Wikileaks: Of Course CNN and the DNC Were Colluding on Questions for Republicans

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If there is one thing that has been laid completely bare for the world to see, it is the fact that the mainstream media and the Democratic Party are in lock step and collude on coverage. Any claim to objectivity the media have has gone completely out the window. The latest evidence was released last night by WikiLeaks. In the second DNC email dump of the campaign, it was shown that CNN was asking the DNC for questions to ask at least two GOP presidential candidates during interviews. The DNC of course was all too happy to join in.

In an email on April 28, 2016, the DNC research director Lauren Dillon asked her staff to compile questions for CNN to ask Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 90%). In the email, Dillon makes it clear that CNN was asking for help. The email stated, “CNN is looking for questions.”

Phil Kerpen uncovered the email with questions that was sent back to Dillon and presumably forwarded to CNN.

Questions for Cruz included one on North Carolina’s HB2 Bathroom bill and whether Cruz only came to D.C. to run for president.

The questions of Cruz weren’t the only ones that were requested for CNN. Earlier in the week, the DNC was compiling questions for Wolf Blitzer to ask Donald Trump. The questions were for an interview with Wolf Blitzer that was later cancelled.

Earlier emails released by WikiLeaks from John Podesta’s Gmail account showed that Donna Brazile was given CNN debate questions ahead of time, which she shared with the Clinton campaign. This happened on at least two occasions and caused CNN to terminate its relationship with Brazile.

Conservatives have long called CNN the “Clinton News Network.” The revelations of internal communications at the DNC and from Podesta’s emails show that they have every reason to give the network that moniker.

It isn’t only CNN. WikiLeaks has shown that CNBC’s John Harwood asked Podesta on September 21, 2015, “What should I ask Jeb …” The Daily Caller explains how the Bush interview then went down.

On Sept. 25, Harwood sat down for a 10 question interview with Bush.

It’s not yet known if Podesta responded to Harwood’s question.

In other leaked emails Harwood praised Hillary Clinton and Podesta. Harwood also referred to President Barack Obama as “the black guy.”

WikiLeaks has also exposed that Politico’s Glenn Thrush sent stories to Podesta for sign off. The Boston Globe worked with the Clinton campaign for an op-ed placement to best serve the needs of the campaign. That episode has led to a Massachusetts political activist Steve Aylward to file an FEC complaint against The Globe.

No matter who wins the election tomorrow, it is now clear that the media are a propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee — something conservatives have suspected for a while but is now confirmed by internal communications.

CNN, ABC, CNBC, Politico, and others need to come clean about their true relationships with the Democratic Party and its politicians. If they don’t, the American people will continue to lose trust in them. (For more from the author of “Wikileaks: Of Course CNN and the DNC Were Colluding on Questions for Republicans” please click HERE)

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2 GOP Senators Advocate Post-Election Vote on Supreme Court Nominee

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Two Republican senators are breaking ranks with GOP leadership over the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s stalled Supreme Court nominee.

Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., predicted that Merrick Garland would be confirmed by the Senate during the lame-duck session of Congress. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., has also advocated for action on Garland’s nomination in the post-election session.

“My prediction is this: If Hillary Clinton wins next Tuesday, Garland will be confirmed before January,” Isakson said Friday, according to The Huffington Post.

Isakson said he believes Garland would be a better alternative than potential Clinton nominees.

“He’s probably a lot more conservative than anybody she would appoint. If Donald Trump wins, there probably won’t be a confirmation of Merrick Garland,” Isakson said.

Garland, who currently is the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was appointed by Obama in March to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.

Isakson’s comments clash with statements made by fellow Republican senators, including GOP leaders who have ruled out confirmation during the lame-duck session.

“We’ve already made it very clear that a nomination for the Supreme Court by this president will not be filled this year,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in September.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn was even more blunt when asked by CNN about possibility: “No.”

In recent weeks, several Republican senators have suggested blocking Clinton’s nominees if she is elected president.

“I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., according to a recording obtained by CNN.

At a Colorado rally in October, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told reporters that there is a historical precedent for the court operating with fewer than nine members.

“I think there will be plenty of time for debate on that issue,” Cruz said. “ … I would note, just recently, that Justice [Stephen] Breyer observed that the vacancy is not impacting the ability of the court to do its job. That’s a debate that we are going to have.”

Breyer, a Supreme Court justice appointed by President Bill Clinton, told MSNBC in October, “The court, when it began at the time of the Constitution’s writing, had six members. They had six members for several years. They had 10 members for several years after the Civil War. They functioned with an even number of members.”

Meanwhile, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, have been upfront about their intention to block potential Clinton court nominees.

During a radio interview in October, McCain said that Senate Republican leadership would “be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.”

Similarly, Lee has said he believes there would be little difference between Garland and a potential Clinton nominee.

“As a former law clerk … I don’t believe there would be a real substantive distinction, a real noticeable difference between the voting pattern of a justice who would be appointed by a President Hillary Clinton … and Merrick Garland,” Lee told reporters in October.

Until Friday’s statement from Isakson, Flake was a lone voice advocating for lame-duck confirmation of Garland.

“I think the principle ought to be for Republicans to confirm the most conservative jurist that we’re able to confirm,” Flake told CNN’s Jake Tapper in September. “And if we do lose the election, then we ought to move swiftly, I think, to confirm Merrick Garland.”

Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, said that supporting Garland would be detrimental to conservative values.

“Garland would provide the fifth vote to undermine First Amendment free speech and freedom of religion, to gut the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and to invite unelected agency bureaucrats, like those at the EPA, to micromanage every aspect of American life,” Severino told The Daily Signal in an email.

Ilya Shapiro, a fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told The Daily Signal via email that it the distinction between a “moderate” and a “radical’ Supreme Court justice nominated by a Democrat president is not great.

“Justices appointed by Democratic presidents vote together north of 95 percent [of the time] on they key controversies that split the Court,” Shapiro said. “In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether the next nominee is a ‘moderate’ or ‘radical’ progressive. Moreover, on the issues that produce a heterodox split — typically the left/right ‘principled’ against the centrist ‘pragmatic’–a more [left-wing] nominee might be better. For example, Judge Garland inevitably defers to government interests in law enforcement cases, which Justice Scalia assuredly did not.”

Writing for National Review last week, Heritage Foundation experts James Wallner and John Malcolm argued that senators shouldn’t rubber-stamp a president’s judicial nominees.

“To preserve our cherished liberties and our constitutional system of government, both the executive and the legislative branches must engage in robust give and take about the kinds of men and women who ought to be confirmed to life-tenured positions in the judicial branch,” they wrote. “And senators have a sworn obligation to reject nominees who, they believe, would fail to uphold the Constitution.” (For more from the author of “2 GOP Senators Advocate Post-Election Vote on Supreme Court Nominee” please click HERE)

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Obama’s 7 Biggest Foreign Policy Mistakes

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How will history judge the national security and foreign policy of President Barack Obama? From the Iran deal to the Russian reset, the world is not a better or safer place after Obama’s eight-year tenure.

(For more from the author of “Obama’s 7 Biggest Foreign Policy Mistakes” please click HERE)

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On Election Day, ‘We the People’ Tell the Government What to Do

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In urging the delegates to a New York convention to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1788, Alexander Hamilton emphasized the principal strength of the new Constitution: “Here, sir, the people govern.”

The federal government gets its mandate from the American people. You are in charge. Express your will: vote.

You help govern your country through the exercise of your right to vote. As the U.S. Supreme Court has said: “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live.”

When he first became president in 1885, Grover Cleveland stressed in his inaugural address the public trust held by every voter:

He who takes the oath today to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States only assumes the solemn obligation which every patriotic citizen—on the farm, in the workshop, in the busy marts of trade, and everywhere—should share with him. The Constitution which prescribes his oath, my countrymen, is yours; the government you have chosen him to administer for a time is yours; the suffrage which executes the will of freemen is yours; the laws and the entire scheme of our civil rule, from the town meeting to the state capitals and the national capital, is yours. Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, under the same high sanction, though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust.

In his farewell address to the American people in 1989, President Ronald Reagan echoed the words of Cleveland a century earlier, emphasizing that the American people remain in charge of their government:

Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us.

On behalf of your fellow citizens, we ask you to choose carefully in deciding upon the representatives, senators, president, and state and local officials who will make our laws. Your choice, along with the choices of your fellow citizens, will determine what America is to become. You, your fellow citizens, and future generations will live in the America you choose.

Conservatives will do tomorrow and the next day exactly what we did yesterday and the day before: We will continue to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

We know our principles and we adhere to them. That is our public trust. The American people can count on us, just as we count on the American people.

God bless the United States of America and its people. Now, go vote. (For more from the author of “On Election Day, ‘We the People’ Tell the Government What to Do” please click HERE)

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Was It a Sin to Vote for Lisa Murkowski?

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I consider the killing of more than 50 million innocent children via abortion to be the moral crisis of this age.

It is a scourge on our supposedly enlightened society. It is a blight on our humanity. It has corrupted the soul of our nation. It has proven how little regard we have for our own legacy as a people, when we’re willing to so cavalierly dispose of our only renewable resources — our own children.

For these reasons I won’t vote for a candidate that isn’t pro-life — regardless of party or who their opponent is—- for dog catcher let alone a more meaningful office. For where someone stands on the life issue isn’t just a litmus test but a window to the soul. If someone is willing to compromise or worse on something as sacred as life, then they can’t be counted on to be stewards of our less sacred resources, either.

What then, if you believe as I do that abortion is the murder of an innocent child and an abominable violation against the designs of heaven, should you do when you walk into your polling place on Tuesday?

Randall Terry is the original founder of Operation Rescue, which is one of the pioneer organizations in the pro-life movement. And he doesn’t pull any punches. In fact, he has been driving a bus around the southeast to various campaign events for the last two weeks with this main message emblazoned across the side:

It is a sin to vote for Hillary.

Large pictures of aborted babies also cover the side of the bus, as does the command to “not play the whore with your vote. If you vote for Hillary, you share in the guilt of her sins. Do not raise the anger of God by helping Hillary shed innocent blood.”

I recently interviewed Terry, and he said that message is intended for the 55 percent of Catholics and 33 percent of evangelicals who “betrayed Jesus Christ” in the last election by voting for the pro-killing Barack Obama. Not only is that unacceptable, he says, but a preposterous moral equivocation that ultimately leads to a spiritual death sentence for the one making such a wicked compromise.

It doesn’t matter what else you think Hillary will accomplish as president if she promises to accelerate the baby killing. Imagine, as Terry says, that somebody asks you to give them a ride so that they can run some errands. First they ask you to go to the grocery store, then to the pharmacy, and last to the bank. And oh, by the way, the stop at the bank will include a hold up complete with an execution style murder.

That’s what you are an accomplice to, says Terry, if you vote for Hillary. The relative innocence of the other stops along the way, or the other political issues du jour, are non-sequiturs by comparison.

“There are some sins that are higher than others,” Terry said. “There is a hierarchy of evil. And Christians who keep voting in support of abortion have the brazen face of a harlot. They are committed to their path of sin. There is a motive skewing their ethical compass.”

So if one accepts the fundamentals of such a moral economy, then the question becomes what to do next. In Terry’s case, he is supporting Donald Trump, saying that “he says he will make it a crime to kill an unborn baby. He’s the only one (in the GOP primary) who has said that and I believe him, and I know that I believe Hillary is proven to be a maniacal supporter of abortion.”

Note that Trump almost immediately took back his claim that abortion should be considered a criminal offense, like he is prone to do on almost every position he’s taken throughout this campaign. But just as Hillary’s sins don’t absolve Trump from his, neither do his absolve hers. Hillary does little to hide her zeal for baby-killing, nor her admiration for macabre Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

A pro-life leader I admire, Dr. Laurence White in Houston, has long said this about the infanticide holocaust we have permitted to occur on our watch:

The killing won’t stop until the church makes it stop, and not a moment sooner.

In his own, provocative way, Terry seems to be channeling a similar sentiment. “It is necessary for us to speak as harshly as God sometimes does in order to wake people up,” he adds.

This is on us when we affirmatively vote for those who enable and/or champion this rampage, which is why Terry believes it is a sin to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Whether or not you agree, I know this for sure. No matter who we vote for, if we have decided that Planned Parenthood’s freezer bags full of dismembered baby parts for sale are not really our concern, then we are doing it all wrong. (For more from the author of “Is It a Sin to Vote for Hillary Clinton?” please click HERE)

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This Is Your Chance to Shape the Alaska Supreme Court

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In addition to the high profile contests on Nov. 8, your Alaska ballot will list Alaska judges up for retention by a “yes” or “no” vote. Judges are not selected by the people or their elected representatives, so the only place democracy intrudes on the judiciary and their decisions is the retention election.

This year two Alaska Supreme Court justices, Joel Bolger and Peter Maasan, are on the ballot. Earlier this year Bolger and Maasan voted to strike down, as unconstitutional, a law providing for parental notification for a minor’s abortion enacted as an initiative by the people in 2010 with 90,000 Alaskan voters approving the initiative, a 56% majority.

In 2007 the same court struck down a parental consent law enacted by the people’s representatives, the Alaska Legislature. In doing so, the court stated multiple times, in clear and unmistakable language, that a notification law would be constitutional. Nine years later, after the public relied on their word, in a classic “bait and switch,” the court brushed aside its own previous decision and struck down the very law they said would be constitutional.

There are lessons to be learned from this blatant dishonesty. Both the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions created a democratic republican form of government, not a judicial oligarchy. Separation of powers is a critical element in each constitution, but the democratic nature of government is fundamental. The Alaska court has repeatedly violated this principle by freely striking down laws as unconstitutional, without any basis in law or history, deciding for themselves questions of society that only society has the right to decide. In his first inaugural address, President Lincoln commented on Dred Scott vs. Sanford, the ruling that held blacks had no rights and were mere property. “. . . [I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, in the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Abortion is clearly a subject that the judiciary will not allow the people to decide, even when the people in good faith follow the express directives of the court. Currently before the court is a case on a statute banning public funds for elective abortions. In a previous decision requiring state funding for medically necessary abortions, the court clearly stated that the State of Alaska is not required to fund elective abortions. As with parental notification, the law now before the court was tailored to meet that decision. Given this latest reversal we can expect the same for publicly paid abortions.

There is another principle that governs court decisions and its ideologically driven abortion rulings: Lex muista non est lex (Latin: An unjust law is no law at all). This standard legal maxim was originated by Saint Augustine, used by Saint Thomas Aquinas, and, more recently, by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights movement to describe legal racial segregation and discrimination against black people. It is applicable to the decisions of the Alaska Supreme Court as well.

The people have very limited ability to object to judicial power and decisions. The retention elections are the only way the Alaska Constitution provides. Take the time to think about the role of the judiciary and the moral nature of their decisions. The retention elections of Joel Bolger and Peter Maasan are the opportunity to express your approval or disapproval of judicial behavior. (For more from the author of “This Is Your Chance to Shape the Alaska Supreme Court” please click HERE)

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Report: Hillary Had Maid Illegally Handle Classified Information

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News broke Sunday morning that Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton illegally tasked her maid, who lacked proper security clearance, with printing and handling classified information at Clinton’s residence in Washington, D.C.

According to various emails and FBI memos obtained by the New York Post, Marina Santos, was also given illegally access to a high security room in Clinton’s house that is known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF.

The New York Post reports:

Clinton would first receive highly sensitive e-mails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at home.

The claim is backed up by several emails, including one from 2011 in which Clinton asked longtime aide Huma Abedin to “Pls ask Marina to print for me in am.” The Post does note that this email was sensitive but unclassified.

In a classified email from 2012, another one of Clinton’s aides told Clinton, “We can ask Marina to print this.” Another 2012 email read, “Marina is trying to print for you.” Santos would also grab documents for Clinton from the secure fax in the SCIF.

According to the Department of Defense, access to SCIF areas is limited to people with appropriate security clearances. As a former Air Force intelligence official told The Stream, “People without SCI clearances are not allowed in a SCIF without an escort by someone who has an SCI clearance and No Way are they allowed access to a fax.” In fact, all classified materials must be removed from view before the person enters. Clearly, such security procedures were not followed in this case.

The revelation brings even more evidence of what FBI Director James Comey referred to back in July as Clinton’s “extreme carelessness” of handling classified information, putting national security at risk. Some have expressed concern that the FBI has not subpoenaed Santos, a Filipino immigrant, or the iMac and printer she used — or even the printouts themselves.

The news came hours before FBI Director James Comey told Congress in another letter that despite reopening their investigation into Clinton’s emails last week, the Bureau has “not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.” The agency said that the 650,000 emails found on a senior Clinton aide’s husband’s computer were either unrelated to the prior investigation or had already been looked into.

Daily Mail reports that “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump blasted the arrangement on Sunday morning, telling a Sioux City, Iowa crowd that Clinton was ‘completely jeopardizing the national security of the United States.’” (For more from the author of “Report: Hillary Had Maid Illegally Handle Classified Information” please click HERE)

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Factoring Israel Into Your Voting Decision

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God certainly has his ways of getting our attention, and He got my attention this past Saturday night when I was speaking at a pre-election conference at a church in Lakeland, Florida.

The pastor and his wife have three small children, the middle one being a boy named Israel, just three years old.

His grandmother, the pastor’s mother-in-law, was babysitting for him and his sister at the pastor’s house, when suddenly, to her shock, the boy was nowhere to be found. She tried calling her son-in-law and daughter, who were at the church service, finally reaching them on the fourth try.

“Israel is missing!” she exclaimed, as they jumped in their car to head home, calling 911 on the way.

At this time, the night service was now over, and I was waiting for the pastor to drive me back to the hotel, but he had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. That’s when a church worker came up to me and said, “I’ll be driving you back,” explaining to me that the pastor had received a message that “Israel is missing.”

Thankfully, by then, he had been found, asleep in his own bed. Apparently, he had wandered somewhere else in the house, falling asleep in a closet or in the garage, somehow evading his frantically searching grandmother, only to find his way back to his bed and to a quiet night’s sleep.

But those words “Israel is missing” kept ringing in my ears, and when I woke up Sunday morning, reflecting on whether I should speak on Israel and the elections, there was an Amber Alert on my phone for a missing child in the area (obviously, not for little Israel, but the coincidence of the moment was not to be missed).

This certainly got my attention.

But given the importance of America’s relationship with Israel, I didn’t need any kind of special sign to focus on the subject, since I honestly believe that God judges nations, in part, based on how they treat Israel.

Now, before you write me off as some kind of hyper-spiritual, Zionist nut case, let me explain what I do and do not mean. (For those of you who don’t believe the Bible is God’s Word, then I’m already a hyper-spiritual nut case in your eyes. No problem!)

First, standing with Israel does not mean standing against the Palestinians or sanctioning everything Israel does.

Second, if a country stands with Israel, that does not give that country some kind of magic pass because of which God will overlook all their transgressions.

Third, we stand with Israel despite Israel’s shortcomings, not because Israel is perfect (far from it).

That being said, I believe the ancient principle spoken first to Abraham, then to his grandson Jacob, then to the nation of Israel as a whole, still applies today, namely, that God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse Israel (see Genesis 12:3; 27:29; Numbers 24:9).

How has this worked out historically?

In Jeremiah 30:11, the Lord said to Israel,

For I am with you to save you, declares the LORD; I will make a full end of all the nations among whom I scattered you, but of you I will not make a full end. I will discipline you in just measure, and I will by no means leave you unpunished.

Looking back, we can see that Assyria and Babylon, the mighty empires that exiled Israel and Judah in the 8th and 6th centuries, ceased to exist in the centuries that followed, while the nation of Germany suffered horrific defeat in war and was divided for decades after the Holocaust.

Are these just coincidences? I think not.

Derek Prince, an Oxford-trained, British Bible teacher (1915-2003), noted many years ago that, “Britain emerged victorious from two World Wars, retaining intact an empire that was perhaps the most extensive in human history. But in 1947–8, as the mandatory power over Palestine, Britain opposed and attempted to thwart the rebirth of Israel as a sovereign nation with her own state.” (At that time, Prince was living in Jerusalem, and so he spoke “as an eyewitness of what actually took place.”)

In his words,

From that very moment in history, Britain’s empire underwent a process of decline and disintegration so rapid and total that it cannot be accounted for merely by the relevant political, military or economic factors. Today, less than a generation later, Britain — like Spain — is a struggling, second-rate power.

It’s for you to decide whether you believe any of this, but in my humble opinion, even though America helps Israel every year with billions of dollars of military aid, I believe America needs Israel more than Israel needs America.

And since the Republican platform is much stronger on Israel than is the Democratic platform (this seems to reflect the views of Trump-Pence vs. Clinton-Kaine as well), that’s another strong reason I will vote for Trump-Pence on Tuesday, despite Mr. Trump’s many obvious and serious flaws. (For more from the author of “Factoring Israel Into Your Voting Decision” please click HERE)

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Trump Makes Final Plea for Catholic Votes

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is making a final pitch for Catholic support in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

“From marching for civil rights to educating millions of children, serving the poor and helping define the pro-life movement, clergy and lay Catholics across the country have made countless contributions to the American success and the American success story,” said Trump, who discussed Christianity, his comments about women and other issues with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo last month.

Describing as many in Washington as “hostile” to Catholics and “to members of Catholicism,” Trump said that his administration “will stand side by side with American Catholics” for values they hold as “Christians and Americans.”

Recent polls show radically different levels of support for Trump and his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among Catholics. One tracking poll says Trump is ahead by 13 points, while another poll says Clinton has an 11-point margin among the faithful.

Support for Trump among Catholics has been more complicated than for past GOP presidential nominees. Typically, practicing socially conservative Catholics back the GOP nominee while liberal and less-practicing Catholics go for Democrats. This year, many practicing Catholics are concerned about whether Trump’s recent conversion on the issue of abortion is genuine, though most appear to be standing with him against the openly pro-abortion Clinton. Clinton, for her part, has said she will repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prevents most taxpayer funding of abortion, and has campaign staffers who have attempted to subvert the U.S. Church.

Both Clinton and Trump have been criticized by clergy for their proposed policies and some rhetoric on the campaign trail. Clinton’s campaign manager and Vice President nominee are both Catholic, though running mate Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) has said he supports women ordination and changing the Church’s teachings on homosexual relationships. (For more from the author of “Trump Makes Final Plea for Catholic Votes” please click HERE)

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All Politics Is Local: Why Down-Ballot Races Can Be Far More Important Than National

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This weekend, do not neglect to research candidates for local office in your community. For in many ways, the people who serve in your local government will have more influence on your everyday life than those in the federal government.

That is the way our constitutional republic was designed.

In the minds of America’s founders, the powers of the federal government were intended to be limited, while the state and local governments were intended to bear the brunt of government work.

As James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, explained in Federalist 45:

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Essentially, the role of the federal government, as intended by the Founding Founders, was limited in scope to national security, international trade, the maintenance of peaceable relations between the states, and the power to lay taxes to pay for those responsibilities.

The real action of government was meant to take place at the local level. Madison continues: “The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

This principle of separating the powers of the national and local governments, which we call federalism, is the key to having good and safe government. As Thomas Jefferson wrote:

[T]he way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.

The national government has unquestionably exceeded those bounds today. And while its all-encompassing power may seem to make state and local governments less relevant, there are important battles being fought in governors’ mansions, the state legislatures, and town halls of America.

On the issues conservatives care about, it has been state governments, not the federal government, where we have achieved some victories.

The federal government has refused to defund Planned Parenthood. Several states have taken action to do so, ending government aid to an organization that kills babies for profit.

In North Carolina, where most of the media attention is focused on the presidential race, Governor Pat McCrory (R) has held the line against the Left’s radical bathroom-bill demands. He is an extremely tight race with Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, who champions the Left’s radical gender-identity agenda.

Are your candidates for local and state office going to be willing to fight these fights?

Who is running for mayor in your town? City council? Supervisor? State senator, representative, or judge? Do you know the members of your local school board — those that make daily decisions about the welfare of your child? Are you aware of who runs your police department? Have they pledged to improve relations between the police and your community, for the safety and happiness of all?

If you don’t have the answer to these questions, take some time this weekend and educate yourself on the entirety of your ballot.

For the best government is that which governs closest to the people. And it is within your power as a voter to ensure that the government closest to you, in your community, is good government. (For more from the author of “All Politics Is Local: Why Down-Ballot Races Can Be Far More Important Than National” please click HERE)

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