Trump said in 2016 that we’d get tired of all the winning, but I don’t think I can ever get tired of the clean sweep coming from the Supreme Court lately (with a nod toward an excellent decision also out today from New York’s appellate courts).
The biggest win today is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the Court ruled by a 6 – 3 margin (familiar number by now) that a high school football coach who prays on the field after games does not violate the First Amendment’s “establishment clause.” It overturns explicitly what has been eroding for 25 years—the three-part “Lemon Test” from the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, made back in the hey-day of the Supreme Court fashioning “balancing tests” out of thin air. That test was a lemon indeed. One of the refreshing things of the new Court is that it is abandoning the unprincipled “balance test” jurisprudence. Long overdue.
This moves us one step close to implementing the Handmaid’s Tale, which is of course the object of constitutional originalism. (Memo to the humor-deprived: this is sarcasm.)
But that wasn’t the only good news out of the Court today. They also ruled in a comparatively minor case, Xiulu Ruan v. United States, that the burden of proof in cases of doctors charged with overprescribing opioid pain killer belongs on the government rather than the doctor. This reverses the current burden of proof. As the executive summary puts it:
The jury in Ruan was not instructed to consider Dr. Xiulu Ruan’s “good‐faith defense,” i.e., that he was indeed prescribing the drug “legitimately” to treat pain based upon his good‐faith assessments of his patients’ medical contexts and requirements. The Supreme Court held “the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly or intentionally acted in an unauthorized manner.”
The overreaction to the promiscuous abuse of opioids over the last 20 years has deterred even the most scrupulous doctors from writing prescriptions for opioid pain killers, and this is cruel to the many people who legitimately need them. It has probably made the opioid problem worse in fact, as corrupt doctors run pill mills and work through elaborate schemes to avoid detection. And more generally, any time the burden of proof is shifted from citizens to the government is a good day in court.
We’re still awaiting West Virginia v. EPA, which ought to drop in the next couple days. If West Virginia wins, watch for the climatistas to freak out.
Finally, this out of the New York state courts today:
A law that would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections in New York City was struck down on Monday by a State Supreme Court justice on Staten Island who said it violated the State Constitution.
The measure, which was passed by the City Council in December, would have allowed more than 800,000 permanent legal residents and people with authorization to work in the United States to vote for offices such as mayor and City Council.
But Justice Ralph J. Porzio ruled that the new law conflicted with constitutional guidelines and state law stating that only eligible citizens can vote. To give noncitizens a right to vote would require a referendum, the judge wrote.
This reasoning sounds a bit muddled, but a win is a win, and I’ll take it. Still not tired of all the winning.
We are coming off one of the greatest weeks in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. And yet, a largely unreported dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas may be the harbinger of something important that is still to come.
The case is Coral Ridge Ministries v. Southern Poverty Law Center, and the opinion by Justice Thomas, dissenting from a denial of a writ of certiorari, is the kind of thing that normally would disappear into the historical ether.
But this time, perhaps not. Start with the fact that Thomas is now the undisputed intellectual leader of the Court. Then take into account that many observers, including President Trump, have argued that our current standards for defamation cases have been tilted way too far in favor of defendants who libel or slander prominent people. Mix in the reality that the Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the great grifter organizations of our time, reeling in countless millions in donations–the SPLC has literally no idea what to do with the money it has raised, so it stashes it in offshore shelters–and making its living by contemptibly smearing conservative organizations.
Justice Thomas thought that the case by Coral Ridge Ministries against the SPLC should have been heard by the Court:
Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc., is a Christian non-profit dedicated to spreading the “Gospel of Jesus Christ” and “a biblically informed view of the world, using all available media.” 406 F. Supp. 3d 1258, 1268 (MD Ala. 2019) (internal quotation marks omitted). In 2017, Coral Ridge applied to receive donations through AmazonSmile, a program that allows Amazon customers to contribute to approved nonprofits. To its dismay, Coral Ridge learned it was ineligible for the program. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had designated Coral Ridge an “Anti-LGBT hate group” because of its biblical views concerning human sexuality and marriage. Id., at 1270 (internal quotation marks omitted). AmazonSmile excluded Coral Ridge based on SPLC’s “hate group” designation.
This is a familiar story. Amazon has outsourced approval of nonprofits eligible to participate in its “Smile” program to the SPLC. The SPLC always approves left-wing groups, no matter how hateful they may be, but it considers many conservative groups to be “hateful” per se because it disagrees with them. Based on the SPLC’s political categories, Amazon obligingly supports liberal groups, but, often, not conservative ones.
Justice Thomas thinks that the SPLC should be required to defend the truth of its smears against Coral Ridge Ministries, which protests that, while it “opposes homosexual conduct” based on its religious beliefs, it is in no sense a “hate group.” … To the contrary, it “has nothing but love for people who engage in homosexual conduct” and “has never attacked or maligned anyone on the basis of engaging in homosexual conduct.”
The culprit here is twofold: 1) the requirement that to be actionable, a statement must be one of fact, not opinion; and 2) the “actual malice” standard–the standard that a public figure plaintiff must prove not only that the defendant (here, SPLC) was careless in libeling him or her, but rather that the defendant knew that what it said was false, or knew that it was likely false, and said it anyway. For obvious reasons, this subjective standard has proved impossible to meet in nearly all cases involving public figures.
Justice Thomas continued:
I would grant certiorari in this case to revisit the “actual malice” standard. This case is one of many showing how New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups “to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.” Tah, 991 F. 3d, at 254 (opinion of Silberman, J.). SPLC’s “hate group” designation lumped Coral Ridge’s Christian ministry with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. It placed Coral Ridge on an interactive, online “Hate Map” and caused Coral Ridge concrete financial injury by excluding it from the AmazonSmile donation program. Nonetheless, unable to satisfy the “almost impossible” actual-malice standard this Court has imposed, Coral Ridge could not hold SPLC to account for what it maintains is a blatant falsehood. Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc., 472 U. S. 749, 771 (1985) (White, J., concurring in judgment).
This is an issue that will return to the forefront many times in the years to come, until the Supreme Court adopts a reasonable standard to reconcile traditional libel law with the First Amendment.
Amid all the partying and gladhanding and making Vladimir Putin a figure of fun, the G-7 summit in Germany managed to avoid the important topics, such as where the hell greenie Germany is going to get energy from and just what it means when it says it’s going to support Ukraine forever.
Instead, it moved into its comfort zone, which was “infrastructure” and greenie energy for the Third World, as if the Third World needed more corruption and energy shortages, as greenie Germany is experiencing. Naturally, its idea was to throw money — mostly American money — at the problem. Doddering Joe Biden was all in for this idiocy and has touted this bad idea as some kind of success story.
The “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment” was relaunched by President Biden and other Group of Seven leaders on Sunday at their annual gathering being held this year at Schloss Elmau in Southern Germany.
Altogether the G7 leaders pledged to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries.
The U.S.’ $200 billion portion will come from grants, federal funds, and private investment over that time period to support projects are intended to tackle climate change, improve global health, gender equity and digital infrastructure.
Biden went at lengths to insist the money was not “aid or charity.”
“It’s an investment that will deliver returns for everyone,” he said, adding that it will allow countries to “see the concrete benefits of partnering with democracies.”
Ostensibly, it’s to provide an alternative to third-world countries finding themselves in a pickle for taking China’s money in its Belt and Road Initiative and finding themselves unable to repay China for its infrastructure investments, leaving China free to expropriate critical infrastructure such as ports as the world’s greediest repo man. I wrote about one example of that in 2018 here:
If there was ever an example for nations worldwide of What Not To Do, take a look at what socialist Ecuador has done to itself in dumping the U.S. and turning to align its interests to China. The New York Times has a superb (albeit stomach-churning) report about how Ecuador sold itself out as a vassal of China, getting for itself a junk dam that is already collapsing, and turning over 80% of its oil production to the communist behemoth in order to pay its massive, massive debts from it. That, in exchange for scrapping its military ties to the U.S. and skipping out on its tab with western banks.
…and several other places in the same predicament here.
There’s no doubt that this is a problem, given that China is using these expropriations to extend its strategic influence, the carrot from hell, to reel in one militarily useful lily pad after another (to mix a lot of metaphors). But instead of discouraging third-world countries from allowing themselves to get into these situations, and encouraging them to reform their crony capitalist systems for authentic economic growth, the G-7 is offering these places that can’t attract investment the normal way a second credit card, hoping theirs will undercut China’s.
What they will end up with is these places defaulting to the West instead of China, since there isn’t a lot of capitalism going on with all these infrastructure projects.
Worse still, a lot of them billed as “infrastructure” aren’t infrastructure projects at all, but greenie boondoggles. Consultant contract bait. Solyndras, with a side of third-world corruption.
You know, like the kind of Full Greenie–ism that Sri Lanka embraced, prompting the entire country to collapse.
More like that, right?
Greenie energy is a farce. It’s not sustainable. Not even an advanced country like Germany can make it work — its insane devotion to greenie-ism prompted it to shut down its very emissions-friendly nuclear power plants in favor of unreliable trash like wind and solar power, pockmarking its landscape with ugly whirring windmills, and, worse still, left it dependent on Russia to power its batteries and true energy necessities. Now it’s looking at natural gas shortages and economic ruin as a result, and…all Germany and Joe Biden want to do…is export this failed model to the Third World, shelling out $200 billion to do it.
Joe Biden’s stupid statement about this not being “charity” is nonsense. If third-world countries could make greenie energy work better than fossil fuels, you can bet they would have been investing in it themselves. But they can’t — they can’t any more than Germany can. Biden justified the claim that this cash shell-out from the West was an “investment,” but that calls to mind that investments can fail — and given that they haven’t been done already by people with real money in the private sector, they probably will, by the guys who rely on the printing press for their big-government cash-shovelings.
It’s obnoxious stuff, given that the G-7 has some serious issues to look at right now — the failed unsustainability of green policies that have left Europe bereft of energy, and the even bigger failure of the shutdowns of authentic fossil fuel industries that have left the big Western powers in debt to petrotyrants, including one who is blowing up apartment buildings in a European capital, and did a demonstration for the G-7 over the weekend, with a renewed attack on civilian housing in Kiev.
Neither of those problems is being seriously looked at by the G-7. All they are trying to do is make the Third World as failed an area as the West in its still religiously bizarre greenie obsession.
What a spectacular load of trouble this is. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau (neither of whom is a stranger to ridicule) will join Joe Biden in trying to laugh at Vlad Putin.
Hard reality here: It’s Putin who will have the last laugh.
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” — Adam Smith
The Left has been tempting fate since January 2021—applying its nihilist medicine to America on the premise that such a rich patient can ride out any toxic shock.
Our elites assume that all our nation’s past violent protests, all its would-be revolutions, all its cultural upheavals, all its institutionalized lawlessness were predicated on one central truth—America’s central core is so strong, so rich, and so resilient that it can withstand almost any assault.
So, we can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured.
We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists. Who cares that we tossed off a billion-dollar new embassy, and jettisoned a $300-million refitted air base, as long as our pride flags were waving in Kabul?
Certainly, we can afford to restructure all our universities, eliminate free expression and speech, and institute Maoist cultural revolutionary fervor in our revered institutions of higher learning—once the world’s greatest levers of scientific advancement and technological progress.
We can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.
We assumed that our foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—our natural bounty in North America, our cherished rule of law, our legal immigration traditions that drew in the most audacious and hardworking on the planet, and our guarantees of personal freedom and liberty led to such staggering wealth and affluence that nothing much that this mediocre generation could do would ever endanger our resilience.
But such inheritances are not written in stone. America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. It was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.
We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.
Our major cities are no longer safe. Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade. A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population. It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.
We know it is so because California public officials talk of anything and everything—Roe v. Wade, transitions to electric cars, hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief for illegal aliens—to mask their utter impotence to address feces in the street, the random assaults on the vulnerable, and the inability to park a car and return to it intact.
Ditto the Dodge City downtowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and a host of others. In just four or five years, they have given up on fully funding the police, aggressive prosecutors indicting the violent, and ubiquitous civil servants ensuring the streets are free of trash, vermin, flotsam, jetsam, and human excrement.
There are natural reactions to such excess. The most terrifying is that our once-great cities, especially their downtowns, will simply shrink into something like ghost towns—our versions of an out-West Bodie, or an abandoned Roman city in the sand like Leptis Magna, or a Chernobyl.
But the culprit will not be a played-out mine, or encroaching desert, or a nuclear meltdown, but the progressive leadership of a worn-out, bankrupt people who no longer possess the confidence to keep their urban civilization safe and viable. And so, they either fled, or joined the mob, or locked themselves up in fortified citadels, both in fear to go out and terrified of losing what they owned.
We are seeing that deterioration already in our major cities. Stores are boarded up. Women cease to walk alone after sunset. Police officers walking the beat are now rare. Hate crimes, smash-and-grab robberies, and carjackings go unpunished. Streets are filthy and littered. Commerce and human interaction cease at dusk, as if in expectation that zombies will emerge to control the streets. Criminals when arrested are not always identified—the media censoring names and descriptions on their own selective theories of social justice.
But again, the culprit is not the COVID plague or want of money. It is us, we who turned over our cities to the incompetent, the selfish, the timid, and the violent.
There is again an antidote. But doubling the police force, bringing back broken-windows policing, electing tough prosecutors, moving the homeless from the downtown into hospitals and supervised shelters beyond the suburbs, arresting, convicting, and incarcerating the guilty—all that seems well beyond this generation’s capacity.
Would not such efforts be unfair to the mere rock-thrower? Who says the fentanyl user has no right to defecate on the street? Would not our jails become overcrowded? Would the incarcerated be unduly overrepresented by this or that group?
Joe Biden took a strong economy—albeit one that after three serial spendthrift presidencies faced huge national debt and a rendezvous with fiscal sobriety—and has utterly ruined it.
He discouraged labor participation with federal checks. He ensured that his minions on the politicized Federal Reserve Board would keep interest rates artificially low. Biden inflated the money supply while debasing the value of the currency. He brought back mindless regulation and put ideological commissars in place to ensure the corporations, banks, and Wall Street would be woke, allowing ideology to warp ancient economic laws that kept prices stable, supply and demand in balance, and incentives to work and profit.
Many thought Biden would have needed at least four or five years to wreck such a strong economy with such nihilism rather than a mere 16 months.
Yet nature is about to step in with a recession and perhaps even a depression to correct the Biden madness. If interest rates rise, capital dries up, businesses close, employers cut back, consumers no longer have access to easy money, and the nation becomes inert, then the country will be worse off, spend less—and that too will be a brutal solution of sorts to Biden’s hyperinflation and stagflation.
Still, it is hard to see how anyone in the government might prefer the proper and necessary medicine at this late hour. An updated Simpson-Bowles plan still could address long-term insolvency. Meaningless regulations could be pruned back. The tax code could be radically altered and simplified to encourage investment rather than consumption. Entitlements could be calibrated by incentives to become productive rather than to remain inert. All of that might return us to a sound currency, a strong GDP, long-term financial solvency, and general prosperity for all. But are not such medicines perceived as worse than the disease?
There is an answer to the open border, when upwards of 4 million illegal aliens will flow into the United States in a mere two years, for the most part without audits, English, capital, income, and vaccinations—and with no idea how to house, feed, or provide health care for millions without background checks.
At this late date, the corrections of stopping catch and release, ending amnesties, hiring more border patrol officers and immigration judges, or building more detention centers are too little too late.
Eventually, Americans will become acculturated to large enclaves of endemic poverty, as millions with no familiarity with the United States are neither assimilated nor integrated.
The border will then disappear, and northern Mexico and the southern United States will become indistinguishable, as millions simply drift back and forth in the manner of an ancient Gaul or Germania. Large areas of Texas, Arizona, and California are already returning to such pre-state status.
Or the alternate corrective will be the completion of a massive wall from the Pacific to the Gulf, with strict audits of all would-be immigrants, immediate deportations for lawbreakers, and legal only immigration that is measured, diverse, and meritocratic.
We are reaching the inflection point quickly and will either experience the absolute destruction of the border or a radical backlash, given that the current mess is unsustainable. Either a nation with borders survives or a tribal and nomadic region supplants it.
If America chooses to shut down refineries, put our rich oil and natural gas fields off-limits, cancel pipelines, and demonize the fossil fuel industry, then, of course, prices for carbon fuels will explode.
The Biden Administration talks nonsensically about Teslas, batteries, and electric replacements. But it is not greenlighting mining for the critical minerals needed for batteries. It is not encouraging nuclear power plants to provide enough power for a clean fleet of 200 million electric cars. There is no Marshall Plan to wean America off mostly non-polluting natural gas and gasoline onto electricity-hungry engines.
Instead, Biden begs the Saudis, the Russians, the Venezuelans, and even the Iranians to pump the fuel he will not. He seeks to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that can supply only a fraction of the oil America gulps daily. He defines his own pre-midterm, self-created mess as a national emergency to tap a reserve he could never fill or refill.
So, what is the natural corrective to unaffordable fuel?
A likely Biden recession or depression, in which the middle classes simply do not enjoy jobs that pay enough to afford $6-9-a-gallon gas. And so, they will not drive. Vacations, optional shopping trips, and visits to friends—all that and more will taper off. Gas will stabilize at near-European levels, and the people, as planned, will be rerouted into dirty and unsafe subways and mass transit.
Biden will be happy. But America won’t be the same mobile country.
America’s bounty was predicated on each generation following the prompt of the prior, modulating when change was necessary, but not daring to tamper with the foundational principles and values that explained our singular wealth, power, and leisure.
This generation in its arrogance tested fate. It felt itself smarter and morally superior to its betters of the past. It lost that wager and now we the public are paying for its foolishness. To destroy America as we have always known it, there was far less necessary to ruin than our elite believed.
Like a stunned adolescent whose reckless incompetence totaled the family car, the Left seems shocked that America proved so fragile after all.
Proving yet again that there are no lengths the Democrats in New York won’t go to in their quest to pave the path toward amnesty, they passed a law in January that would allow non-citizens to vote in New York City municipal and local elections. The law was scheduled to take effect next year. Attempts to allow such residents – including illegal aliens – to vote in national and congressional elections had failed in the past, but they appeared confident that they could establish this as a first step on a longer path. Unfortunately for them, a judge on the state supreme court disagreed and struck down the law today as being in violation of the state constitution and agreed that it would cause “imminent harm” to registered citizen voters. Proponents of the law plan to appeal. (Gothamist)
New York City’s law extending voting rights in municipal elections to noncitizens who are legally allowed to live, work and go to school in the five boroughs violates the New York State Constitution, according to a ruling issued by Justice Ralph Porzio in Richmond County State Supreme Court on Monday.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella was the lead among a group of predominantly Republican plaintiffs who sued the city after the new law was enacted in January, arguing it would change how they needed to campaign. A group of voters who were plaintiffs in the suit also claimed their votes would be diluted by the new law, which was set to allow upwards of 800,000 new voters to register and vote in local elections starting in 2023.
In his ruling, Porzio sided with the plaintiffs, adding the measure also violated New York State election law and the municipal home rule law.
Judge Porzio didn’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting to reach this conclusion. In his ruling, he cited the precise wording of the state constitution. It reads, “citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections.” Porzio emphasized the word “citizens” just in case anyone had missed the more subtle parts of the message.
The judge went on to further cite existing state election laws which also specify that “citizens” are entitled to vote. He additionally agreed with one of the plaintiffs in the case that their vote – as a citizen – could be severely diluted by allowing up to 800,000 non-citizens to vote in next year’s municipal elections. While agreeing with the opposition that the plaintiffs had not suffered any harm “today,” he concluded that “the harm they will suffer is imminent.”
Perhaps this ruling, if it is appealed far enough up the chain, will produce an impact on other places that have successfully implemented non-citizen voting. There are two places in Vermont that allow it, along with San Francisco. (Though in San Fran the non-citizens can only vote in school board elections.) The big hotspot is Maryland, particularly near the border with the District of Columbia. Eleven jurisdictions there allow voting in municipal elections by non-citizens.
NY GOP Chairman Nick Langworthy released the following statement after the ruling was announced.
This is a huge victory for election integrity, citizen rights, and the rule of law.
New York Democrats have tried time and again to illegally rig the system, but we have proven that when we FIGHT we WIN!
Whether it was their illegal gerrymander or this unconstitutional scheme to allow non-citizens the right to vote, Democrats are brazenly abusing their power and trampling on your rights.
This is simply one of those issues where the public should refuse to compromise. Voting is one of the most fundamental rights that allows the citizens of the United States to decide who is best fit to represent them and fight for them at all levels of the government. When non-citizens come to America legally and follow our laws, there is a way for them to gain the right to vote. It is by following the established pathway to naturalization.
But when you allow an army of non-citizens to show up (and the 800,000 in New York City literally represents a significant army) and start voting to change our laws and determine who represents us, you are thwarting the entire process. Democrats these days are fond of constantly talking about “existential threats to our democracy” that hardly seem to exist. If you want to see an actual threat to our democracy, look at this law that New York Democrats are trying to force through.
Here’s the Deal by Kellyanne Conway is a memoir of her life. Readers will take the journey from her life as a young child to a pollster, a mom, and the only woman to run a successful presidential campaign. She shares her feelings about family, her marriage, reporters, and working with Donald Trump, first on his 2016 campaign and then as a consultant in the White House.
In reading the book, people will see her honest and straightforward account. They will understand why she was so vital to the Trump campaign as a smart, articulate, and talented woman. It was a pleasure to interview her about the past, present, and future regarding the issues.
EC: Let’s start by talking about the past — 2020. Can you explain the book quote, “I think if we lose to this guy [Biden] we are pathetic”?
KAC: In my book, I have an entire chapter titled “A Tale of Two Outcomes.” I show the contrast between 2016 and 2020.
In 2020, there was a whole lot more going in terms of resources, much more money, and staff members. Yet, toward the end, they ran out of money and had to pull some ad buys in those critical swing states. For example, can anyone even tell me what the Super Bowl ad was about sometime before the election? Then the Tulsa rally publicized how a million people would be there, yet there were empty seats.
I think the campaign never adapted and adjusted from the Trump economy as the core governing central premise for his election versus a once-in-a-century global pandemic. COVID dominated, which was a benefit for Biden, who stayed in his basement bunker. There was never such a gulf between exposure of the two presidential nominees. President Trump was on TV two hours plus a day versus less than an hour of Joe Biden per week. Biden benefited by it because people could make him whatever they wanted to make him.
EC: Was the first presidential debate a disaster?
KAC: I told the president to let Biden speak. There was no indication the man had the stamina or wherewithal to stand there and spar with President Trump for ninety minutes. I wanted him to put it to the test.
EC: What about his tweets and social media presence?
KAC: There is an anecdote in the book where I walked into the Oval Office, and the president says about his social media presence, “Without this, I would not have gotten elected.” My response was, “I want to make sure with that, you don’t get unelected.” Overall, it was a net plus for him and the nation. Why? We all benefited from receiving instant communication free of charge from the president. The CEO billionaire and the housewife both knew what was going on at the same time. But it was also easier for his detractors and critics to take some of those communications and turn them around, alienating some independents and suburban women.
EC: President Trump in 2020 lost suburban women. Did he not concentrate on issues that concerned women? You have a book quote, “Politics 101. You don’t tell the American people what’s important to them. They tell you.” Please explain.
KAC: Women were concerned about education, crime, economic security, and COVID. The process changed, which did not allow him to do as many rallies. This prevented him from discussing more issues.
EC: What about the universal mail-in ballots?
KAC: The president himself said that if that happens, it will be bad. The campaign should have realized and adapted to it better. There should have been poll-watchers ready to go, lawyers ready to go, and challenges ready to go instead of scrambling around after November 3, 2020. They had to prove that the level of fraud had changed the election. I said in the book that proving conspiracy and fraud is tough.
EC: President Trump complained early on about universal mail-in ballots, so why didn’t he call the state legislators and governors to enact something before the election?
KAC: Great question. This is the point about 2020. Of course, there were improprieties and malfeasances. In a movie, the president says he lost. But also looking at the movie, there is a realization that the fix was in. [Mark] Zuckerberg and his wife, through two nonprofits, spent $400 million for safe voting. Yet 92% of the precincts that received $1 million or more from them were won by Joe Biden. You start to scratch your head. What happened? They outfoxed the Trump operation. It is important that we get answers to these concerns so we are not up against them again in the next presidential cycle.
EC: President Biden is arrogant, self-centered, and incompetent. He takes no responsibility. He is a liar and is unable to come up with solutions. Do you agree?
KAC: I completely agree. He has never been an impressive legislator or vice president. It goes way beyond mental ability and physical energy for the job. People should not focus so much on his mental ability and age because then they are not focusing on his agenda, which has brought us to the brink of failure. He is also an angry guy. He is not up for the job of president.
EC: Will January 6 have an impact on the elections of 2022 or 2024?
KAC: On the margins. Those against Donald Trump, his family, and the people around him might be motivated by these hearings. Others will say it is another witch hunt.
EC: What about the other issues?
KAC: I do think most people are concerned about education, the economy, crime, energy independence, and border security. Look at how fentanyl is the number-one killer of 18- to 49-year-olds in this country right now. What is Congress doing about that? Where are those televised hearings? I think guns, abortion, and the January 6 hearings will have an impact on getting a little more enthusiasm and turnout among the Democratic base who otherwise feel very demoralized this year because they have two turkeys, Biden and Harris, in the White House.
EC: It appears the Democratic strategy is to make themselves out to be moderates when they are not: Biden; Eric Adams, the mayor of New York; and now the Ohio Senate candidate, Tim Ryan. How can Americans be warned?
KAC: Look at their records. Joe Biden had a zero record of being a unifier. In the case of Tim Ryan, he has been in Congress for over two decades. He tried to run for president and embarrassed himself. He is a hothead; just look at his TV interviews. People should look at his record, where he votes 95% with the Squad, Biden, and the radicals. These ad-makers need to wake up and do some digging with the record and statements that already exist.
EC: 2024?
KAC: President Trump, if he runs, should not be there to settle scores or run based on spite. I know he has been given polling data that is not always accurate or helpful to him.
He is a smart guy and was an excellent president. Tens of millions miss him and what he has accomplished. I hope he considers allying himself with folks who are in it for all the right reasons, the America First agenda. I do hope that what we implemented in 2016 is implemented in 2024. So much of it still applies.
The magic of Trump’s appeal is to the forgotten man, forgotten woman, and now the forgotten child with school choice, opportunity scholarships, and pro-life advocates. If there is a role for me to get rid of Biden-Harris, I will take it. But President Trump needs to decide if he will run. His most likely path is to go from king to kingmaker back to king. Looking at the way the media cover issues, one would think Trump is president, not Joe Biden.
EC: The Supreme Court ruling on abortion just came out. What would you say to candidates regarding this issue?
KAC: The “follow the science” crowd say they know that a five-year-old should be masked up. They cannot look at a five-month-old sonagram and ignore the heartbeat, eyes, and limbs. Let’s follow the science. Anyone who cannot tell what is on that sonagram is anti-science, especially if he believes in abortion any time, up to the moment of birth, like the Colorado law.
EC: I see you as a role model for women, considering you were the first female campaign manager who won. Do you see yourself as one?
KC: Conservatives are the ones who lift other women up. I will leave it to other women to decide if I inspired or influenced them in a positive way — although I do it hear that from young girls. After I tell them they could be the one to be the first female president, their faces just light up.
EC: Can you talk about KAConsulting?
KAC: It is my new company. I am back to my original craft, which is polling. I have been doing it for twenty-eight years. We have been working with candidates and non-profits for about a year and a half. We do polling, consulting, and media training. We are very involved in 2022 and will be in 2024.
EC: What should we know about polling questions?
KAC: My advice is for people to look at the poll’s sample size and where the questions are placed in the poll. It should go from general to specific questions. The first questions should be generic, such as “what is the most important issue facing the country?”
I always tell people to be aware of biased words in the questions. I think the worst questions are biased through insidiousness, such as “do you support or oppose protecting the environment?” If a large number say they support protecting the environment, then the inference is that there is support for the Green New Deal. No, that is not what the question asked.
The sample size should be large enough and representative of the intended audience. Everybody who releases polling data has an obligation to release the entire poll. Americans have a right to demand it.
EC: What would you want to say to Americans?
KAC: I have been going around the country and found out how wise Americans are. They have excellent ideas about how to fix what is broken, how to protect and ensure our freedoms and democracy.
Let’s not lose hope. We have been through two world wars, 9/11, social and civil unrest, real tragedies. We will overcome. Voting is not just someone’s civil duty and constitutional right, but a necessity. All elections are vital.
It is not the consultants, not the media, not the elected officials, but the American people who are the best ambassadors for limited government and the free market. There are people in your circle of life whom you should speak with about education, inflation, high gas prices, border security, energy independence, and the rights of women and children. Stand up, show up, and speak up.
The day before the Supreme Court turned the world upside down and overruled Roe last week, it held that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding people to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense and that New York’s Sullivan law, which makes that virtually impossible for anyone but VIPs, was therefore unconstitutional. Justice Thomas wrote the opinion for the Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Justice Breyer dissented in an opinion joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.
Justice Alito filed a separate concurring opinion to deconstruct the fog of hysteria emitted in the dissent. I recommend Justice Alito’s concurrence for its entertainment value, which is considerable. Below are a few paragraphs that give a sense of the rest (internal citations and footnotes omitted).
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In light of what we have actually held, it is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served by most of the dissent’s lengthy introductory section. Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years? Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home? And how does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.
What is the relevance of statistics about the use of guns to commit suicide? Does the dissent think that a lot of people who possess guns in their homes will be stopped or deterred from shooting themselves if they cannot lawfully take them outside?
The dissent cites statistics about the use of guns in domestic disputes, but it does not explain why these statistics are relevant to the question presented in this case. How many of the cases involving the use of a gun in a domestic dispute occur outside the home, and how many are prevented by laws like New York’s?
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The dissent cites the large number of guns in private hands—nearly 400 million—but it does not explain what this statistic has to do with the question whether a person who already has the right to keep a gun in the home for self-defense is likely to be deterred from acquiring a gun by the knowledge that the gun cannot be carried outside the home. And while the dissent seemingly thinks that the ubiquity of guns and our country’s high level of gun violence provide reasons for sustaining the New York law, the dissent appears not to understand that it is these very facts that cause law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense.
Trump and his Republican backing fought to put solid picks on the court, justices who stood firm and gave their final word on Roe.
JORDAN BOYD
There were many seen and unseen forces that contributed to the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but a large part of the credit for the U.S. Supreme Court finally overruling Roe v. Wade goes to former President Donald Trump for nominating solid justices who could see an “egregiously wrong” decision as something that desperately needed to be undone.
Without Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett who, despite facing an intense intimidation campaign from openly violent leftists, stood behind the judicial belief that there is no constitutional right to abortion, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wouldn’t have had the backup they needed to overturn 50 years of an “exceptionally weak” ruling that had “damaging consequences” on Americans for years.
They certainly wouldn’t have received much help from Chief Justice John Roberts, George W. Bush’s pick for the court.
As a matter of fact, even though he didn’t side with the dissent, Roberts refused to join the court’s majority opinion. In return, he was pummeled by Alito for doing “exactly what it criticizes Roe for doing: pulling ‘out of thin air’ a test that ‘[n]o party or amicus asked the Court to adopt.’”
“The concurrence would ‘leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all,’ and would hold only that if the Constitution protects any such right, the right ends once women have had ‘a reasonable opportunity’ to obtain an abortion,” Alito wrote. “The concurrence does not specify what period of time is sufficient to provide such an opportunity, but it would hold that 15 weeks, the period allowed under Mississippi’s law, is enough—at least “absent rare circumstances. There are serious problems with this approach, and it is revealing that nothing like it was recommended by either party.”
Leftists understood the threat that Trump’s nomination power posed to their abortion regime. After all, he predicted that if he added another two or three justices to the court, Roe would be overturned “automatically.”
“And that will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court,” he said during a 2016 debate.
That’s why the left tried to stonewall, bully, and tarnish Trump’s picks for the highest court in the land.
Their opposition campaign began with Gorsuch. It quickly escalated when Democrats, along with the corrupt corporate media, launched a weeks-long smear campaign against Kavanaugh. By the time Barrett came along, the leftists in Congress and the media had their vilification tactics down pat.
At the end of Trump’s judicial saga, leftists had waged a full-blown war on the Supreme Court. When things didn’t go their way, they called for court-packing. By the time the Dobbs opinion was leaked in May, they landed on completely destroying and undermining the court’s integrity.
Without Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, the court might have caved to pressure to appease the masses. After all, the court chief Roberts did change his mind on Obamacare in 2012 to satiate his fears over potential pushback.
But because Trump and his Republican backing fought to put solid picks on the court, the justices stood firm and gave their final word on Roe.
Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, albeit, in a twisted, pro-abortion rhetoric kind of way, recognized Trump was somewhat responsible for the landmark decision.
“Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party, [and] their supermajority in the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers,” Pelosi said in a press conference on Friday.
Under Roberts, the NeverTrumpers who suddenly want to claim credit for the legal victory they long opposed the Trump-forged path to, and a Hillary Clinton-led regime aided by a Supreme Court filled with activist justices, Roe would still be cursing states and permitting the butchering of millions of unborn babies.
Under Trump, states are allowed to ban the killing of unborn babies completely. As a matter of fact, many of them have already started to preserve life in the womb.
“This is following the Constitution, and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago,” Trump told Fox News on Friday after the ruling was released.
The extent to which liberals have gone bananas over the Dobbs case is a phenomenon that demands explanation. Most liberals, after all, understand that the Court has not banned abortion, or in fact placed any limits on it whatsoever. It has simply remitted the issue of abortion to the political sphere where it was prior to 1973, and where it always has belonged, thus ending a half century of usurpation by the Court.
Moreover, abortion laws in the U.S. have been extremely liberal compared with most countries–almost every country other than North Korea, in fact. This chart shows in striking fashion how liberal our laws have been compared with Europe’s:
One of the many ironies of post-Dobbs hysteria was French President Emmanuel Macron denouncing the decision, even though the Mississippi statute that the Court upheld was more permissive, more liberal, than France’s own abortion law.
Most liberals no doubt understand that they now will have to take their case to the voters, and that when the dust settles, American abortion laws will look pretty much like Europe’s. And some states will be extremely permissive–New York, for one, may legalize infanticide, which the states are perfectly free to do. So, once again–why the hysteria?
I think several elements are at work here, but the most basic is that liberals (Democrats) do not want to take the issue of abortion to the voters. They do not want to have to make their case. They do not want to have to argue and persuade. Rather, they want all views opposed to their own to be banned and unheard.
This is perhaps the dominant fact of 21st Century politics. Liberals don’t want to debate, they don’t want to persuade. They want to censor. They want some higher authority, whether the Supreme Court or Twitter, to declare all views but theirs out of bounds. They don’t want to participate in democratic politics, they want to rule by fiat. For all their wailing about “our democracy,” the last thing liberals want is the actual give and take of a democracy, which usually entails compromise.
I think that is the key reason for the Left’s hysteria over Dobbs. For liberals, having to argue, to persuade, to run for office, to participate in the messy work of democracy where you don’t always win, is a step backward. They had everything going their way, and now…this.
Viewed in that light, I think the demonstrations, insurrections, encouragement of assassination of Supreme Court Justices, and arson at Christian maternity centers are understandable.
This week, Adam Schiff and his friends on the Jan. 6 Select Committee have been pushing a new “Big Lie” on America, that President Trump conspired with state GOP leaders to present “fake Trump electors” on January 6, 2021, whose votes would be substituted for the “real” Biden electors during the ceremonial public count of the votes by the vice president in the Capitol.
According to the breathless committee script, it was a classic switcheroo, conducted in top secret, all by word of mouth or by encrypted text messages, please. In Michigan, electors were said to have hid out in the Capitol building overnight so they could cast their ballots legally in the morning without being detected.
Schiff presented these claims in an eight-minute Sixty Minutes style video, narrated by the committee’s investigative counsel, Cosey Lucier, who drove the theme home, presenting snippets of a “secret” meeting of the Arizona “fake electors” presided by state GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward and “fake electors” themselves.
This is how propaganda works. You present one side of the story, you label it, and then you repeat repeat repeat.
Ms. Lucier was no doubt aided by former ABC News executive James Goldston, hired by the committee earlier in the month to “produce the hearings as if they were a docudrama or a must-watch mini-series,” according to the NY Times.
The only problem with this latest Big Lie is that it isn’t true. When citizens vote for president and vice-president they actually vote for a slate of electors. Every state in the union has two slates of electors and both of them gather after the election to cast their ballots for their candidate. Only one slate of electors gets certified by the state legislature.
RNC chairwoman Rhonda McDaniels correctly called this second set of electors “contingent electors,” but that was ignored by the Jan. 6 gaslighters.
As any of the 74 million Trump voters who were paying attention before, during, and after the 2020 election knows, the issue of “contingent electors” was debated rigorously in public. Electors in seven states cast dueling votes for Trump and Biden. Memos from opposing lawyers were presented to the President — and purposefully leaked to the press. The legal theory on the President’s side was that the Vice President had “plenipotentiary” powers, meaning that he could decide by himself on Jan. 6, which set to electors to accept.
Few Republicans agreed with that theory. Mike Pence certainly didn’t, and when approached by a staffer for Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to accept contingent elector certificates from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, he refused. Now, of course, Democrats are using that fleeting incident to attack Senator Johnson in his tight re-election race.
In live testimony before the Jan. 6 committee on June 23, former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donaghue acknowledged that the Department of Justice vigorously opposed all efforts to investigate the 2020 election. “We are not quality control” when it comes to elections, he told the committee. If states ran defective elections “it is up to the states or Congress to correct, not the Justice Department.”
And while RINO Adam Kinzinger got him to describe how DoJ “investigated” President Trump’s claims of election fraud by rehashing the denials from compromised officials at the time, he conceded that “the American people do not constitute a client of the U.S. Justice Department, only the American government does. We simply did not have standing” to intervene in the dozens of court cases involving alleged voter fraud. And they didn’t.
One DoJ attorney, Jeffrey Clark, was prepared to intervene. For his courage, President Trump planned to name him acting attorney general in January 2021. For his courage, Clark has been vilified by the media, the Jan. 6 Committee, and was dragged out of his home in his pajamas on Jan. 22, 2022 in a pre-dawn raid by FBI goons, who seized his electronics apparently on orders from Biden’s Department of Justice.
Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and her husband, also a Trump elector, were presented with grand jury subpoenas this past week as well.
We are witnessing the arrival of a Banana Republic in our country. When one side in a heated political environment criminalizes their opponents because of their political views, our Republic dies.
The Democrats used their constitutional remedies against President Trump by impeaching him twice. Now they want to throw him and his supporters in jail.
Why? Because they know they are losing the battle of public opinion and will lose fair elections against Trump allies in November and against Trump himself in 2024.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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