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Roberts: Why the GOP’s Strategy to Combat the Rise of Socialism Rings Hollow

The GOP is figuratively licking their chops, awaiting the new socialists in the Democratic Party to put their socialist extremism on full display for the entire country in the upcoming Democratic presidential debates.

A 2018 Gallup Poll indicated Americans aged 18 to 29 are more positive about socialism (51%) than capitalism (45%). And, in the most recent May 2019 Gallup Poll, more than four in ten Americans believe socialism would be good for the country.

Has the GOP forgotten that the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders won 23 states and 19 million-plus votes in the primary? Could that result be a larger and significantly more important indication of  a political trend than the non-politician and populist Trump winning the presidency?

While the GOP is gleefully anticipating these Democratic presidential debates, they should be mindful that younger generations (and many independents) view socialism entirely differently. Older Americans (translation: baby-boomers) typically define socialism as when government owns all means of production and where history has proven it is a stepping stone to communism.  Even Lenin stated socialism’s ultimate goal is communism.

The new democratic socialists believe socialism is about “equality.” Translated, they mistakenly believe corporations are inherently evil, Wall Street and banks are modern-day Robber Barrons, capitalism hasn’t addressed gender income inequality, and the top income earners don’t pay their fair share in taxes. To them, those of privilege have only gotten that way by taking from the middle/working class and the poor.

For those who have studied history, the desire for “equality” is exactly how socialism took root in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and other places – only to lead to totalitarianism. For an example of how political winds can change rapidly in our new information age, consider the fact that even Obama did not support same-sex marriages as late as 2012, yet it’s acceptance became almost universal overnight.

When President Trump claimed, “We will never be a socialist country” in his State of the Union address, the GOP members in Congress stood up and gave boisterous applause, all nodding their heads in agreement.

I’m sorry Mr. President – we already are.

The GOP has somehow forgotten that our progressive graduated income tax is a Marxist ideology, and is the 2nd tenet of the communist manifesto. The income tax was always intended to be used as a social justice tool and it has succeeded.

What we are seeing now is history is once again repeating itself. The American Progressive Era, commonly referred to as the period between 1890 – 1920, had many of the same tell-tale signs we see today, yet the GOP doesn’t recognize them. At the time, giant trusts (the Robber Barons) were similar to today’s giant tech companies, anti-trust laws were ignored, and monopolies thrived. Large corporations had undue influence in elections for the very first time. Citizen politicians became full-time bureacrats who made careers out of public service, enriching themselves along the way.

In 1908, the GOP, which had majorities in both houses of Congress and a Republican in the White House, passed the 16th Amendment Resolution for ratification to the states with the full intention it would never be ratified, only to be shocked it was eventually ratified four years later. Yet, here we are 106 years later with a 77,000 page tax code, a KGB-style IRS enforcement agency that is is the quintessential “Deep State” and a nearly complete revocation of our Bill of Rights in all tax matters.

The American Revolution was an anti-tax revolt, but that’s not taught in academia or public schools anymore. America needs schools that teach entrepreneurship and lionize those who have been successful in business whether it be the corner dry cleaners store, the home-based business, or the next big thing in nano-technology.

The GOP should embrace our anti-tax heritage and meet the new socialists on terms they can understand, that nothing is free, there is no such utopia, and stealing tax revenues from one group to give to another, however well-intentioned, eventually leads to bloodshed, fiscal collapse, and ultimately totalarianism.

The GOP needs a messaging wake-up call before it’s too late.

David Thomas Roberts is author of The Death of Liberty: The Socialist Destruction of America’s Freedoms Using the Income Tax and the CEO of Teligistics, a telecom financial management company.

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Democratic Socialists of America Protest Gay Pride Parade Over Corporate Ties, Police Support

The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement condemning the Pride Parade and its organizers, Pride NW, for working with the Portland police and allowing The Evil Corporations™ to sponsor events.

Suddenly it’s a problem to be accepted by the city, police, media, and corporate America, for which the past generations of LGBT activists worked so hard to achieve.

Willamette Week reports:

The Portland Democratic Socialists of America’s Queer Caucus yesterday released a statement against Pride NW, the group that puts on the city’s Pride parade.

The group urged Pride NW to sever ties with it corporate sponsors and the Portland Police, saying that corporations and cops are exploitative presences at the parade, which was originally “a protest led by trans women of color against the police.”

“Pride celebrations today, which are promoted by multi-billion dollar corporations and which use queer bodies as a new, profitable marketing tactic, look very different from the original Pride protests,” the statement read. “We used to revolt against the norms; now we celebrate conforming to them.”

The caucus alleged that six sponsors received incomplete scores on the Human Right Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which analyzes large company’s policies and practices pertinent to LGBTQ employees. It also highlighted that only a third of the event’s sponsors are based in Oregon and only three of the 39 are LGBTQ-focused.

“Similarly, three of your sponsors are from the drug industry which, like the tobacco industry, preys on marginalized populations,” the group wrote. “As queer people, we are a diverse group, and yet we are truly not represented by these corporations.”

The group specifically criticized a high-profile sponsor, Seattle-based retail giant Amazon, for allegedly “exploit[ing] the labor of queer people making poverty wages and fail[ing] to protect those queer people from on-the-job harassment.”

The Queer Caucus also condemned police presence at the parade and said that the police bureau is “notorious for targeting the most marginalized in our community.”

“We believe the solution to our queerphobic culture is not greater inclusion in systemic exploitation,” read the statement, “but a radical departure from a system that perpetuates inequality and turns queer people into a market to be exploited.”

Portland has long been considered one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world, but somehow that has morphed into being “queerphobic.” In fact, the Portland Police Bureau actively participates in the parade and associated events.

You may recall that officers were asked to not be in uniform for the 2017 edition of the parade.

Portland Police Bureau even has a recruitment video specifically marketed toward encouraging members of the LGBT community to join the force. The video profiles several officers who are transgender and gay, and they speak about how they were depressed and wanted to hurt themselves. And they are now police officers.

But this isn’t good enough for the DSA. Their complete jumble of word soup reads:

To board members and staff of Pride Northwest Inc.,

Portland Democratic Socialists of America’s Queer Caucus calls on members of the Queer community to write letters to Pride Northwest to demand an end to their collaborations with major corporations and the Portland Police, and instead focus on empowering the Queer community.

Queer people are under attack in this country. This has been true for decades in the United States, and today the hatred spurred on by Trump’s bigoted presidency has bled into our community: two months ago, the Portland DSA Queer Caucus was targeted by Patriot Prayer, while Trans and non-binary people in Portland have been harassed and attacked on the streets. All the while, Portland police ignored our community and blamed the victims. However, as Queer people we know that it is not just proto-fascists and the police we need to worry about, but also the exploitation by major corporations who wish to profit off of our identities.

The DSA continues in multiple paragraphs with its diatribe.

For most Americans its hard to keep up with what is right and what is wrong based on the ever changing moral police from the left.

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Comparison Between Presidents Trump and Obama – Massive Success vs. Abysmal Failure Continues

President Trump has now been in office for more than two years and the results of his actions as President are exceptional, especially when compared to his predecessor President Barack Obama.

US Stock Markets

* President Trump is the only President in US history to oversee two stock market rallies of nine days or more where the markets set new highs each and every day.

* On February 28th, 2018, President Trump matched President Reagan’s 1987 record for most continuous closing high trading days when the DOW reached a new high for its 12th day in a row!

* Then in early August of 2018 President Trump reigned over a 9 day stock market rally with each day reaching record highs.

* The DOW daily closing stock market average has risen more than 40% since the election on November 8th, 2016. (On November 9th, 2016, the DOW closed at 18,332 – yesterday the DOW closed at nearly 26,000).

Since the 2016 Presidential election, the DOW reached record highs an amazing 103 times.  There were more stock market highs (71) in 2017, Trump’s first year as President, than any year in history.

The fastest 500 point increase in major milestones in the DOW (i.e. between 26,000 and 26,500), the fastest 1000 point increase, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000 and 7000 point increases in the DOW in major milestones have all occurred since President Trump became President.  (No doubt the markets would be much higher if the Fed hadn’t increased rates multiple times whenever a new market milestone was reached.)

So how does this compare with President Obama’s first few years in office? 

* The DOW daily closing stock market average tanked (went down) (-31% ) between Obama’s election win on November 4th, 2008 and March 5th, 2009. (On November 4th the DOW closed at 9,625 – on March 5th the DOW closed at 6,594. Overall it decreased more than 3,000 points during this time).  The markets had no way to go but up after this time and they increased but at a sluggish rate.

Obama never saw a new stock market high his entire first term (his first 4 years in office).  This is in spite of Obama receiving beneficial treatment from the Fed who kept rates at near 0% for most of Obama’s eight years in office.

Jobs

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics President Trump added 5,652,000 jobs in his two years plus through May (January 2017 through May 2019.) President Obama on the other hand lost (3,137,000) jobs in his same time period.

President Obama was so bad at creating jobs that by the end of his second term he said that jobs were not coming back.

The net difference in the same respective time periods shows that President Trump added 8.8 million more jobs than Obama.

Unemployment

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics President Trump decreased unemployment since his inauguration to the lowest levels in 50 years! The unemployment rate in January 2017 was 4.7% and by May 2019 it was down to 3.6% . It has never been higher than the starting rate of 4.7%.

President Obama on the other hand again moved in the opposite and wrong direction in the same respective time period. In his first two years plus as President of the US, the unemployment rate increased from 7.8% in January 2009 to 10.0% by October of 2009.  By May into his third year the rate was still at 9%.

Unemployment under Obama at the same respective time periods was horrible with nearly three times the rate of unemployment as under President Trump during the same time periods.

Food Stamps

President Trump has decreased the number of individuals on food stamps and the amount of dollars spent on food stamps since he became President.  In 2016, Obama’s last year in office, the US had 44.2 million participants on Food Stamps.  The total costs in 2016 were $70.9 billion.  In 2018, the number of participants had decreased to 39.7 million and the total costs also decreased to $64.9 billion.  President Trump has decreased the number of participants by 4.6 million and costs by $6 billion.

President Obama on the other hand was king of food stamps.  In Obama’s first two years the number of individuals increased by 12 million (from 28 to 40 million) and costs increased by more than $30 billion (from $37.6 billion to $68.3 billion).

President Obama’s policies increased the poor in America while President Trump’s policies are creating good paying jobs and economic prosperity.

In Summary

Overall based on the above data it is clear that President Trump is doing a solid, if not excellent job.

The mainstream liberal media won’t report this, but when looking at the economy, President Trump the billionaire businessman crushes the former community organizer Barack Obama in every meaningful measurement. President Trump is enjoying massive success while the severely unqualified and nearly incompetent President Obama forced America through some of its worst years in history.

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Illegal Immigrants Can Hurt US Economy, Professor Argues, Prompting Calls For His Firing

Speaking truth can now get you fired. Via Fox News: A college professor in Georgia is drawing criticism for his online comments about illegal immigrants, including his contention that people in the U.S. illegally can be a drain on the nation’s economy. “If you are going to reward illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal […]

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It’s Not Just Central Americans: Hundreds of Migrants from Africa Arriving in Texas

The general impression that people have of those illegally crossing our southern border is that they’re from Spanish-speaking Central American countries. It used to be Mexican immigrants, now it’s migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and other countries south of Mexico. In San Antonio, they’re perfectly used to this. There’s no shortage of representatives of…

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Autoworker Tells CNN the Blunt Truth About Trump That They Still Don’t Understand

The general media line in the Trump-Mexico trade kerfuffle was that autoworkers were going to among be the Americans most hurt if the president imposed a 5 percent tariff on our southern neighbors if they didn’t start enforcing immigration laws and stop the flow of illegal immigrants from their Central American neighbors.

Mexico apparently got the message: Late Friday, the president announced that the proposed tariffs wouldn’t be enacted because of an agreement with the Obrador government which “has agreed to take strong measures” to stem illegal migration, according to The Associated Press.

Before that, however, CNN found out that not all auto workers necessarily believed the tariffs would have been apocalyptic. In fact, one Chrysler mechanic the network talked to said he was pleased there was “somebody would actually fight for us” in the White House.

So first, a quick recap of what’s going on: In late May, Trump announced that he was going to slap a 5 percent tariff on Mexican goods if they didn’t do more to stop the flow of illegal immigrants.

The tariffs would be effective starting June 10 and would increase by 5 percent for every month there wasn’t a deal, reaching a maximum of 25 percent.

TRENDING: Alec Baldwin & His Hateful Trump Impersonation Are Out at ‘SNL’

Automakers were probably going to get hit the hardest if the tariffs went into effect; cars and car parts are our two biggest imports from Mexico. The general belief, at least among those who were reporting on the showdown, was that this was going to be ruinous to the industry — and that those in the industry would be against it.

However, when CNN interviewed Chrysler mechanic Chris Vitale, what it found instead was a man who was for the proposed tariffs — if they were being used as a negotiating tool with the Obrador government.

In a piece that aired Wednesday, CNN’s Erica Hill said that “after 25 years in the volatile industry, Vitale believes they can weather a storm. And he’s confident this president has his back.”

“The idea that somebody would actually fight for us after being told for years and years, ‘Oh, you don’t matter. You’re going the way of the buggy whip,’” he said.

Do you agree with Trump’s negotiating strategy with Mexico?

100% (2 Votes)

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“He’s won legions of fans for — just for doing that.”

Video below:

Vitale was contrasted with Sean Crawford, a GM auto worker who thought that the tariffs would doom the industry.

“If you raise the price of these products, less people are going to buy them. It’s just common-sense economics. And if less people buy these products that I’m building every day, then they’re going to have to lay people off,” he said.

RELATED: Mexican Senator Threatens Takeover of US States

Vitale, a two-time Obama voter, said he felt Trump “wouldn’t have to resort to that if we had a Senate and a Congress that would enforce the borders.”

“People have endured much worse than expensive avocados or a few more dollars here and there, you know, to protect the country,” Vitale said. “And I think that this is valid, what he’s doing.”

Keep in mind that, as the events of Friday demonstrated, these weren’t tariffs aimed at protectionism. They were a negotiating tool, something that has been “indefinitely suspended” because the Obrador government has apparently agreed to “stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border. This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States.”

People don’t have to deal with “expensive avocados” and that’s a good thing. Tariffs as a way to boost domestic industry are inherently ruinous. However, what the Trump administration has shown is that they can be an effective negotiating tool, particularly when you’re at the helm of the world’s largest economy.

Now, whether or not this tack works against China or other nations is another issue entirely. At least when it comes to Mexico, however, the president seems to have won — and the promised apocalypse has been anything but. Yet, the fact that there are people who support these kinds of policies continually stuns the folks at CNN.

Is Vitale representative of an entire industry? No, of course not. But one imagines that the media was surprised to find people like Vitale. I imagine they’d be surprised, too, to learn that there are a lot more like him.

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When the Left Defended the Electoral College

New York today is part of the movement to choose presidents by popular vote, but 40 years ago a nationally known liberal from the state took to the Senate floor to argue the advantages of the current system.

The Electoral College, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan asserted in his July 1979 speech, forces consensus and allows a president to “govern with the legitimacy that has come of attaining to such diverse majorities.”

The New York Democrat, who died in 2003, had lots of liberal company at the time.

Other Senate Democrats who opposed a constitutional amendment to scrap the Electoral College and elect presidents and vice presidents by direct popular vote included Joe Biden of Delaware, a future vice president, and Bill Bradley of New Jersey, a future presidential candidate.

These Democrats were joined by Edmund Muskie of Maine, the party’s vice presidential nominee 11 years earlier; Paul Sarbanes of Maryland; Thomas Eagleton of Missouri (briefly a vice presidential candidate in 1972); and John Durkin of New Hampshire.

Of those states, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey now are part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement in which states that sign on pledge the votes of their electors to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote.

Four decades ago, though, advocates of a popular vote for president didn’t try to end-run the process of amending the Constitution.

Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972, served there from January 1973 until he successfully ran for vice president as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008.

Bipartisan Divide

In 1979, Congressional Quarterly reported that senators “crossed party and ideological lines” in the debate over Senate Joint Resolution 28.

The measure was sponsored by Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., an old pro with constitutional amendments who had drafted the 25th Amendment on presidential succession in a crisis as chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution.

With bipartisan support and opposition, Bayh’s resolution passed by a vote of 51-48, far short of the two-thirds majority needed for a constitutional amendment. A majority of Republicans opposed the measure.

The Senate breakdown at the time was 61 Democrats, 38 Republicans, and an Independent who caucused with the Democrats.

At the time, Congressional Quarterly reported, “three of the Senate’s most liberal Republicans”—John Heinz of Pennsylvania, Charles Percy of Illinois, and Lowell Weicker Jr. of Connecticut—”voted against direct election of the president.”

Weicker eventually left the Republican Party and won the Connecticut governorship as an Independent. Both Illinois and Connecticut are among states that joined the popular vote compact.

Since the 1979 debate, Republican presidential candidates twice have won the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote, pushing the debate largely along party and ideological lines.

Under the Bayh amendment, the presidential candidate with the most votes nationally would win. If no candidate got 40%, though, the top two candidates would face each other in a runoff election.

Incidentally, that setup would have imperiled Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who won the 1860 presidential race with 39.8% of the vote against a splintered Democratic Party.  

Minority Votes

Strong advocates of protecting the Electoral College four decades ago included the National Urban League, an African-American civil rights group, and the American Jewish Congress, a Jewish civil rights group.

“Take away the Electoral College and the importance of being black melts away,” National Urban League President Vernon Jordan testified during a Senate hearing at the time.

“Blacks, instead of being crucial to victory in major states, simply become 10%  of the electorate, with reduced impact,” Jordan said.

Jordan later became an ally of President Bill Clinton, and was among the cast of characters in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The National Urban League has changed its mind, stating in a report last month that it backs moving “the U.S. toward the popular election of presidents through states’ participation in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, with the goal of eliminating the Electoral College.”

In an official pronouncement on the 1979 proposal, the American Jewish Congress cited similar reasons for opposing the Bayh amendment, The New York Times reported.

The organization’s statement said blacks and Jews “make up a significant proportion of the electorate in the key states with large electoral votes, and they tend, at least in presidential elections, to vote in a bloc.” It continued:

Hence, the political parties are sensitive to the interests of Jews and blacks both in their selection of candidates and in the adoption of party platforms. In a system of direct election, however, where a vote in one state is equal to a vote in another, that influence will be lost.

In a 2004 report, the Congressional Research Service explained a prevailing view about minority groups during the 1979 debate that helped explain why the presidents of the National Urban League and American Jewish Congress supported the Electoral College:

Another theory advanced during debate on Electoral College reform centers on the asserted advantage enjoyed by ethnic minority voters. According to this argument, minority voters, e.g., blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, tend to be concentrated in populous states with large Electoral College delegations.

By virtue of this concentration, they are presumably able to exert greater influence over the outcomes in such states because they tend to vote overwhelmingly for candidates whose policies they perceive to be favorable to their interests, and thus helping to gain these states and their electoral votes for the favored candidates.

Bayh, who died in March after living to see his son Evan Bayh serve as governor and senator from Indiana, became an advocate of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. For years, the elder Bayh would blame the 1979 defeat on minority advocates.

In 2012, Bayh told BuzzFeed, “I had an interesting experience, one of the few times I’ve been angry enough to throw people out of my office.”

He said African American and Jewish leaders told him “to get off this Electoral College reform kick. … You dump us into the whole mix, and we’ll get lost.”

Bayh, who also supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, recalled replying: “You’re talking to somebody who busted his tail for ‘one person, one vote.’”

‘Most Radical Transformation’

A diverse coalition indeed backed a national popular vote in 1979, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Other prominent backers included Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Jake Garn, R-Utah.

In reporting on their defeat, Congressional Quarterly summarized: “A few northern liberals aligned July 10 with a majority of Republicans and southern Democrats to thwart passage of the direct election amendment.”

Because the Senate passed the measure by only a bare majority, the House didn’t bother taking it up even though in 1970 it had mustered a supermajority in favor.

The 1970 measure died from a Senate filibuster primarily led by Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Interestingly, many segregationists in the South cited voting bloc protections similar to those cited by civil rights advocates in the North in arguing for the Electoral College.

Moynihan led the Democrats’ opposition to the Bayh proposal, calling it the “most radical transformation in our constitutional system that has ever been considered.”

“The Electoral College requires the assembly of consent—again, concurrent majority—in one part of the country and another part of the country, and yet another part, all defined in terms of several states,” Moynihan said. “It has as its extraordinary ability the formation of consensus as between widely differing regions, political purposes and styles, and political agendas.”

The New York Democrat continued:

The fundamental thrust of this measure, however unintended— nonetheless, it seems to be ineluctably clear—would be to abolish that principle of concurrent majority.

If there is once introduced into the Constitution the idea that a president may routinely be elected by 40% of the vote, you have the most ironic of all outcomes, that in the name of majoritarianism we have abolished even that single majority which the Founders so feared.

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Christian Florist Will Appeal to the Supreme Court in Same-Sex Wedding Dispute

A florist who refused to create floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after a Washington state court ruled Thursday that she violated the state’s civil rights law.

The case presents the high court with an opportunity to decide whether conservative religious believers can use the First Amendment as a defense against laws requiring accommodation of LGBT people, a question the justices ducked in the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling.

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“I could lose my business and life savings simply because I declined to celebrate and participate in a sacred event that violates my faith,” the florist, Barronelle Stutzman, said following Thursday’s decision. “No artist or creative professional should be forced by the government to create custom work that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs. That’s why I will appeal my case to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

State prosecutors filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Stutzman, who owns and operates Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, in April 2013 after she refused to sell flowers to a longtime gay patron called Robert Ingersoll for use in his wedding. Stutzman is a Christian who operates her business consistent with her religious views about same-sex marriage.

“Washington state law protects same-sex couples from discrimination based on their sexual orientation,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said. “I will continue to uphold these laws and fight to protect Washingtonians from discrimination.”

The Stutzman case reached the Supreme Court once before. The justices held her case in abeyance while the court considered the Masterpiece Cakeshop dispute, a case with similar facts arising from Colorado where a Christian baker refused to produce a custom wedding cake for a gay couple. The justices found for the baker because a Colorado civil rights commission displayed animus toward his religious beliefs when processing the dispute.

After releasing the Masterpiece decision, the justices lifted a lower court decision against Stutzman and ordered the court to reconsider her case in light of Masterpiece. On remand, the Washington State Supreme Court said it found no evidence of discrimination against Stutzman’s beliefs.

“We have painstakingly review [sic] the record for any sign of intolerance on behalf of this court of the Benton County Superior Court, the two adjudicatory bodies to consider this case,” Thursday’s decision reads. “After this review, we are confident that the two courts gave full and fair consideration to this dispute and avoided animus toward religion. We therefore find no reason to change our original decision in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop.”

Alliance Defending Freedom, a faith-based cause lawyering group that represents Stutzman, counters that the state enforces its civil rights laws unevenly.

While state prosecutors sued Stutzman personally—an aggressive step that makes her personally liable for fines and damages—they did not take action against a coffeehouse owner who profanely expelled a group of Christians from his business. ADF argues this enforcement pattern is the kind of discrimination the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling condemns.

As with the Masterpiece case, which ADF also litigated, Stutzman’s lawyers argue she cannot be compelled to create expression with which she disagrees. They also say requiring her to attend a same-sex wedding violates her constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion.

A decision as to whether the justices will hear the case will come during the court’s next term, which begins in October. Arguments would most likely follow in 2020, depending on how quickly the justices choose to process the petition.

The high court is also considering a similar petition from Oregon, where a state anti-discrimination panel fined a Christian bakery $135,000 for declining to produce a cake for a same-sex wedding. That court has been sitting on that petition since February, indicating it has piqued the justices’ interest.

The Klein petition also asks the court to revisit the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision, a landmark ruling that held laws that interfere with religious exercise are constitutional provided they apply to everyone and are neutrally enforced.

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