Month: February 2019

An intruder tried to break his way into a home in Federal Way, Washington on Thursday night but was unable to go a step further after he was confronted by an armed resident as well as an armed neighbor.

It was around midnight when homeowner Casandra Cooksey heard someone attempting to enter her house, KING reported. Her husband was at work and she was alone with her infant daughter.

Cooksey knew something was amiss when she heard a car door slam in the front of her house and her dog began to bark.

“When I heard my screen door open, and I just started panicking and instantly grabbed our firearm,” Cooksey said. “I saw a very tall man leaning against the door, and I saw the handle rattling, going up and down.”

Cooksey told KING she believed the man was intoxicated and said that despite her warnings, he wouldn’t leave.

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The young mother called her husband, as well as a neighbor, Daniel Wilson, who came out of his home with his own firearm.

“I said ‘you ain’t going nowhere, bud.’ I said, ‘leave the house alone,’” Wilson recalled. “Then he actually looked at me and said, ‘just go ahead and shoot me.’”

Wilson said this isn’t the first time he’s had such encounter — his own home was burglarized in 2017. “Gives you the chills for a little while,” he said.

As Cooksey waited for the police to arrive, she held the man at gunpoint through a nearby window, while Wilson held his spot in the yard.

Once police arrived, they took the unidentified man into custody. However, they ultimately determined that no crime had been committed, and transported him to his residence in Tacoma.

The police’s decision to release the man without any charges left Cooksey with several unanswered questions, though she declined to provide specifics and merely expressed her gratitude that she was able to defend her family.

“That’s the last thing I ever wanted to do, but the first thing that went through my mind when I heard the door trying to be opened, I just wanted to protect myself and my baby,” she said. “And yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would have pulled the trigger to protect myself and her if he got in the house.”

Thankfully for Cooksey and her infant daughter, she didn’t have to pull the trigger, but she and her husband will no doubt rest easier knowing they have the means to do so if necessary.

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That ability — to defend one’s own life, liberty and property — is one of the fundamental reasons why our nation’s Founders had the foresight to recognize and codify the natural right of all people to keep and bear arms.

Unfortunately, the Democratic-led state of Washington seems intent on whittling away at that foundational right. If Democrats in the state are ever successful in imposing strict gun control laws on the state’s citizenry, this situation could have ended up quite differently for Cooksey and other young mothers like her.

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How many betrayals from Republican-nominated Supreme Court Justices will it take to finally convince conservatives that the judicial deck is systemically stacked against us in such a way that we will simply never ultimately prevail?

Harry Blackmun, who authored the murderous atrocity of Roe v. Wade, was a Republican judicial nominee. John Paul Stevens, a leftist lion for decades on the Supreme Court, was a Republican judicial nominee. Anthony Kennedy, who did more than anyone to disingenuously codify the homosexual rights agenda into the Fourteenth Amendment, was a Republican judicial nominee. The infamous turncoat David Souter was a Republican judicial nominee.

Alas, Chief Justice John Roberts was a Republican judicial nominee. And — take some deep breaths, judicial supremacists — Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a Republican judicial nominee.

Democrats, who nominate jurists based on the grotesque ruse of “living constitutionalism” and barely feign that their “jurisprudence” is inherently anything other than outcome-determinative, never miss with their Supreme Court nominees. In baseball terminology, their batting average is approximately 1.000. Republicans, at best, seem to bat .400.

Today, Roberts and Kavanaugh yet again demonstrated to the legal conservative movement the fallacy of putting all one’s eggs in the alluring basket of the Supreme Court.

In Moore v. Texas, released this morning, the Court summarily reversed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ determination that Mr. Moore “did not have intellectual disability and consequently was eligible for the death penalty.” Summary reversal, as Ed Whelan notes at National Review’s “Bench Memos” blog, is “ordinarily reserve[d]…for situations in which a lower court has clearly failed to abide by the Court’s precedents.”

But that clear failure to abide by precedent plainly did not happen here. And the unsigned, per curiam opinion in Moore today itself suggests as much. The opinion merely states that the Texas court’s decision below “rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper.” And, as Justice Alito’s dissent notes, “each of the errors that the majority ascribes to the state court’s decision is traceable” to the Court’s failure to provide a clear adjudicative rule in 2017, when Mr. Moore’s case was last in front of the nine robed oracles.

So the Supeme Court never should have summarily reversed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. But it gets worse.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ determination had followed a previous remand from the Supreme Court in 2017 — a remand order from which, crucially, Chief Justice Roberts dissented. But today, the Chief Justice concurred with the Court’s liberal bloc in vacating the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ determination that Mr. Moore is eligible for the death penalty. Put simply, the Chief Justice completely flipped his stance in the same case, from two years earlier, in order to side with the Court’s liberals.

It seems the proverbial ink is barely dry from when I wrote this eleven days ago, about another instance of Chief Justice Roberts-induced legal jiggery-pokery:

Chief Justice Roberts has once again shown his true colors — that of an “institutionalist” committed to preserving the purported “integrity” of the U.S. Supreme Court, as an institution, against those who would opportunistically excoriate it as being too political or partisan.

And yet it once again gets even worse. Because not only did the Chief Justice concur in the summary reversal (!) of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after registering his dissent only two years ago, but Justice Kavanaugh — who did not join Justice Alito’s dissent today — appears to have also silently joined the summary reversal.

These are utterly indefensible votes from the Chief Justice and from Justice Kavanaugh. For the Chief Justice, that he would switch his posture from dissenting to concurring in the same case merely two years later speaks volumes about his (erroneous) fealty to stare decisis norms. As Whelan says, “today the Chief treats as governing precedent the Court’s 2017 decision in Moore, in which he wrote the dissent (for himself, Thomas, and Alito).” As for Kavanaugh, he similarly would be mistaken to treat the 2017 Moore remand order as persuasive — let alone correct or even “binding.” Indeed, it is very difficult to see how Roberts and Kavanaugh could possibly agree to summary reversal today if they did not both view the 2017 Moore remand — from which, again, Roberts dissented (!) — as something closely approximating “binding” precedent.

It seems clear that the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh are already duking it out to see who can better anoint himself the “new Anthony Kennedy.” I do hope they enjoy themselves. But what is not particularly enjoyable is to watch the legal conservative movement beclown itself time and time again by nominating — and placing institutional and political capital behind — judges who more often than not deeply disappoint conservatives.

In November 1996, the late Robert Bork penned the following at First Things:

Republican Presidents have used the nomination process in an effort to change the direction of the Court with almost zero results on the major issues. After twelve years of Presidents Reagan and Bush, each of whom made a determined effort to appoint Justices who would abide by the Constitution as originally understood, we seem farther than ever from a restrained Court. Between them, Reagan and Bush had five appointments. Only two try to relate their decisions to the Constitution as the men who wrote, proposed, and ratified it understood it. A majority of the Justices has become more arrogantly authoritarian than ever.

Sadly, 23 years later, our crisis is even worse. We will never, ever win the “long game” of judicial nomination wars with the Left.

What we can do, however, is work to end sycophantic judge-worship and self-destructive judicial supremacism in America.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham vowed on “Face the Nation” this weekend that he would hold a hearing to investigate former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s widely reported claim that high-ranking figures in the Justice Department, particularly Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, had discussed using the 25th Amendment to oust President Trump.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” last week promoting his new book, McCabe said he and Rosenstein seriously discussed potentially orchestrating a coup through the 25th Amendment, which empowers the Cabinet to remove a sitting president if he’s deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Rosenstein, he said, “offered to wear a wire into the White House” to catch Trump saying something disqualifying, a claim Rosenstein has dismissed as a sarcastic joke. “He was absolutely serious,” McCabe told “60 Minutes.” “And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had. I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time.”

Calling McCabe’s claim that they were seriously discussing a quiet coup a “tremendous allegation,” “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Graham if he’s ever asked Rosenstein if the conversation ever actually happened.

Noting that Rosenstein’s “publicly denied it,” Graham stressed, “The whole point of Congress existing is to provide oversight of the executive branch. So through good reporting by ’60 Minutes,’ there’s an allegation by the acting FBI director at the time that the deputy attorney general was basically trying to do an administrative coup, take the president down by the 25th Amendment process. The deputy attorney general denies it.”

The South Carolina senator then made his vow to the audience: “So I promise your viewers the following; that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened. Mr. McCabe, you remember, was dismissed from the FBI for leaking information to the press. So you’ve got to remember the source here.”

Saying he believes the country “needs to know if it happened,” Graham said it was simply “stunning” that a leader of the FBI would proudly go on television and brag about the “attempted bureaucratic coup.”

“I don’t know who’s telling the truth,” he said. “I know Rosenstein vehemently denied it, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it. I do know there was a lot of monkey business about FISA warrants being issued against Carter Page, about dossiers coming from Russia that were unverified. Mr. Mueller is going to look at the Trump campaign as he should to see if they violated any laws during the 2016 election. And I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of the Department of Justice FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.”

Brennan responded by expressing concern that such an inquiry might be doing “some damage” to “the credibility of the FBI,” to which he fired back: “Quite the opposite. If it happened we need to clean it up. The FBI has gotten off track in the past. It’s one of the greatest organizations in the world. The Hoover years have proven to be pretty dark periods for the FBI. The latter part of the Hoover days where politicians were being blackmailed. There is no organization beyond scrutiny. There is no organization that can’t withstand scrutiny. And the FBI will come out stronger. But we’ve got to get to the bottom of it.”

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President Trump has since responded to McCabe’s claims by calling for action against those involved.

“Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe,” Trump said in a series of tweets Monday morning. “He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught[.] There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who had just elected a president who they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more. This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”

“This was an illegal coup attempt on the President of the United States,” he wrote, quoting Dan Bongino on “Fox and Friends.” “True!”

Former second-string 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, has reached a settlement deal with a group of NFL owners accused of conspiring together — and with President Donald Trump — to lock Kaepernick out of the league over his pre-game anti-racism protests.

CBS News reports that both Kaepernick and the NFL’s attorneys announced late Friday that they’d reached a deal, estimated to be in the high tens of millions.

“For the past several months, counsel for Mr. Kaepernick and Mr. Reid have engaged in an ongoing dialogue with representatives of the NFL,” the two parties said in a joint statement released Friday evening. “As a result of those discussions, the parties have decided to resolve the pending grievances. The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party.”

All parties are prevented from revealing details of the settlement, by the settlement’s terms, but various news reports put the settlement between $60 million and $80 million split between the two players. Those reports are, of course, unconfirmed.

Kaepernick and his 49ers teammate, Eric Reid, filed a joint grievance against NFL owners under the terms of the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement back in October of 2017, alleging that they were “locked out” of open positions with NFL teams over their kneeling protests, held during the national anthem.

Kaepernick also claimed that the NFL owners had conspired together to deny him a plum league position until he agreed to stop protesting, and that league owners were responding directly to President Donald Trump’s universal condemnation of NFL players’ anti-racism demonstrations by ending Kaepernick’s official relationship with the NFL.

Kaepernick was unable to get another quarterback job after turning down a one-year extension on his contract from the 49ers; Reid, the first player to join Kaepernick’s protests, was unemployed during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, but signed with the Carolina Panthers midway through the 2017-2018 NFL season. Reid signed a three-year deal with the Panthers, CBS reports, earlier this week, for an estimated $22 million.

Kaepernick’s attorney, celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos, told ESPN that he predicts Kaepernick will now be welcomed into the league with open arms, and that Kaepernick believes he will end up on either the Carolina Panthers, like his former teammate Eric Reid, or that he could replace a retiring Tom Brady on the Patriots.

“I think you’re going to see within the next two weeks that somebody is going to step up and do the right thing, and you want me to predict who?” Geragos told the sports network. “Besides the Panthers, it would not surprise me if Bob Kraft makes a move.”

The Patriots are probably a longshot. The team has two backup quarterbacks already, both of whom trained under Brady, and have been waiting for their moment in the spotlight for years.

The Redskins reportedly considered adding Kaepernick to the roster late last season, after trying out two other formerly retired quarterbacks, but eventually passed on the opportunity. The Alliance of American Football, which is in its premiere season and looking for star power, offered Kaepernick a slot, according to NBC News, but Kaepernick turned the offer down after the AAF refused to meet his demand for a $20 million contract.