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Hill Conservatives Sound Alarm Over Spending Deal

Some conservatives in Congress are denouncing a spending compromise between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats “that increases spending by about $2 trillion over the next 10 years, but provides only $77 billion in offsets,” according to the chairman of the Republican Study Committee.

“While conservatives can appreciate the agreement’s restrictions on poison-pill riders, the price alone is far outside of what Congress should be allocating,” Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., added in a statement.

The spending deal, which is expected to be voted on this week before Congress adjourns for its August recess, combines a temporary suspension of the debt limit through July 31, 2021, with raising the spending caps in the Budget Control Act for fiscal years 2020 and 2021—meaning the federal government would have no limit on how much it can borrow, as The Daily Signal previously reported. 

“With more than $22 trillion in debt, we simply cannot afford deals like this one,” Johnson said. “I am disappointed Democrats denied the administration even modest concessions, and I will continue to make the case for restoring fiscal sanity in the Congress.”

The deal allocates $738 billion for military spending, which is less than the  $750 billion requested by Trump.

Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., a former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, also voiced his displeasure with the spending deal. 

“The debt ceiling is here again,” Walker tweeted. “Our credit card is maxed out. What this budget deal does is ask the credit card company for another $320 billion in credit NOW for the chance to get paid back $75 billion in a decade. No bank would take that. American taxpayers shouldn’t either.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, called out Trump for negotiating through Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, rather than acting Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. 

“The president should be listening to [acting White House Chief of Staff] Mick Mulvaney and Russ Vought, and he should not be listening to Steven Mnuchin, period,” Roy said, appearing to suggest that he doesn’t trust Mnuchin to fight for conservative Republican budget priorities.

Roy added that “Senate Republicans will never not find a corner where they can go and hide,” implying that Republicans in the other chamber cannot be counted on to cut spending.

Roy also tweeted about the spending deal:

In May, Roy penned a letter, signed by more than 40 of his House GOP colleagues,  asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to pursue only spending deals that adhere to the budget caps for fiscal years 2020 and 2021. 

Conservative lawmakers in the Senate are also not happy about the so-called deal. 

“The Trump economic boom gave us the best economy we’ve had in decades, and in any business, now would be the time to cut spending & save up for a rainy day,” freshman Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., tweeted. 

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., likewise weighed in on Twitter:

The post Hill Conservatives Sound Alarm Over Spending Deal appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Gohmert to Mueller: ‘You Perpetuated Injustice’

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Wednesday that if someone knows he’s innocent of conspiring with Russia to interfere with the election and that people at the Justice Department hate him, that person is not obstructing justice, he’s pursuing justice, and the fact that Mueller dragged out the Russia investigation for two years shows Mueller was perpetuating injustice.

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Rep. Stewart: ‘Every Single One’ of 25 Leaks from Mueller’s Office ‘Designed to Weaken or Embarrass President’

Rep. Chris Stewart (Screenshot)
During Wednesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) held up a binder documenting 25 leaks from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and declared that “all of them have one thing in common.”

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Donald Trump Thanks Democrats for Robert Mueller Hearings

President Donald Trump mocked Democrats on Wednesday for holding hearings with former special counsel Robert Mueller on the Russia investigation.

“I would like to thank the Democrats for holding this morning’s hearing,” he wrote on Twitter ahead of Mueller’s additional testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee under chairman Adam Schiff on Wednesday afternoon.

“Now, after 3 hours, Robert Mueller has to subject himself to #Shifty Schiff – an Embarrassment to our Country!” Trump continued, referring to the chairman.

Trump watched portions of the testimony, according to reports, but did not appear concerned about the first round of testimony.

The president also shared Fox News analysis of the hearings, including Chris Wallace describing the testimony as a “disaster,” Katie Pavlich noting that Mueller denied that his investigation was impeded, and highlights of Rep. Jim Jordan’s line of questioning.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also shared an assessment of the Mueller testimony earlier on Wednesday.

“The last three hours have been an epic embarrassment for the Democrats,” she wrote in a statement to reporters. “Expect more of the same in the second half”:

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‘VERY PAINFUL’: Democrats, Left-Wing Media Implode Over Disastrous Mueller Hearing

Prominent Democrats and members of left-wing media melted down on Wednesday in response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s bumbling hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
As the hearing unfolded, numerous critics across the political spectrum criticized Mueller’s seemingly dull mental dexterity and his inability to defend his work.
David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama, tweeted: "This is very, very painful."

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Investigation: Washington Sanctuary County Releases Hundreds of Illegal Aliens Charged with Felonies

Washington state’s central sanctuary county released hundreds of illegal aliens charged with felonies such as homicide, kidnapping, and sexual assault over the course of two years, a new investigation finds.

Records obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) reveal that the sanctuary jurisdiction of King County, Washington — which includes Seattle — failed to honor more than 370 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency detainers that were placed on arrested illegal aliens — including those charged with serious felonies.

An ICE detainer is a hold that federal immigration officials put on an illegal alien who has been arrested by local or state law enforcement asking that they turn the particular illegal alien over to them for arrest and deportation.

Sanctuary jurisdictions like King County,refuse to hand criminally charged illegal aliens over to ICE agents.

Over a 27-month period ending on December 30, 2017, King County freed hundreds of illegal aliens instead of turning them over to ICE for deportation. Nearly 290 of these illegal aliens taken into custody and then freed by King County officials had been charged with felonies such as homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, drugs, burglary, and fraud.

RLI Executive Director Dale Wilcox said in a statement:

State and local elected leaders like to congratulate themselves for the compassion of their sanctuary policies, but they are actually bringing violent crime and even death to their residents. The people of King County should be outraged and demand accountability from their leaders. Refusing ICE detainer requests means releasing dangerous criminals into the community, period.

Most recently in King County, a 32-year-old woman who is bound to a wheelchair was allegedly raped by 35-year-old illegal alien Francisco Carranza Ramirez, as Breitbart News reported.

The victim pleaded with the court to give the illegal alien the highest penalty possible, but instead, he was given just 12 months in prison which had already been served and he was released and ordered deported to Mexico.

Just three days after being released from prison, Ramirez found his rape victim and attacked her while she was with her three-year-old son, pushing her out of her wheelchair and fleeing the scene. Today, Ramirez is wanted by local and state officials and is now an illegal alien fugitive.

Currently, IRLI is awaiting additional data from ICE that will reveal how many illegal aliens charged with serious felonies were released from King County jails who were later charged with additional crimes.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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Google Blacklists Free Speech Platform Gab’s Latest App

Tech giant Google has blacklisted the free-speech focused social media app Gab from the Google Play Store, joining Apple in banning Gab users from accessing the platform using Gab-branded smartphone apps.

Silicon Valley tech giant Google has reportedly banned the free-speech focused social media platform Gab from the Google Play Store. According to a screenshot posted by Gab to Twitter, Google banned the app from the store for “Violation of User Generated Content (UGC) Policy.” Essentially, it appears that Gabs refusal to censor users’ content is what resulted in the app being removed from the store.

The tweet posted by Gab can be seen below, along with a number of links to similar apps that are still active in the Play Store and work with Gab’s servers. Because Gab shifted its platform to a decentralized and open-source architecture, it can be accessed by other apps still available on both Android and Apple smartphones, some with nearly identical code to the blacklisted Gab app.

Breitbart News reached out to Gab.com founder Andrew Torba for comment on the matter. Torba commented on and outlined the current situation with Google, saying:

Google has banned Gab’s decentralized and open-source mobile app from their Google Play Store, claiming that it has “non-compliant user-generated content such as hate speech.” The Gab android app contains no user content. It is effectively a web browser that allows anyone to connect to any one of the thousands of decentralized microblogging servers, Gab included. So by Google’s own standards, the Google Chrome web browser is also violating their user-generated content policy.

Gab’s app was forked from an open source project. The exact same code exists on the Google Play Store, the only difference is this version has Gab’s logo on it and was submitted by Gab. All of those apps with the exact same code are still up on the Google Play Store and ironically our one million Gab users can still utilize them to login to Gab.

Gab is now part of the Fediverse, a decentralized community of open source microblogging projects that are all built on top of the same open source protocol, ActivityPub. Any app that supports ActivityPub will allow Gab users to sign into Gab and get their feeds, notifications, and all other functionality. ActivityPub is used by multiple projects and by millions of users outside of Gab. Google will need to ban each and everyone of these apps in order to stop Gab.

The future of social networking on the web is decentralized and open source. Gab has been the tip of the spear in the fight for free speech online since August of 2016 and we continue to be the leading alternative technology solution to the Silicon Valley oligarchs.

We now have a decentralized and unstoppable social network, a web browser that blocks big tech trackers and ads, and soon our own free speech app store to circumvent the censorship of mobile apps. We will continue to build products that defend the fundamental human right to speak freely.

Breitbart News reporter Allum Bokhari recently reported that decentralized social media system Mastodon was also attempting to ban Gab and even shutting down users that refused to ban Gab from their servers. Bokhari writes:

Mastodon is an open-source social network that theoretically enables a decentralized network of online communities to thrive. Anyone can set up a Mastodon server, appoint moderators, and add it to the network of communities known as the “Fediverse.”

However, although its technology is built around the principles of decentralization and federated content moderation, Mastodon’s leadership leans to the left.

…

However, the very decentralized principles that allowed SJWs to set up Mastodon-based communities with trigger warnings and censorship on steroids also allowed free speech platform Gab to create a community based on First Amendment principles. By using Mastodon’s open source technology to provide a new mobile app to its users, Gab would theoretically be able to bypass Apple and Google’s anti-competitive bans of its original smartphone app.

The left-wingers behind Mastodon and many of the smartphone-based platforms built with the project’s software have swiftly acted to contain Gab.

…

To remove Gab from the Fediverse, every host of a Mastodon server would have to agree to ban Gab — as a result, panicked left-wing Mastodon users are flagging and reporting any Mastodon-based app that doesn’t agree to ban Gab. Merely by existing on the network, Gab has triggered a civil war within it.

Thanks to Gab, the people behind the Mastodon project are now at war with their own founding principles of decentralization. In abandoning their founding principles to pursue a strategy of censorship, they follow in the footsteps of the “Good Censors” at Google.

Read the full article at Breitbart News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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Religious Freedom Scorecard: Marco Rubio Earns Highest Rating in Senate for 3rd Year

WASHINGTON, DC — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) earned the highest score in the Senate again this week, which was bestowed by the latest International Religious Freedom (IRF) Congressional Scorecard, a non-governmental organization (NGO) assessment that recognizes lawmakers’ devotion to advancing religious liberties via their voting record, caucus work, and sponsoring of bills, among other efforts.

More Democrats received highest scores than Republicans, although the scorecards, first launched in 2017, covered the Republican majority sessions of Congress.

Rubio came out on top for his chamber on all three scorecards, released since 2017 by the Christians human rights NGO, 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative.

The NGO released one for the 114th session of Congress (January 2015 to January 2017), another for the first year of the 115th session, and the latest one issued Tuesday for the 115th in its entirety.

Breitbart News spoke to Lou Ann Sabatier, the communications director of 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, on the day it issued the IRF Congressional Scorecard.

Referring to the assessment, she said, “First, we want people to know and appreciate that we have members of Congress who have championed international religious freedom in tangible ways.“

“Secondly, we want to encourage legislators to take even bolder actions in support of international religious freedom,” she added. “And we want to ‘stir’ citizens to be more curious about what Congress is doing and to understand the scope of challenges they face on this issue.”

In the final assessment for the 115th congressional session, Rubio was joined by Rep. James McGovern (D-MA) in the House of Representatives in receiving the highest scores, showing bipartisan support for religious freedoms.

Only in the first scorecard (114th Congress) did two Republicans from each legislative chamber of the U.S. Capitol receive the highest scores.

Sabatier told Breitbart News, “Scoring is pretty balanced between Democrats and Republicans; it transcends partisanship.”

“Republicans and Democrats are working together on international religious freedom issues,” she added. “The Notable Leaders [48 out of 535 members of Congress] in the Senate did skew more to Democrats, but it’s balanced in the House.”

“I believe the reason this holds true is that it is the foundational freedom; it’s the dignity of humanity to respect and protect freedom of conscience and religion or belief,” she also said.

All scorecards covered Republican majority congressional sessions, but they all showed bipartisan support for religious liberties.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, however, the NGO recognized 31 Democrat and 17 Republican lawmakers as “notable leaders” of religious freedom.

In its assessment, the Wilberforce Initiative explained:

The FINAL International Religious Freedom Congressional Scorecard illuminates the voting records of members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for bills, resolutions, and amendments that support international religious freedom. It also tracks sponsorship and co-sponsorship of bills, votes in the House and the Senate, and international religious freedom-related caucus membership.

Some analysts indicated that Congress can still do more to promote religious freedom.

Katrina Lantos Swett, the president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice, declared in a statement attached to the release of the scorecard:

The FINAL IRF Congressional Scorecard has an incredibly important story to tell. As religious freedom abuses have proliferated around the world, America’s efforts to advocate for this bedrock human right have not kept pace. This vital tool tells us who in our Congress is leaning forward in defense of the First Freedom and who is leaning back. This is information we need to know so that all of us can better protect the conscience rights of people around the globe.

The NGO acknowledged that the scorecard is not a perfect tool.

“There are additional factors that cannot be reflected therein. Not all efforts made in the promotion and protection of international religious freedom can be publicly recorded,” it added, noting:

Low scores do not necessarily indicate disagreement with international religious freedom legislation, but rather that it was not a high priority for that legislator. Conversely, high scores indicate that a given legislator has made support of international religious freedom a priority.

The NGO released its scorecard amid the second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom hosted by the U.S. Department of State this week.

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Conservative Student Kathy Zhu Stripped of ‘Miss Michigan’ Title for ‘Offensive’ Social Media Posts

Kathy Zhu, a student from the University of Michigan, was stripped of her Miss Michigan title over “offensive” social media posts. The student says that she is being discriminated against over her conservative views.

University of Michigan student Kathy Zhu says that Miss World America recently contacted her to inform her that she was stripped of her Miss Michigan beauty pageant title over “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate” social media posts.

Zhu tweeted about the incident on Thursday, stating that Miss World America dismissed her from the beauty pageant due to her conservative views, as well as her refusal to wear a hijab last year.

“Miss World America’s State/National/Chief Director accused me of being racist, Islamaphobic, and insensitive,” tweeted Zhu. “They stripped me of my Miss Michigan title due to my refusal to try on a hijab in 2018, my tweet about black on black gun violence, and ‘insensitive’ statistical tweets.”

In 2018, Zhu made waves on campus after approaching a Muslim Student Association table and later declining to wear a hijab for “World Hijab Day,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

The student then tweeted, “There is a ‘try a hijab on’ booth at my college campus. So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam?”

Zhu later clarified that she was referring to women in the Middle Eastern countries who are being punished for refusing to wear the hijab.

“Nobody is talking about that in the West because all they see is everyone being at peace, but that is the beauty of America,” affirmed Zhu.

The conservative student took to Twitter to elaborate on the accusations made against her. “Someone called me an islamophobic for not wanting to put on a hijab. Someone called me a racist because I recognize that black people kill more blacks than police do,” said Zhu.

Miss World America, however, does not seem to approve of the student’s online activity, according to a purported email from the organization, shared by Zhu on Twitter.

“It has been brought to the attention of Miss Word America (MWA) that your social media posts contain offensive, insensitive, and inappropriate content,” read the purported email from Miss World America to Zhu.

The email went on to state that Zhu was in violation of the pageant’s Rules and Conditions requiring contestants to be “of good character and whose background is not likely to bring into dispute Miss World America or any person associated with the organization.”

“Therefore, and effective immediately, WMA does not recognize you as a participant of any sort or in any capacity as it relates to any events or WMA,” the email continues. “Furthermore, let this communication serve as an official notice to remove any mention of yourself as a participant in MWA from all social media platforms.”

Miss World America did not immediately respond to Breitbart News’ request for comment.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.

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