Gowdy Says Lies Show Sufficient Intent to Prosecute Clinton in Email Scandal

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With the FBI investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server having revealed careless conduct, flouting of the rules for handling sensitive documents, and attempts to cover up the scandal, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., wanted to know on Wednesday what — exactly — the FBI’s standard would have been to have prosecuted Clinton for breaking the law.

“What would she have had to do to warrant your recommendation for prosecution?” Gowdy asked FBI Director James Comey during a House Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday.

Comey, as he has before, said that he would have to be able to prove intent. On Wednesday, he replied to Gowdy that he would have had to be able to prove Clinton knew what she did was wrong when she did it.

“But the way to prove that is whether or not someone took steps to conceal or destroy what they’ve done,” Gowdy said. “That is the best evidence you have that they knew it was wrong, that they lied about it.”

The congressman made it clear he believed intent had been demonstrated.

” … you have to prove it by circumstantial evidence such as whether or not the person intended to set up an e-mail system outside the State Department, such as whether or not the person knew or should have known that his or her job involved handling classified information, whether or not the person was truthful about the use of multiple devices, whether or not the person knew that a frequent e-mailer to her had been hacked, and whether she took any remedial steps after being put on notice that your e-mail or someone who’s been e-mailing with you prolifically had been hacked, and whether or not — and I think you would agree with this, Director — false exculpatory statements are gold in a courtroom. I would rather have a false exculpatory statement than a confession. I would rather have someone lie about something and it be provable that that is a lie, such as that I neither sent nor received classified information. Such as that I turned over all of my work related e-mails. All of that to me goes to the issue of intent,” Gowdy said.

He told Comey he was “real careful not to criticize you” but was highly unhappy with the results of the FBI’s work.

“That is not the FBI that I used to work with,” Gowdy said.

Gowdy had also expressed his frustration during Fox and Friends when he noted that rules seemed to have been bent severely in the investigation, as typified by the multiple roles played by Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who was given immunity by the FBI.

“Cheryl Mills, one day she’s a target, one day she’s a witness, and then the next day, she’s sitting in Secretary Clinton’s interview as a lawyer. And I’ll just tell you, as somebody that did this for a living, that is unprecedented,” Gowdy said.

Gowdy was not alone in being skeptical.

“It seems clear that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed multiple felonies involving the passing of classified information through her private email server,” said Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va.. “The FBI, however, declined to refer the case for prosecution on some very questionable bases.”

Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, said he was certain the decision not to prosecute Clinton was made before she was interviewed. Comey denied that assertion. (For more from the author of “Gowdy Says Lies Show Sufficient Intent to Prosecute Clinton in Email Scandal” please click HERE)

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Senate Hands Obama Huge Loss, Gives 9/11 Victims’ Families Big Victory

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Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks moved one step closer to being able to sue Saudi Arabia after the Senate overrode President Barack Obama’s veto of a bill allowing those lawsuits.

The vote on the override was 97-1.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was the only one in the chamber to support Obama.

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, would provide an exception to the Obama-supported doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” in which countries are not sued in one another’s courts.

Obama has insisted that although the bill does give 9/11 families the chance they have wanted to sue Saudi Arabia, the U.S. might lose the immunity from lawsuits it currently has in other nations.

Senators who opposed Obama said the risk was worth taking.

“This legislation is really about pursuing justice,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas. “The families have already suffered too much. They’ve already suffered untold tragedy, of course, and they deserve to find a path to closure that only justice can provide.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., another strong supporter of the legislation, said, “Overriding a presidential veto is something we don’t take lightly. But it was important in this case that the families of the victims of 9/11 be allowed to pursue justice. Even if that pursuit causes some diplomatic discomforts.”

The bill was vetoed by Obama on Friday after the president sought to find supporters who would take his side against the families of 9/11 victims who pushed for the bill.

Overriding a presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress.

The Senate was the first to act to override. House action is now pending and may take place this week.

JASTA’s override came as some lawmakers expressed concerns that they still don’t know the full extent of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

“We are still learning the facts, but there is mounting evidence that the Saudi government – or at least operations and operatives within the Saudi government – aided and abetted one of the most massive crimes in the United States,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “In our system, the truth behind those facts deserves to be presented in court – a court of law where fairness and justice will be assured.” (For more from the author of “Senate Hands Obama Huge Loss, Gives 9/11 Victims’ Families Big Victory” please click HERE)

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LGBT Activists Are Coming for Your Children

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Do you need to lock your doors and windows at night because a homosexual predator is coming after your kids? That is absolutely not what I mean when I say that LGBT activists are coming for your children.

I’m talking about educators and government leaders; I’m talking about celebrities and judges; I’m talking about people of influence who want to indoctrinate your children even before they get to school. I’m talking about an all-out war for the minds and hearts of your kids.

Are you equipped and ready to do what is best for these little ones?

By all means, as parents, we should teach our kids to be kind to all, especially to those who seem different and are ostracized by their peers. And we should teach by word and example that bullying is always wrong. In other words, we don’t need to teach gay is good in order to teach that bullying is bad. In the same way, we don’t need to push every boy to be a football player and every girl to be a ballerina to combat transgender activism.

But you better believe that we need to take a stand for our kids — in the schools; in the world of entertainment and social media; in the courts; in the churches — if we want to keep them safe from this destructive and deceptive indoctrination.

Consider that there are YouTube channels dedicated to teaching pre-school children that you can be a boy or a girl or neither or both, also trying to teach them the meaning of words like “queer.”

Kids this age can barely tell the difference between fantasy and reality (they play with dolls and toys as if they were real creatures), and they have virtually no understanding of sexuality or romantic attraction. Some even think they are dogs and like to walk on all fours and bark. Yet activists want to indoctrinate them with the latest LGBT talking points. This is so wrong.

I documented years ago how groups like GLSEN were going after elementary school children with “Terminology Game Cards” that quizzed students and teachers on terms like Biological Sex, Gender Identity, Gender Role, Transgender, Gender Expression, Sexual Orientation, Heterosexism, Transphobia, Asexual, Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual, Intersexual, Androgyny, Cross Dresser, Genderqueer, Gender Non-Conforming, Queer, LGBTQ, Sexual Reassignment Surgery, D/L (Down Low), MSM (Men Who Have Sex with Men).

And the average mom and dad probably have no clue that their little 7-year-old daughter just learned to distinguish between Genderqueer and Gender Non-Conforming in school today.

This is absolute madness.

Of course, I understand what motivates the activists and educators. They want to teach “tolerance” and they want a child who does not appear to be “gender conforming” to realize that their insides might not be in harmony with their outsides.

But that doesn’t make what they’re doing right, nor does it make it helpful. And the best motivation in the world cannot change falsehood into truth.

That being said, it is clear that LGBT activists and their allies have had ample motivation to change the thinking of Americans, beginning with our children, and already in 1995, lesbian author Patricia Nell Warren stated, “Whoever captures the kids owns the future.” (Published in The Advocate, October 3, 1995, p. 80, in the article “Future Shock.”)

How sad that these activists have been far more visionary than many of us who identify as conservative Christians and who claim to care about future generations.

Frankly, I don’t doubt that we care; I do doubt that we have been on the alert.

It is becoming increasingly common for women who partially transitioned to men to give birth to their children and even nurse them — this was graphically illustrated in one of the most disturbing images I have ever seen — while a recent headline stated, “Is this the world’s most modern family? Man who used to be a woman gives birth to a baby by woman who used to be a man.” (Stream note: You can read more about this twisted story in Jennifer Hartline’s new column “Back to Reality, Please: A Man and a Woman Make Babies“)

What effect will this have on the children? How will the child feel as it grows up and marries and has children yet knows that its “father” is actually its mother?

In keeping with this confusion, the hit ABC show Modern Family has now added a transgender child actor to its cast. How fitting (and ironic) that Modern Family will now feature an 8-year-old boy who is actually a girl. And your kids are taking all this in.

Over in Norway, “A proposed bill in the Norwegian Parliament would allow people to change their legal gender online within a matter of minutes.” And the word “people” includes children as young as 6-years-old. Yes, a child that young would have the ability to make a decision officially changing their legal gender. How can this be?

Incredibly, “The bill is expected to pass with few objections when it goes to a vote this summer. Norwegians would just have to go online and simply ‘tick a box’ to change their legal gender.”

Back here in the States, the Obama administration is ready to punish schools that will not force a 15-year-old girl to share a locker room and shower with a 15-year-old boy who identifies as a girl. This is why I say that LGBT activists (and their allies) are coming after your children.

Perhaps we can learn from the people of Mexico who recently rallied in more than 130 cities and drew crowds of over 200,000 in Mexico City alone, as they stood against redefining marriage and family in their country.

And we can do this without hating anyone. In fact, love requires us to act. Our children’s future is at stake. (For more from the author of “LGBT Activists Are Coming for Your Children” please click HERE)

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First Baby Born With Controversial ‘Three-Parent’ Technique

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A technique to make “three-parent babies” was voted into law by the British Parliament in February 2015, but it wasn’t a “three-parent” baby born in the UK that made an ethical splash heard around the world — it was a baby boy born to a Jordanian couple treated in Mexico by a team of U.S. doctors. This procedure, called mitochondrial replacement therapy, is not legal in the U.S., so Dr. John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City traveled to Mexico to treat the Jordanian woman.

The woman, identified as Ibtisam Shaban, has Leigh syndrome, which is a fatal disease affecting the developing nervous system, reported the New Scientist. The genes for Leigh syndrome are in the mitochondrial DNA of the mother. While Shaban did not exhibit symptoms of Leigh syndrome, she lost her first two children to the disease at ages six and eight months.

The procedure used to produce the baby, Abrahim Hassan, is surrounded by a flurry of ethical questions. In his case, Dr. Zhang removed the nucleus (which houses the majority of a person’s DNA) and placed it in the “shell” of a donor’s egg containing healthy mitochondria DNA. Another technique is to fertilize both the mother’s egg and the donor egg with the father’s sperm, then replace the donor’s nucleus with the mother’s. This technique destroys one embryo. While the mitochondrial transfer procedure is being hailed as a great accomplishment for those who have or are treating mitochondrial diseases, it also raises several serious ethical questions.

Altering the Germ Line

A child with mitochondrial DNA therapy will have DNA from three people, hence the term “three-parent babies.” Since mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child, females with three parents will permanently alter the “germ line” by passing the altered DNA to their children and so on. Dr Trevor Stammers, Program Director in Bioethics and Medical Law at St. Mary’s University, said, “Even if these babies are born they will have to be monitored all their lives, and their children will have to be as well. We do not yet know the interaction between the mitochondria and nuclear DNA. To say that it is the same as changing a battery is facile. It’s an extremely complex thing.”

Playing God

Some have charged that experimenting with DNA is “playing God,” and producing “genetically-modified” humans. “These regulations would authorize the crossing of a rubicon for the first time,” said British MP Fiona Bruce who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group. “It would authorize germ line therapy… to alter the genes of an individual. This is something defined by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as effectively constituting eugenics.”

Only Boys Allowed

At this time, the procedure is only recommended to produce male embryos, since mitochondrial diseases are passed down through females. According to Science News, the Institute of Medicine in the United States determined “it would be ethical to produce male embryos using the technique,” but as of this year federal laws still prohibit the method. This means that female embryos would be destroyed in search of a male who would not pass on mitochondrial diseases to future generations.

Risk of Crossing Ethical Boundaries

British MP Jacob Rees Mogg said once the lines have been crossed, there’s no going back. “I think the difficulty is that it starts a process which is very hard to see where it stops,” he said. “Once the germ line is changed at one point you decide that isn’t allowable in other cases … there is a very clear boundary that babies cannot be genetically altered. And once you have decided that they can you have done something very profound.” Bruce concurs, “We … have approved a technique and what that technique could be used for in the future who knows,” she said. “We’re opening a Pandora’s box.”

The concerns around what amounts to having two mothers could present a problem in the future as child custody battles grow increasingly complicated, even as same-sex couples fight for custody of a child who biologically belongs to only one of them. Others worry that the legalizing of this technique will lead to creating “designer babies” on demand. While scientists may not be able to select a preferred eye color or hair color now, selecting embryos based on sex is already being done. Selecting other desired characteristics is only a matter of time. Once the laws are in place to perform mitochondrial DNA transfers in the U.S., the question of designer babies will be a nonissue.

Genetic Abnormalities

Perhaps one of the most alarming findings has to do with the very real possibility of genetic abnormalities for the three-parent babies. “There are numerous serious risks associated with this technology,” said Dr. Paul Knoepfler, Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. “These include most notably the possibility that developmentally disabled or deceased babies will be produced. Aberrations could lead to developmental defects in babies or also manifest in later life as increased rates of aging [or] cancer.”

Dr. Knoepfler’s concerns are hardly unreasonable. In the early 1990s, embryologists in the U.S. performed a similar technique involving DNA from three people and the results were unsuccessful. The babies who were born later developed genetic disorders, including two infants born with a missing X chromosome and two who later had serious developmental disorders. The practice was banned after the problems were discovered.

Even with the mitochondrial DNA therapy there are no guarantees that the baby will be born without the mitochondrial disease the parents were hoping to avoid. Scientists are aware of mitochondrial carryover during nuclear transfer, also known as Genetic Drift — that is, the mitochondrial DNA of the mother carrying the disease could still carryover to the created embryo and eventually take over anyway, as reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Professor Mary Herbert of Newcastle University commented that “we don’t know what it means for development, but it’s alerted us to the fact that we really need to work hard to get as close to zero carry-over as we can.”

Following the UK’s legalization of the procedure, MEPs wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron, calling the practice “unethical.” In an open letter, the group warned Cameron that EU law prohibited genetic alterations that will carry on to the next generation. “Your proposals violate the fundamental standards of human dignity and integrity of the person,” they wrote. “Modification of the genome is unethical and cannot be permitted.” The Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) said it was “a historic mistake” and warned the technique “will turn children into biological experiments.”

CGS added, “… [T]hey will result in children with DNA from three different people in every cell of their bodies, which will impact a large range of traits in unknowable ways, and introduce genetic changes that will be passed down to future generations through the female line.” (For more from the author of “First Baby Born With Controversial ‘Three-Parent’ Technique” please click HERE)

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The Left’s Decivilization Agenda Comes to Ohio

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If a person can become transgender, why can’t a state or another branch of government become trans-judicial?

Our Founders never envisioned that states would remain obsequious to judicial power grabs. But they could never have anticipated, in their wildest nightmares, a day when federal judges would require states to treat boys like girls. Yet, that is exactly what happened in Ohio when Judge Algenon Marbley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio ordered Highland Local School District to treat a boy who thinks he’s a girl “as the girl she is”!

Just like North Carolina, Ohio can’t seem to catch a break from the tentacles of the radical courts. Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals prevented Ohio’s Secretary of State from cleaning its voter registration lists of dead voters. Now a district judge is ordering a school district outside of Akron to treat a boy in Highland Elementary School like a girl for all official school business.

After the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, prompted by a complaint from the boy’s family, ordered the school district to allow him in female bathrooms and locker rooms, the school officials sued the DOE in federal court for grossly misinterpreting the 1972 Title IX statute as absurdly applying to those suffering from transgender illness. Threatened with the loss of $1 million in Title IX funding, the school district argued that they already went out of their way to accommodate that individual student by allowing him to use a bathroom in the school office. But the parents argued that the boy, who they say had previously attempted suicide, would suffer mental health breakdowns from such an accommodation.

In Monday’s order, Judge Marbley, a Clinton appointee, required the Highland Local School District to allow the child (absurdly referred to as “Jane Doe”) into the girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms. “The Court orders School District officials to treat Jane Doe as the girl she is, including referring to her by female pronouns and her female name and allowing her to use the girls’ restroom at Highland Elementary School,” wrote an irate Judge Marbley.

The judge went on a mind-blowing polemic about how … you guessed it … the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment likely protects this individual and creates a right to use the opposite gender’s bathroom. “[A]s a tiny minority of the population, whose members are stigmatized for their gender non-conformity in a variety of settings, transgender people are a politically powerless minority group.”

Sadly, this is no April Fool’s joke. The unelected judges and bureaucrats at the DOE are using a 1972 statute and an 1868 amendment that was designed to stop real discrimination against fundamental rights to codify the most absurd distortion of natural law — the very source of fundamental rights.

There is no end to the absurdity of this de-civilization agenda. There are all sorts of unfortunate mental disorders in the world that deserve treatment and compassion from the society. But nobody would ever suggest that we codify the hallucinatory behavior of those stricken with the disorders into practice, law, the Constitution, and inalienable rights. What if a schizophrenic student who legitimately exhibited suicidal behavior demanded to be treated as a killer whale and asked for the school district to allow him to sit in a water tank during class? Or what if the student demanded to be referred to as “it” in all documentation? Would this stigmatized super-minority not be entitled to the same degree of “privacy” and “equal protection?”

The Ohio case is a quintessential example when states must simply say no and refuse to comply with the most ludicrous debasements of fundamental rights and the worst usurpations of power by the two unelected branches of the federal government. Even the elected branch of the federal government could never order a state to engage in such absurdity. How can the DOE and the courts be taken seriously for a minute?

Folks, we are like frogs in boiling water who become desensitized to the sharp increase in the temperature of cultural licentiousness. Even those on our side are beginning to adopt much of the Left’s premise and use the absurd and illogical parlance about sexual identity mental disorders. What is it going to take to arouse the states and the people from their slumber as the federal judiciary initiates the most outrageous societal transformation imaginable? Why are the federally elected representative of states like Ohio and North Carolina not fighting to defund the DOE transgender mandate in the budget bill? Why are they not countering the stolen sovereignty from the courts with congressional powers?

It’s time for a new Tea Party, a new movement within the states to fight back against judicial and executive reach. After all, if a boy with male plumbing can be deemed a girl, why can’t a state self-identify as a Supreme Court and control its own destiny? (For more from the author of “The Left’s Decivilization Agenda Comes to Ohio” please click HERE)

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James Comey Promises FBI Database to Track Race-Based Police Activity

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Never let a serious crisis go to waste, goes the old axiom. And in the context of America’s ongoing tension regarding race and policing, it would appear that the crisis has provided a ripe opportunity to further centralize policing in the United States by mining data from state and local law enforcement agencies.

At a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey promised a panel of senators that he would spend the remaining seven years of his 10-year term to build a national database to monitor the role of race in use of force by police across the country.

“We simply must collect data that is reliable nationwide about police use of deadly force in altercations, encounters, with civilians,” Comey said, in an exchange with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., (F, 11%). “If there is anything more inherently governmental than that, I can’t imagine what it is.”

During the hearing, Comey said that the need for the database is due to the fact that the only available information that the public has about policing incidents and the use of force comes from newspapers, whose “data isn’t comprehensive”:

“We will build a nationwide database that the FBI will collect that shows us what happened, when, who was involved, what were they like, what were the circumstances so we can have informed conversations.”

Furthermore, this is a project that Comey said could span through the next two presidential administrations.

“We are going to do this,” the FBI director continued, “One of the beauties of a 10-year term is I am not going to shut up about this. I have seven years to go.”

Ultimately, the goal of James Comey’s proposed policing data project would be to definitively answer questions about whether or not deadly force is applied disproportionately against minorities by police, he says:

“No one in this country knows whether the use of deadly force against any particular group — African-Americans most particularly — is up, down, or sideways over the last 10 years,” Comey told the committee. “Do we have an epidemic of violence? No one knows that. We could, we might not — we simply must gather the information so we can care deeply and solve these problems.”

James Comey’s testimony does sound good at first blush. And had the director’s reputation as an impartial arbiter of the law not been botched over the summer by the bureau’s handling of the Clinton email scandal investigation, there might even be a greater danger of congressmen joining hands to slap the all-powerful “bipartisan” label on this effort and push it forward in the name of “transparency.”

While the narrative of police disproportionately and indiscriminately gunning down unarmed black men is a popular one — and individual incidents generate easy, eye-grabbing headlines for media outlets — the statistics currently available would say otherwise.

A 2015 Washington Post study of police shootings — one of the newspaper pieces that Comey disparaged in the hearing — revealed that incidents of white law enforcement officers shooting unarmed black men accounted for less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Furthermore, multiple criminology studies have found that police were actually more hesitant to shoot black suspects who posed a credible threat (versus white suspects).

Giving the FBI and Department of Justice a federally-mandated periscope to look over the shoulder of every beat cop in the country will likely only exacerbate the phenomenon and put more police lives in danger by forcing them to second-guess themselves every time a suspect poses a credible threat.

While this might be an adequate diagnosis of the problem that popular racial policing narrative is, at best, poorly-informed, Comey’s solution is just another means of contributing to the Obama administration’s years-long efforts to centralize everyday policing in the United States.

Past proposals include the president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and the host of grants that serve as dangling carrots for local law enforcement to hand over more authority to the feds in exchange for funds.

Contrary to the “Hope and Change” narrative that the president sold voters, the Obama years have seen an unquestionable resurgence in racial tension in the United States. And this tension has been used as excuse at nearly every single instance as a vehicle to increase federal oversight and control over law enforcement — which, by nature, should be a local undertaking.

While James Comey’s FBI database may seem like a benign solution to questions about racial impetus in police shootings, it has to be viewed as part of a greater pattern to increase the DOJ’s presence over local law enforcement. (For more from the author of “James Comey Promises FBI Database to Track Race-Based Police Activity” please click HERE)

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GOP Lawmakers Pressure Administration Over Obamacare ‘Bailout’ for Insurers

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GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate are pressuring the Obama administration for additional information on whether it plans to settle with insurance companies suing the government over a program written into Obamacare, which they warn would serve as a “multibillion dollar bailout” of those insurers.

Republicans in the House and Senate sent separate letters to top officials with the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services raising concerns over the possibility of the Justice Department tapping into the Judgment Fund to settle lawsuits filed by insurance companies over Obamacare’s risk corridor program.

The risk corridor program was written into the Affordable Care Act and designed to provide insurers with stability during the first few years of the law’s implementation.

“This program was originally intended to be implemented in a budget neutral manner,” Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska wrote in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, and Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt.

“This intention was confirmed when Congress passed, with presidential approval, two separate provisions of appropriations law confirming its budget neutrality,” the letter continued. “It now appears the administration is preparing to circumvent these actions.”

The Republican senators said they have “grave concerns” about the potential for settlements with insurers.

Insurance companies filed lawsuits earlier this year after learning they would receive a small fraction of the money requested from the risk corridor program.

But Rubio and Senate Republicans included an amendment in 2015 and 2016 government spending bills prohibiting the government from using any taxpayer dollars to fund payments requested by insurers through the program. Under Rubio’s provision, the federal government could only use money collected from insurers to make those payments.

Because of those restrictions, insurance companies participating in Obamacare’s exchanges received just 12.6 percent of the money they intended to get from the risk corridor program—a collective $2.5 billion less than originally anticipated.

Many smaller insurers, including at least four of 23 consumer operated and oriented plans, ended up closing their doors because of lower-than-expected risk corridor payments.

Congressional Republicans began to sound the alarm over use of the Judgment Fund after insurers filed the lawsuit. Settling with insurers, they warned, would give the White House a way to provide the companies with their full risk corridor payments, effectively circumventing Congress.

“Any attempt to settle these cases out of court as a backdoor way to direct taxpayer dollars to insurance companies through the Judgment Fund will be met with the strictest scrutiny from Congress,” more than 40 GOP lawmakers wrote in one of the letters, sent to Burwell last week.

The Republicans go on to signal they would be willing to file their own lawsuit against the administration.

“Should the administration seek to make settlements in any pending lawsuit regarding risk corridor payments, we remain committed to exhausting all legislative and judicial options to ensure the power of the purse vested in Congress under the Constitution is respected and maintained,” the letter continues.

Republicans further stepped up their pressure on the Obama administration regarding potential use of the Judgment Fund following the release of a Sept. 9 memo from the Department of Health and Human Services on risk corridor payments for the 2015 benefit year.

In its memo, the agency addressed the lawsuit filed by insurers over the risk corridor payments for 2014 and said it would be “open to discussing resolution of those claims.”

Then, in a hearing before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee earlier this month, Slavitt indicated officials from his agency had discussed with the Justice Department a potential settlement with insurers over the risk corridor program.

Nicole Navas, spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the agency declines to comment because of pending litigation.

Health Republic Insurance of Oregon, a co-op, filed the first lawsuit against the Obama administration over the risk corridor program in February. The nonprofit is seeking class-action status.

Highmark Inc. and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina followed, filing their own individual lawsuits in May and June, respectively.

The insurers allege that the federal government violated the Affordable Care Act and the risk corridor payment obligations outlined in the health care law.

Though the Obama administration has signaled it would be willing to use the Judgment Fund to settle insurers lawsuits against the government, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service issued two separate memorandums to Rubio and Barrasso on the legality of the use of the Judgment Fund.

In a memo sent to Rubio in January, the Congressional Research Service said the administration wouldn’t be able to use the Judgment Fund to award payments to insurers who filed suit.

Congress, the memo concluded, would have to appropriate additional funds for “any payment to satisfy a judgment secured by plaintiffs seeking recovery of amounts owed under the risk corridors program.”

In a separate memo to Barrasso, the Congressional Research Service said that even if the insurance companies won their case, either insurers would need to pay additional money into the risk corridor program or Congress would need to appropriate additional money for companies involved in the litigation to recover additional funds.

“Consequently, it would be inappropriate for the Judgment Fund to be used to settle any litigation stemming from the risk corridor program,” the letter from Barrasso, Lee, Rubio, and Sasse continues. (For more from the author of “GOP Lawmakers Pressure Administration Over Obamacare ‘Bailout’ for Insurers” please click HERE)

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3 Reasons New Flint Spending Will Make Things Worse

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Liberal lawmakers held a liberal spending bill hostage this week until the Republican-controlled Congress agreed to even more big government priorities.

Here’s what happened: For the past few weeks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., worked with Democrats to propose a 10-week government funding bill, commonly referred to as a continuing resolution.

That bill failed to include countless conservative priorities. It failed to keep spending levels within the reasonable levels set by the Budget Control Act. It failed to protect life by opening the door for more taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood. And it failed to do anything positive through the addition of conservative policy riders like stopping the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers transfer in the interest of protecting internet freedom, requiring a more stringent vetting process for refugees, or blocking the Labor Department’s new overtime rule.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his fellow Senate Democrats defeated a key procedural vote on this continuing resolution because it was not liberal enough—it did not include federal taxpayer money for the water problems in the city of Flint, Michigan.

With government funding set to expire at midnight Friday, House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed to add $170 million in federal aid for Flint’s water issues in a water infrastructure bill that was under consideration in the House.

There are three major problems with the Flint spending bill:

1. It uses federal tax dollars for something that should be appropriated at the state level.

2. It authorizes federal dollars at a time when the nation is nearly $20 trillion in debt.

3. It sets the precedent of allowing liberal lawmakers to take bad spending bills hostage until they receive even more.

State, Not Federal Funding

State, not federal, funds and resources should be used to solve Flint’s crisis. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, made this point repeatedly when objecting to the inclusion of Flint spending in an earlier version of the Senate version of the Water Resources Development Act, speaking to The Daily Signal:

If we create a precedent that suggests any time there’s a significant problem with a locally operated utility that operates entirely intrastate, I would ask, where’s the stopping point? What’s the limit?

Unnecessarily Additions to National Debt

America’s spending is out of control. Every penny counts when our nation is nearly $20 trillion in debt. Earlier this year President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency for Flint, authorizing more than $80 million in aid to help in the cleanup effort.

There are additional funds built into the state budget to help provide for local clean up and rehabilitation. Flint has already squandered federal funding sources, as The Daily Signal reported earlier this year: “Michigan has squirreled away $386 million in an emergency fund and collected a $575 million surplus in 2015. Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has already requested $200 million in relief funds from the state legislature for Flint.”

Bad Precedent for Capitulation

After Senate Democrats blocked the liberal continuing resolution, the Republican-controlled Congress could have moved forward with a conservative bill. Instead, Republican leaders looked at Reid, Pelosi, and Obama and asked which additional bad funding provisions should be added.

If these lawmakers won’t stand up for the principles of their constituents before an election, we shouldn’t expect them to in a post-election lame-duck session, either. (For more from the author of “3 Reasons New Flint Spending Will Make Things Worse” please click HERE)

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Why This Virginia Tech Student Went on a Hunger Strike for Gun Rights

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A Virginia Tech student, currently on a hunger strike advocating for the allowance of concealed weapons on campus, wants the right of self-defense abided by on his college campus.

“I am advocating for Virginia concealed gun permit holders to be able to carry concealed on campus and in buildings and in the classrooms,” Ryan James Martin, a fifth-year senior studying English and biological sciences at the Virginia university, told The Daily Signal in a phone conversation. “The hunger strike aspect of it was really designed to call attention to the issue.”

Martin, 22, started his hunger strike Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. and plans to carry the strike through Friday, Sept. 30, at the conclusion of University President Timothy Sands’ first State of the University Address set to start at 3 p.m. Eastern time.

The Virginia Tech campus is a gun-free zone.

Martin, a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Virginia, said that on his campus no one is allowed to carry Nerf guns or even pepper spray.

“The only legal weapon we’re really allowed to have is a less than four-inch pocket knife and our fists,” he said.

Martin said he has graduated from Virginia Tech’s student police academy, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office’s citizen’s police academy, and is currently in the Blacksburg Police Department’s citizens police academy program.

“Just because I have a gun on me does not make me an evil assailant,” Martin said.

“Just because I have a gun on me does not make me an evil assailant.” —Ryan James Martin, a Virginia Tech student

Martin said he has had his concealed carry permit for a little over a year and said he has passed state and federal background checks multiple times and is also a firearms instructor.

“I take [students] to our local firearm range free of charge and teach them how to shoot safely and effectively,” Martin said.

Martin said that in January he requested a meeting with Sands, the university president, and the university’s Board of Visitors to discuss concealed carry on campus. The meeting was never granted, he said.

Martin sent an email on Sept. 23 to Sands, college deans, community leaders, and local media explaining the hunger strike.

“Our campus is not immune to the ever-increasing acts of violence and terror that happen every day,” Martin wrote in the email to The Daily Signal. “We should know best—it has been 3,447 days since we inherited the title of deadliest college campus in the nation, yet students are still forbidden from even carrying pepper spray as per university regulation.” His email added:

Further, I will be on the steps of Burruss Hall every morning, and every other chance I am able next week, to read aloud the Constitution and Bill of Rights which seem to be ignored on my campus.

“Virginia Tech respects any student’s right to civil protest, provided that person abides by our Principles of Community and incurs no harm to self or others,” Mark Owczarski, assistant vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, wrote in an email to The Daily Signal.

The university did not comment as to why Sands and the Board of Visitors did not meet with Martin.

In April 2007, 32 students and staff were killed by a gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia.

“What we saw on April 16, 2007, almost 10 years ago, is that 32 students and faculty members were killed, many others shot while they waited for a little over 10 minutes for law enforcement to arrive and the threat was neutralized,” Martin said.

“I truly believe that if one of those individuals had legally possessed a concealed firearm, we’d have less than 32 memorial stones on the Drillfield today,” he said, adding:

I’ve been called many names for claiming that, but in all honestly we’ll never know because they weren’t allowed self-defense that day and we saw what happened. It’s a tough issue. It is sensitive, but we need to talk about it. We need to find some solutions to the problems we face as a campus of 30,000 students.

In Virginia, along with 22 other states, a college or university makes the decision whether to ban or allow concealed carry on campus, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Eight states—Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin—have provisions allowing concealed weapons to be carried by students on public higher education campuses.

To obtain a concealed carry handgun permit in Virginia, a person must be 21 years of age or older or a member of the military.

Employees, students, volunteers, and visitors at Virginia Tech “reported or discovered to possess a firearm or weapon on university property will be asked to remove it immediately,” the university’s policy on weapons states. “Failure to comply may result in a student conduct referral and/or arrest, or an employee disciplinary action and/or arrest.”

Exemptions from the policy include certified and sworn police officers or when participating in programs sponsored by the on-campus police department such as the police academy.

This week, Martin said he has limited his hunger strike diet to consist of liquid intake and regular medicine and multivitamins.

Over 34 hours into his strike, “at this point, I’m surprisingly not even hungry,” Martin told The Daily Signal Tuesday morning.

Martin said he possibly will strike longer than Friday if Sands does not contact him, but already considers the hunger strike a success because he’s “got the conversation on campus going.” (For more from the author of “Why This Virginia Tech Student Went on a Hunger Strike for Gun Rights” please click HERE)

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Police Chopper Catches UFO on Thermal Camera

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South Wales police are still scratching their heads over the UFO that appeared on one of their cameras last Saturday, reports the Daily Mail in Britain.

Officers flying in a helicopter across the Bristol Channel around 9:30 p.m. local time became aware of the mystery object when it showed up on the aircraft’s thermal camera. It was not visible to the eye, nor did air-traffic control detect the unidentified object.

The helicopter’s altitude at the time was 1,000 feet.

“It’s difficult to judge the size but we filmed it for just over seven minutes,” the police tweeted, while requesting suggestions from the public as to the object’s identity.

Some have suggested the UFO is a Chinese lantern or balloon, but those ideas have been rejected since the object was flying against the wind. (Read more from “Police Chopper Catches UFO on Thermal Camera” HERE)

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