:27pm
Americans now recognize impeachment as a partisan sham, but Democratic elites simply refuse to let it go.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, for one, remains committed to the imaginary exposing of “the full extent of the president’s misconduct.”
The road to this unprecedented partisan impeachment sham is hardly straightforward. What impeachment lacks in actual crimes, misdemeanors or “Russian collusion” it makes up for with the Ukrainian strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Impeachment’s 2016 roots may be mired in corruption, but not on the part of President Trump.
Hillary Clinton, who routinely urges her fellow Democrats to “keep going” until President Trump is taken down, orchestrated an $84-million money-laundering scheme in 2016 — the largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history. It was so brazen even Federal Election Commission lawyers called for action.
The Clinton machine raised excessive, six-figure contributions from Democratic mega-donors like fashion icon Calvin Klein and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, before laundering it through the Hillary Victory Fund to dozens of Democratic state parties acting as straw men, over to the Democratic National Committee and into the hands of Clinton’s campaign.
The Clinton campaign then illegally paid millions of dollars to its law firm, Perkins Coie, which secretly funded the creation of the infamous “Steele Dossier.” Her campaign and the DNC effectively accepted something of value from a foreign national, Christopher Steele, in the form of anti-Trump opposition research (from Russian intelligence sources, no less).
The DNC itself tasked operative Alexandra Chalupa with “obtaining incriminating or derogatory information” about President Trump and his campaign staffers directly from Ukrainian government contacts.
Democrats violated the laws protecting our democracy again and again and again.
Meanwhile, there’s also the Democrats’ 2020 frontrunner, Joe Biden, whose daily diatribes are filled with anti-Trump smears. Good ol’ Joe admitted, on camera, to explicitly holding up aid to Ukraine to force the government to fire corruption investigator Victor Shokin — after Shokin looked into Biden’s son and his ties to a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.
Do you think Democrats are guilty of abusing their power?
100% (1 Votes)
0% (0 Votes)
Hunter Biden, the son of a then-sitting vice president, was receiving $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a foreign company, for which he lacked any relevant qualifications or experience. Hunter Biden’s big-money payday was essentially an insurance policy against precisely the kind of corruption investigation Burisma was worried about — and it worked for the Bidens.
That sure sounds like corruption to me — exactly the kind of corruption by powerful politicos we ought to investigate.
Yet Democrats have made their key thrust on impeachment that President Trump, in a bid to fight such blatant corruption here and abroad, asked for cooperation from a country that relies on American aid.
Seriously? Good for President Trump, and shame on the Democrats for enriching themselves at the expense of American taxpayers and Ukrainian oil and gas tycoons — and for covering it up.
What a long, strange year 2019 was. Fortunately, the American people aren’t so easily misled. For months, public polling has revealed impeachment to be decidedly unpopular, especially in key battleground states. According to a recent Michigan poll, most voters still oppose impeachment, even after House Democrats spent weeks flooding the airwaves with pro-impeachment propaganda.
Between President Trump’s strong stance against terrorism and an even stronger U.S. economy, the Democrats are no closer to bringing down the Trump presidency than they were on Inauguration Day. But perhaps President Trump’s greatest strength is the absolute moral bankruptcy of his Democratic opposition.
The same Democrats who complain about imaginary “abuses of power” have no problem abusing their own when it becomes politically expedient or profitable.
Remember: Those who scream the loudest about corruption are often the most corrupt. Rather than scrubbing the stain of corruption within their own party, Democrats are chasing after a sitting president for the “sin” of calling them out on it.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
A cultural divide between the National Football League and heartland America continues to grow, with a new commercial underscoring how far apart the two have drifted.
The commercial, which will play in front of millions of families across the country during the Super Bowl, features two drag queens who were previously on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a reality show that is centered around drag culture.
Kim Chi and Miz Cracker are the two drag queens who will appear in the commercial, among other personalities.
“Ready, Cracker?” Chi asks, while eating the Sabra brand hummus the entire commercial seems to be intended to sell.
“Chickpeas, I was born ready,” Cracker responds before attempting to put a football helmet on.
While the commercial is likely to catch many unaware families off guard, the LGBT crowd is overjoyed about their lifestyle choices being normalized and broadcast to millions.
LGBTQ Nation celebrated the fact that more than “100 million people will see drag queens on TV – many of them for the first time.”
PinkNews, another LGBT-centric publication, claimed that the cross-dressing duo “will make herstory.”
While the quips between the two may entertain the LGBT crowd, the connection to hummus will be largely lost on many Americans who may struggle to understand why drag queens are needed to sell a snack food.
Will this go over well with the NFL’s audience?
0% (0 Votes)
100% (1 Votes)
Thankfully, there are some answers.
“We’re bringing a diverse group of personalities to the table and demonstrating just how incredibly versatile, relevant and relatable hummus is today,” Jason Levine, chief marketing officer for Sabra, told AdWeek.
“We think we’ve got something for everyone.”
Along with the drag queens, the commercial will feature rapper T-Pain and two women from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
The ad is set to debut during Super Bowl LIV Sunday. Watch a 15-second preview of the full commercial below.
While there have been plenty of controversial Super Bowl commercials before this one, the addition of two drag queens to this major sports event will not go unnoticed.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
It might just be. Supreme Court Justic Neil Gorsuch, in a ruling about denying green cards to migrants who come here to be “public charges,” something that’s plainly laid out in U.S. law as illegal, threw in a special warning to activist judges, all leftists, who have been beavering away to rule from the bench, warning them that he’s tired of their shenanigans. It’s a specter to behold – a big lion on the Supreme Court who not only cares about rule of law, but is now warning the leftists out there that he’s coming for them.
In addition to the 5-4 decision allowing the rule to go into effect, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a concurring opinion rebuking activist judges and their rush to apply “nationwide injunctions” against Trump administration policies.
“Today the Court (rightly) grants a stay, allowing the government to pursue (for now) its policy everywhere save Illinois. But, in light of all that’s come before, it would be delusional to think that one stay today suffices to remedy the problem. The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case,” Gorsuch wrote.
His concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, is a much-needed rebuke to what he calls “the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case.”
Love the use of the word ‘cosmic’ to describe this judicial overreach. Kudos also to Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been laboring on this for decades.
Translation: Back off. You are a problem. You will be overruled.
The story here is that a new big lion has roared and all the little judicial activist rats out there who have been scurrying hard to block President Trump’s bid to do what the voters asked of him, are now being read the Riot Act.
The problem Gorsuch stated is actually a huge issue, cutting to the right of whether the citizens have the right to elect the leaders they want. Seems any judge out in some wasted blue city has appropriated for himself the power to overrule the president on any spurious grounds whatsoever and knows that by the time the appeals get done, the presidency will be over. Time enough to elect a Democrat for that. Some of these creeps even know their spuriously reasoned rulings will be overturned but for them, knowing full well the idea is to
Those who lose out are the voters. And the irony of the whole matter is that they elected President Trump to get rid of insane things like government by executive order, as in the case of DACA and assorted drilling bans. Obama, or any Democrat, is free to issue these essentially sweeping dictatorial edicts, but the judicial rattery says Trump is not free to get rid of them, correcting course on previous presidential overreach.
Here’s are fifteen such judicial activist bids to block Trump and rest assured the list is not comprehensive
San Francisco judge William Orrick in 2017 blocked President Trump’s bid to withhold federal funds from cities that shield illegal aliens through sanctuary city laws.
Hawaii judge Derrick Watson in 2017 blocked President Trump’s temporary travel ban on citizens from terrorist-exporting countries, derived from an Obama administration list, a perfectly reasonable presidential decision based on who was getting in.
Texas border judge Andrew Hanan in 2018 blocked President Trump’s bid to shut down DACA, despite admitting that President Obama had no authority to impose DACA after Congress rejected it, arbitrarily saying Trump waited “too long” to get rid of the Obama executive order. He didn’t notice that Trump spent a lot of time trying in good faith to make a deal with the Democrats, who don’t do deals.
Washington D.C. judge John D. Bates in 2018 blocked Trump from shutting DACA down, too, ruling that not only were the Dreamers free of any deportation concerns, the Trump administration would be forced to continue to take applications from the lawbreakers, keeping the incentive to immigrate illegally with small children going.
San Francisco judge William Allsup in 2018 blocked Trump from shutting DACA down so that all the little lawsuits from illegals and their advocates could go through first, a great plan for driving a decision on the issue well past the Trump administration for disposition.
San Francisco judge Kim Wardlaw in 2018 continued to block the Trump administration from shutting down DACA on the logic that the illegals in question were “likely to succeed” in whatever new lawsuits they could cook up to stop Trump. Nothing like a convenient forecast.
El Paso judge David Brione in 2019 blocked President Trump’s diversion of $3.6 billion in defense funding for a border wall, effectively saying that guarding the border from bona fide invaders was not a defense purposa, apparently thinking the Department of Defense is solely there for Iraq wars instead.
Oakland judge Haywood Gilliam in 2019 blockedPresident Trump’s diversion of $3.6 billion in border wall funding to protect the border on the get-a-load “logic” that it might interfere with the Sierra Club’s enjoyment of all the border scenery. Kid you not. When you see how much the other judges are getting away with in Gettin Trump, any old logic will do.
San Francisco Judge Jon Tigar in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enforce international asylum law requiring would-be asylees to take the first country of refuge, meaning, would-be asylum seekers would have to show their seriousness by taking any place they can get instead of country-shopping across multiple borders for the best package deal. His ruling pretty well rang the dinner triangle for the increasingly sophisticated and lucrative people smuggling networks from India, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central America to come on in, passing through as many countries as they needed to. He actually did it two other times, too, creating a “gift to human smugglers and traffickers,” as White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said.
Alaska judge Sharon Gleason in 2019 blocked President Trump’s 2017 lifting of Obama-era restrictions on drilling, saying he hadn’t done enough environmental assessmenting.
New York judge George Daniels in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enforce existing federal law about denying green cards to migrants who have come her to use pricey welfare services such as Medicaid, free housing cash, and food stamps, and he wasn’t the first – three other judges in California, New York and Washington state were there first.
Washington, D.C. judge John Bates (him again) in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enable small businesses to band together with other small businesses to buy health care at the same cheap rates corporates get for their employees, saying it was “an end-run” around the punitive Obamacare. That’s some logic he’s got there: Pay higher rates or else. Stay punished, my friends.
Maryland judge Peter Messitte in 2020 blocked President Trump’s decision to allow local officials to decide whether they wanted to accept “refugees,” many of whom have created problems, with the vague flip of the hand that it was “not in the public interest.” Apparently the members of the public who live in such places don’t have interests.
That’s just fifteen such activist jackasses and rest assured there are more.
Gorsuch’s move was sorely needed if the voters are ever going to be able to make choices based on democratic representation. It’s a good thing for democracy, it restores the link between voter choices and voter results, allowing voters to be right and wrong, and ending a petty satrapy of petty leftwing judges who follow solely the activist agenda, allowing themselves to be the handmaidens of creatures such as George Soros and his vast NGO activist networks. It forces judges to rule by what the law says, not what they want and can’t persuade votes to get at the ballot box. It forces them to stay in their lane or else endure the disgrace of seeing their stupid rulings overruled. It snaps the judges back to their role and curbs the vast unelected administrative state that Brought Trump.
Gorsuch’s stellar move is in the same constellation as the great legal mind of Antonin Scalia. It’s fealty to the Constitution. It’s fealty to democratic rule. And it’s a torch that has long been lying there, critical for someone to pick up. Gorsuch did it. This Justice rocks.
Is the era of Big Judicial Activism over?
It might just be. Supreme Court Justic Neil Gorsuch, in a ruling about denying green cards to migrants who come here to be “public charges,” something that’s plainly laid out in U.S. law as illegal, threw in a special warning to activist judges, all leftists, who have been beavering away to rule from the bench, warning them that he’s tired of their shenanigans. It’s a specter to behold – a big lion on the Supreme Court who not only cares about rule of law, but is now warning the leftists out there that he’s coming for them.
In addition to the 5-4 decision allowing the rule to go into effect, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a concurring opinion rebuking activist judges and their rush to apply “nationwide injunctions” against Trump administration policies.
“Today the Court (rightly) grants a stay, allowing the government to pursue (for now) its policy everywhere save Illinois. But, in light of all that’s come before, it would be delusional to think that one stay today suffices to remedy the problem. The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case,” Gorsuch wrote.
His concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, is a much-needed rebuke to what he calls “the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case.”
Love the use of the word ‘cosmic’ to describe this judicial overreach. Kudos also to Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been laboring on this for decades.
Translation: Back off. You are a problem. You will be overruled.
The story here is that a new big lion has roared and all the little judicial activist rats out there who have been scurrying hard to block President Trump’s bid to do what the voters asked of him, are now being read the Riot Act.
The problem Gorsuch stated is actually a huge issue, cutting to the right of whether the citizens have the right to elect the leaders they want. Seems any judge out in some wasted blue city has appropriated for himself the power to overrule the president on any spurious grounds whatsoever and knows that by the time the appeals get done, the presidency will be over. Time enough to elect a Democrat for that. Some of these creeps even know their spuriously reasoned rulings will be overturned but for them, knowing full well the idea is to game the system.
Those who lose out are the voters. And the irony of the whole matter is that they elected President Trump to get rid of insane things like government by executive order, as in the case of DACA and assorted drilling bans. Obama, or any Democrat, is free to issue these essentially sweeping dictatorial edicts, but the judicial rattery says Trump is not free to get rid of them, correcting course on previous presidential overreach.
Here’s are fifteen such judicial activist bids to block Trump and rest assured the list is not comprehensive
San Francisco judge William Orrick in 2017 blocked President Trump’s bid to withhold federal funds from cities that shield illegal aliens through sanctuary city laws.
Hawaii judge Derrick Watson in 2017 blocked President Trump’s temporary travel ban on citizens from terrorist-exporting countries, derived from an Obama administration list, a perfectly reasonable presidential decision based on who was getting in.
Texas border judge Andrew Hanan in 2018 blocked President Trump’s bid to shut down DACA, despite admitting that President Obama had no authority to impose DACA after Congress rejected it, arbitrarily saying Trump waited “too long” to get rid of the Obama executive order. He didn’t notice that Trump spent a lot of time trying in good faith to make a deal with the Democrats, who don’t do deals.
Washington D.C. judge John D. Bates in 2018 blocked Trump from shutting DACA down, too, ruling that not only were the Dreamers free of any deportation concerns, the Trump administration would be forced to continue to take applications from the lawbreakers, keeping the incentive to immigrate illegally with small children going.
San Francisco judge William Allsup in 2018 blocked Trump from shutting DACA down so that all the little lawsuits from illegals and their advocates could go through first, a great plan for driving a decision on the issue well past the Trump administration for disposition.
San Francisco judge Kim Wardlaw in 2018 continued to block the Trump administration from shutting down DACA on the logic that the illegals in question were “likely to succeed” in whatever new lawsuits they could cook up to stop Trump. Nothing like a convenient forecast.
El Paso judge David Brione in 2019 blocked President Trump’s diversion of $3.6 billion in defense funding for a border wall, effectively saying that guarding the border from bona fide invaders was not a defense purposa, apparently thinking the Department of Defense is solely there for Iraq wars instead.
Oakland judge Haywood Gilliam in 2019 blockedPresident Trump’s diversion of $3.6 billion in border wall funding to protect the border on the get-a-load “logic” that it might interfere with the Sierra Club’s enjoyment of all the border scenery. Kid you not. When you see how much the other judges are getting away with in Gettin Trump, any old logic will do.
San Francisco Judge Jon Tigar in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enforce international asylum law requiring would-be asylees to take the first country of refuge, meaning, would-be asylum seekers would have to show their seriousness by taking any place they can get instead of country-shopping across multiple borders for the best package deal. His ruling pretty well rang the dinner triangle for the increasingly sophisticated and lucrative people smuggling networks from India, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central America to come on in, passing through as many countries as they needed to. He actually did it two other times, too, creating a “gift to human smugglers and traffickers,” as White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said.
Alaska judge Sharon Gleason in 2019 blocked President Trump’s 2017 lifting of Obama-era restrictions on drilling, saying he hadn’t done enough environmental assessmenting.
New York judge George Daniels in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enforce existing federal law about denying green cards to migrants who have come her to use pricey welfare services such as Medicaid, free housing cash, and food stamps, and he wasn’t the first – three other judges in California, New York and Washington state were there first.
Washington, D.C. judge John Bates (him again) in 2019 blocked President Trump’s bid to enable small businesses to band together with other small businesses to buy health care at the same cheap rates corporates get for their employees, saying it was “an end-run” around the punitive Obamacare. That’s some logic he’s got there: Pay higher rates or else. Stay punished, my friends.
Maryland judge Peter Messitte in 2020 blocked President Trump’s decision to allow local officials to decide whether they wanted to accept “refugees,” many of whom have created problems, with the vague flip of the hand that it was “not in the public interest.” Apparently the members of the public who live in such places don’t have interests.
That’s just fifteen such activist jackasses and rest assured there are more.
Gorsuch’s move was sorely needed if the voters are ever going to be able to make choices based on democratic representation. It’s a good thing for democracy, it restores the link between voter choices and voter results, allowing voters to be right and wrong, and ending a petty satrapy of petty leftwing judges who follow solely the activist agenda, allowing themselves to be the handmaidens of creatures such as George Soros and his vast NGO activist networks. It forces judges to rule by what the law says, not what they want and can’t persuade votes to get at the ballot box. It forces them to stay in their lane or else endure the disgrace of seeing their stupid rulings overruled. It snaps the judges back to their role and curbs the vast unelected administrative state that Brought Trump.
Gorsuch’s stellar move is in the same constellation as the great legal mind of Antonin Scalia. It’s fealty to the Constitution. It’s fealty to democratic rule. And it’s a torch that has long been lying there, critical for someone to pick up. Gorsuch did it. This Justice rocks.
KYIV, Ukraine—Monday marks
the 75th anniversary of the day Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, Nazi
Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp. At Auschwitz, the Nazis
murdered more than 1 million men, women, and children, mostly Jews, during the
Holocaust.
I have been to Auschwitz
only once. It was a long time ago, in February of 2006.
I lived in Paris at the
time, attending graduate school at the Sorbonne as part of a military
fellowship before Air Force pilot training.
We had a few weeks off in February, so a friend and I embarked on a road trip across Eastern Europe. In Prague, we split up for a few days. I’d wanted to visit Krakow, Poland, and Auschwitz. My friend didn’t. So, I hopped on a train and we agreed to reconvene in Vienna a few days later.
The Auschwitz I camp. (Photos: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)
The thing is, I was drawn
to Auschwitz. For me it was a monument, symbolizing that wars are sometimes
necessary. And at that time, war cast a long shadow over my life, even while I
was having the time of it while living in Paris as a young man.
The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan were then in full swing, and I was a newly-minted Air Force second
lieutenant, having graduated from the Air Force Academy in June of 2004.
And so, while most of my friends had gone straight off to training programs for their future career fields, getting ready for war, my superfluous days were spent reading and writing in Parisian cafes, enjoying the famous French wine and food—with the odd university class thrown in the mix, from time to time.
A memorial to the dead near the ruins of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
By February of 2006, some
of my friends were flying fighter jets. Others had already experienced combat.
And yet, there I was, nearly two years on active duty, about to automatically
make rank as a first lieutenant. And I’d done nothing more than easy living in
Paris.
I got a hard dose of
reality one weekend night in Paris.
I was in line for a
nightclub, and the two men in front of me were speaking in English, using
acronyms and lingo that quickly gave them away as U.S. military members. We got
to talking, and I let them know I was an Air Force lieutenant slated to begin
pilot training in the fall of 2006. I thought they’d be impressed. They
weren’t.
They said they were
enlisted U.S. Army soldiers on leave after a tour in Iraq. Then they asked if
I’d ever deployed. I said no and felt smaller than I ever had before.
Yes, living in Paris was a gift, and I was grateful for the experience. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be out there fighting in my country’s wars.
On a cold February day in 2006, the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp seemed deserted.
Thus, it was in this frame
of mind that I decided to part ways with my friend in Prague and take a night
train to Poland. I’d also just recently watched the movie “Schindler’s List”
for the first time. Fresh, haunting images from that film were forefront in my
mind when I stepped off the train in Krakow.
It was night, and I walked
the streets alone and in the dark. A thick layer of snow covered the ground.
The air was painfully cold.
I went first to Oskar
Schindler’s Enamel Factory, where the legendary German industrialist had
sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. From there, I strolled Krakow’s streets
late into the night, trying to imagine what had happened there during the war.
The city was quiet and still as most cities are at night, and I felt like I had
the place to myself.
And yet, that nagging sense
of guilt was always there, chasing me like Pigpen’s dust cloud. The
unforgettable truth that at that moment my friends were at war, and I wasn’t.
The next day I took a train from Krakow to Auschwitz. It wasn’t a long ride, and I arrived early in the morning and took a taxi from the station to the Auschwitz I camp.
It was cold inside the prisoner barracks at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.
Like a scene from Dante, I
walked into the camp through the metal gate infamously crested by the German
words: “Arbeit macht frei.”
Work sets
you free.
Originally Polish army
barracks, the Nazi SS had used Auschwitz I at first to house Polish political
prisoners. At the site, the Nazis later built gas chambers and a crematorium
for the mass murder of Jews and other minorities.
The day was clear without a
cloud in the sky. But it was cold. A kind of unforgiving cold that cuts easily
through piled-on layers of down and fleece. My fingers moved in slow motion as
I tried to work my camera.
My thoughts, too, seemed to be stuck at some slower pace. But that lethargy had nothing to do with the cold. Rather, as I went deeper into the camp, and as I encountered mounting evidence of what had happened there during the Holocaust, my mind simply could not keep up with the horror of it all. The real-world implications of what I was seeing were beyond the limits of my 23-year-old imagination, which had not yet been shaped by war, to appreciate.
A memorial to the dead at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
Yes, I’d seen movies and
read books about the Holocaust. But at that moment I was walking through the
place where it had all actually happened. The epicenter of humanity’s
greatest crime.
I went into the old brick
buildings and saw rooms filled with eyeglasses, shoes, clothes, random
knick-knacks. All stolen from prisoners before their executions in the gas
chambers. The piles of these things were depressingly huge.
There was a gas chamber and crematorium left standing at the Auschwitz I complex. When I went inside my eyes gravitated toward the walls and the ceiling—the edges of that horrible space. Subconsciously, my mind wanted out.
The crematorium at Auschwitz I.
I caught another taxi for
the two-mile trip to the larger, Auschwitz II-Birkenau compound.
From pictures, I instantly recognized the front tower at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and how the narrow-gauge railway line ran underneath the tower into the center of the camp where prisoners were unloaded from cattle cars and the Nazi SS guards decided who lived and who died.
The end of the railway into Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where prisoners were unloaded from cattle cars and the Nazi SS guards decided who lived and who died.
I walked alone through the
ruined camp. I’m sure other people were around, but I saw no one.
The day, as I’ve said, was cold beyond cold. My feet crunched in the snow. My fingers burned and then went numb. I felt guilty, though, when I considered cutting my visit short to seek warm shelter. The prisoners had once endured equally cold conditions, and under infinitely more trying circumstances.
I walked to the rear of the
camp and stood at the edge of a ramp that led down to what had once been a
building housing gas chambers. In an attempt to hide their crimes, the Nazis
had demolished the gas chambers before the Soviets arrived. On that day in
2006, the structures were nothing more than piles of rubble covered in
snow.
Nearby where I stood, a
black stone monument stood amid an unblemished blanket of snow. The stone was
engraved with the words:
To the memory of the men, women, and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.
Gravity seemed heavier on this spot. The weight of the knowledge of the tragedy that had happened here added mass to the earth and air.
A gas chamber at Auschwitz I.
It wasn’t an exceptional
place. Just a heap of bricks under the snow. But the suffering that the ground concealed
was radioactive. It hummed and crackled, passing invisibly through the air,
then right through me, turning me inside out, damaging me from within.
You can’t see it, touch
it, or smell it. But you feel it. And there’s a particular way the hushed
voices of the dead echo to the living in a place like Auschwitz.
Later, I moved on and looked into the prisoners’ barracks. It was unimaginably cold inside where the prisoners had once slept—where at night they’d clung to their slim hopes for survival. I ran my hand over a graffiti mural a prisoner had drawn on a wall. I tried to imagine life as a prisoner at Auschwitz. I couldn’t.
Piles of eyeglasses stolen from prisoners on display at the Auschwitz I camp.
Before I left Auschwitz
II-Birkenau, I came upon two roses tied to a barbed-wire fence. The red petals
stood out sharply against the snow. The flowers had not wilted; someone had
left them there recently. I looked around but saw no one.
Standing before the roses, I thought, “Thank God there are good people, too.”
Then I proudly remembered my friends who were at war. And more than ever I wanted to join them in the noble effort of preventing something like Auschwitz from ever happening again.
Two roses tied to a barbed-wire fence at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
More than 10 years later, I
stood at the edge of a field in Sinjar, Iraq. A pile of human bones was in the
field. Evidence of another genocide—the Islamic State’s mass murder of Yazidis, Christians, and
Shiite Muslims.
By then, in June
of 2016, I’d
already served in both Iraq and Afghanistan as an Air Force special operations
pilot. And I’d been back to both those wars as a civilian war correspondent.
I’d spent a lot of time on the front lines in Ukraine, too.
Now I knew what war looked like from both the ground and from the air. I knew a lot more about war than I’d ever thought I’d know. And yet, despite my education in the horrors of war, there I was once again, totally incapable of understanding what quantity of evil could ever permit a human being to prosecute the mass murder of innocents.
An image drawn by a prisoner in the barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
I stood
there in silence alongside dozens of Kurdish peshmerga soldiers. Those brave
warriors were, at that time, engaged in ongoing combat against the Islamic
State’s terrorist army. In fact, the Islamist militants were entrenched only a
couple miles from where we then stood.
The
fighting was close enough to hear. And in the sky, U.S. warplanes—piloted by
men and women of my generation, some of whom I knew—were also killing our
mutual enemies. Amid the background din of distant gunfire and American jet
noise, I thought back to that cold day at Auschwitz a decade earlier.
I remembered that the ruins of Auschwitz’s gas chambers are not, after all, evidence of evil’s defeat. Rather, those ruins remind us that the fight is never over. Every generation has its own responsibility to keep evil at bay. And mine is no exception.
Originally Polish army barracks, the Nazi SS had used Auschwitz I at first to house Polish political prisoners.
As we reflect on the 75th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s easy to be lulled into the mistaken belief
that history automatically arcs in the right direction. That the era of world
wars and genocides is over. That it could never happen again.
But the truth is we are just
treading water, fighting against the gravitational tug of history. The minute
we stop kicking, we descend, quickly and easily, into those dark depths from
which we thought we had escaped.
To defeat evil, we must
remember that it exists. And to prevent another Auschwitz from ever happening
again, we must believe that it could.
