The Electoral College Chooses Trump. But Don’t Expect the Malcontents to Surrender

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In the end, the malcontents failed to stump Donald Trump.

Despite a campaign drive from the Left, threats of violence and death against Republican electors, protests, and cheesy celebrity videos, Donald Trump was officially elected the 45th president of the United States Monday, earning the 270 Electoral College votes he needed, and then some.

The proceedings were not without its drama. In Wisconsin, for example, protesters interrupted the electors as they met in the state capitol.

“We’re all going to go to war and die because of you people!” one protester exclaimed, as Wisconsin’s 10 electors tallied their votes for President-elect Trump.

Cries of “shame” from the Left were not enough, as the electors kept their commitment to the voters in their respective states. In North Carolina, for instance, the electors blew past protesters singing a loud chorus of “God Bless America.”

Some raised concerns that Republican electors could defect and become “faithless” electors by refusing to vote for Donald Trump. Leading the effort was dissenting Republican, Christopher Suprun of Texas, who announced his refusal to vote for Trump in a recent op-ed in The New York Times and declared his intention to cast his ballot for Ohio Governor John Kasich. That effort proved fruitless.

Suprun was joined in dissent by a few Democrats who refused to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton. Per AJC.com, as of 3:49 p.m. ET “four Democratic voters in Washington chose not to vote for Hillary Clinton, becoming ‘faithless’ voters. Clinton took the other 8 votes in the state. Three Democratic electors have tried to be ‘faithless’ by not voting for Clinton. One in Maine, one in Minnesota and one in Colorado. Those votes were changed and registered for Clinton.”

One noteworthy Maine Democratic elector, David Bright, declared in a Facebook post that he would cast his ballot for Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt. (F, 17%). “I am not a Clinton elector, I am a Democratic elector. I do not represent Democrats all over the country, I represent the Democrats in Maine,” Bright wrote, explaining that if his vote could have helped Clinton win, he would have cast it for his party’s nominee.

“I see no likelihood of 38 Republican electors defecting from their party and casting their ballots for Secretary Clinton,” he explained.

Bright’s not-so-bright vote was invalidated.

The final tally will not be known until later today, with Hawaii’s electors casting their votes at 7 p.m. ET. Regardless of the final numbers, Donald Trump has definitively won. But don’t expect the Left to accept defeat.

As BuzzFeed News’ Chris Geidner declared today, “The battle over Monday’s electoral college vote is the beginning, not the end,” as a “larger campaign to undermine the legitimacy” of this free and fair election in the United States is “likely” to begin. The Democrats are preparing to use means outside of the Electoral College to deny Trump the presidency. From Geidner:

Assuming that effort fails to stop Trump, expect to start hearing about Title 3, Section 15 of the US Code and “objections” to the electoral vote results. An objection can be lodged in writing by two members of Congress: one each from the House and the Senate.

Although rare, this step is not unprecedented. In 2005, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio filed such an objection, specifically to the counting of the votes of Ohio’s electors in the wake of allegations of voting irregularities. The objection was rejected within a few hours, with only 32 members of Congress — all but one from the House — voting against the counting of Ohio’s votes.

Should that fail, too, Democrats may challenge the constitutionality of Trump’s presidency under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, as Geidner explained:

Enter the Emoluments Clause — the constitutional provision referenced in the Eisen, Painter, and Tribe memo and elsewhere — which bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

“While holding office, Mr. Trump will receive—by virtue of his continued interest in the Trump Organization and his stake in hundreds of other entities—a steady stream of monetary and other benefits from foreign powers and their agents,” the trio of scholars wrote. A handful of Democrats in the Senate already have made it clear they will not be dropping this as an issue.

And should that fail, Democrats may resort to accusing Donald Trump of treason. All this to say … do not expect the Left to roll over for President Trump the same way Republicans repeatedly caved for President Obama. (For more from the author of “The Electoral College Chooses Trump. But Don’t Expect the Malcontents to Surrender” please click HERE)

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Here’s the Tool Congress Can Use to Curtail Obama’s Regulation Legacy

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Conservatives in Congress have a plan to undo a large number of regulations from the last few months of President Barack Obama’s time in office.

The recently imposed regulations include a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that protects federal funding for Planned Parenthood as well as regulations from the Department of Labor instituting paid sick leave for federal contractors.

Both of these new rules, along with a host of others, may be able to be undone with the help of the Congressional Review Act.

This law was passed in 1996 as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America reform agenda.

Conservatives in Congress have a plan to undo a large number of regulations from the last few months of President Barack Obama’s time in office.

The recently imposed regulations include a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that protects federal funding for Planned Parenthood as well as regulations from the Department of Labor instituting paid sick leave for federal contractors.

Both of these new rules, along with a host of others, may be able to be undone with the help of the Congressional Review Act.

This law was passed in 1996 as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America reform agenda.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Review Act “is an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn a rule issued by a federal agency.”

It requires agencies to update Congress on the rules they write and “provide Congress with a special set of procedures under which to consider legislation to overturn those rules”.

For a rule to be appealed under the Congressional Review Act, those disapproving of the rule must first present a report to the House, Senate, and comptroller general.

According to the Congressional Research Service, this report must contain “a copy of the rule; concise general statement relating to the rule, including whether it is a major rule; and the proposed effective date of the rule.”

Once this report is received, the House and Senate must pass a “joint resolution of disapproval” that would go to the president for approval or veto.

If vetoed by the president, Congress still has one more shot at the resolution by voting to overturn the veto with a two-thirds vote in each chamber.

So far, the Congressional Review Act has aided in the overturning of one rule.

The Hill reported that in 2001, Congress was able to successfully repeal a rule on workplace injuries that was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Since then, according to the Congressional Research Service, OSHA has not tried to reinstate a similar version of this workplace injuries rule.

James Gattuso, a senior research fellow who studies regulatory issues for The Heritage Foundation, said that the Congressional Review Act has not been successful in the past because of the administration in power.

“The problem that became apparent after the [Congressional Review Act] was adopted was that the president will almost never be in a situation where he wants to disapprove of regulations from his own agencies,” Gattuso told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

Then-Republican President George W. Bush was the reason the Congressional Review Act succeeded in repealing the OSHA rule in 2001.

Gattuso said of the law’s potential success on a larger scale:

The Democratic president [has] adopted just slews of regulations all within the past few months. So all those new rules, there are dozens of them, are eligible to be reviewed under the [Congressional Review Act]. And, when they’re submitted to the president, they’ll be submitted to a Republican president who will have no hesitancy in signing a lot of these.

According to Gattuso, conservative lawmakers are likely to have more success with using the Congressional Review Act due to incoming President-elect Donald Trump.

Constitutionally, the president has to be involved in any legislative decision meant for his possible veto. The one example where that was not a barrier was in 2001, when there was a change of administrations and a Clinton administration rule was rescinded. Now, we have that same situation for really the first time since then that there is a new Republican president coming in with an outgoing Democratic president.

According to a report released by The Heritage Foundation’s Gattuso and Daren Bakst, the Congressional Review Act will be able to address regulations handed down by Obama dating back to June 3, 2016.

With Trump, Gattuso said he believes that lawmakers will have significant success in undoing “slews” of regulations that the Obama administration has set in place. He said that the Congressional Review Act is the “most powerful tool that Congress has … it is a powerful weapon.”

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the recently elected chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, is spearheading the effort to address regulations put in place by the Obama administration through the utilization of the Congressional Review Act.

As part of this effort, the House Freedom Caucus has released a special report, “First 100 Days: Rules, Regulations, and Executive Orders to Examine, Revoke, and Issue” that outlines the regulations that conservative lawmakers are planning to take down with the help of the Congressional Review Act and a new presidential administration.

These include regulations present in the National School Lunch Program and
School Breakfast Program, the National Organic Program, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services program.

In total, the report currently lists 228 rules that the House Freedom Caucus is looking to address.

“We expect it to get to 300 rules and regulations by the time that Jan. 20 rolls around,” Meadows said.

According to Meadows, the Congressional Review Act will not apply to all of the rules listed in the report, but instead will be a significant starting place.

“The Congressional Review Act will only apply to some of those, but the ones that it does apply to actually [have] a more far-reaching and lasting impact,” Meadows said.

Meadows said that the Congressional Review Act works best when used in concert with a conservative administration.

“It only works if you have a conservative in the White House or someone of the same party or it can be deployed as well, but it has to have a two-thirds majority … So, [the Congressional Review Act] is an exciting tool that is rarely used, but as we get prepared to use it on the overtime rule and hopefully a couple of others that have been a result of executive overreach, we’ll get to see it actually used perhaps for the first time in more than a decade,” Meadows said.

Not surprisingly, efforts are being made to enact more regulations before Trump takes office.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency are trying to push through more restrictive policies before the presidential inauguration. The EPA is currently attempting to pass fuel economy standards before Trump’s inauguration in January.

However, Meadows said that due to his recent discussions with the Trump transition team, the president-elect’s administration is already aware of and planning to address the regulations imposed by the Obama administration.

“I will say this,” Meadows said. “Talking to some individuals with the Trump transition team, they are taking this extremely serious, and certainly will make it a priority so that excitement on behalf of Americans from coast to coast is well placed ‘cause I know that the Trump administration will have it as a high priority,” Meadows said. (For more from the author of “Here’s the Tool Congress Can Use to Curtail Obama’s Regulation Legacy” please click HERE)

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The ‘Staggering’ Campaign of Liberal Billionaire George Soros to Swing Local Prosecutor Elections

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As part of his quest to overhaul the American justice system, liberal billionaire George Soros is targeting local prosecutor races like the one in Harris County, a large jurisdiction that includes the city of Houston.

Morris Overstreet, a former judge who was the first African-American elected to statewide office in Texas since Reconstruction, was one of the beneficiaries. Overstreet received $100,000 from Soros in the race for Harris County district attorney.

But in a rare lost bet for Soros, Overstreet was defeated easily in the Democratic primary in March by Kim Ogg, a white woman from a prominent political family who has practiced law in Harris County, where she was born, for nearly 30 years.

Ogg had condemned the Soros donation to Overstreet intended to defeat her, calling it “a last-minute money dump to try to buy the nomination.”

Today, Ogg is the Harris County district attorney-elect after going on to beat the Republican incumbent, Devon Anderson. She won the general election with the aid of about $878,000 from the Soros-funded Texas Safety and Justice PAC.

Soros pledged allegiance to Ogg after his preferred candidate lost.

The money helped buy television ads accusing Anderson of botching a case in which the district attorney’s office ordered a rape victim jailed to guarantee she would show up in court to testify against her attacker.

Associates of Soros helped craft the message of the ads, Ogg’s campaign confirmed to The Daily Signal. The campaign said Soros’ contributions to Ogg equaled more than half of the $1.5 million she raised in total.

This past week, less than a month before she takes office, Ogg expressed a different view of Soros’ campaign contributions.

“Before, I was dismayed he was buying the election,” Ogg said in an interview with The Daily Signal, adding:

It was a last-minute dump [of funds supporting Overstreet]. In my instance, his people came to talk to me after I won the primary, so it was not a last-minute dump. Soros is only half of the story here. My agenda and platform was really set before he spent money in my race, but I am appreciative of the money, as I was with every other dollar.

On Jan. 1, Ogg will begin to try fulfilling the vision she ran on, promising a “significant culture change” defined by taking a more lenient approach to marijuana possession cases, focusing tax dollars on punishing violent criminals, and making it easier for defendants to get out of jail on bond in a county where 70 percent of inmates cannot afford to free themselves before trial.

It’s a set of goals that would seem to match Soros’ preference for how prosecutors do their jobs, using their powerful roles and vast discretion not only to protect public safety but also reduce prison populations and repeat offenses.

Despite these overlapping interests, Ogg insists she doesn’t have a mandate from Soros. In fact, she says she’s never spoken to or met with him.

“I don’t know George Soros,” Ogg said, then repeated: “I don’t know George Soros.”

“I made no promises to Soros or his supporters. The money that helped expose issues here is always a benefit, but I believe voters made their decision not based on the name or identity of a contributor, but on the poor policies and public safety record of my opponent. Plus, I have my own reputation here. In cases of David vs. Goliath, I often represent David. I believe my reputation is intact.”

‘Staggering Amount of Money’

Soros, 86, an American hedge fund manager and philanthropist, is No. 22 on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, with a net worth estimated at $20 billion. He finances a variety of liberal political causes, including ones related to education, immigration, climate change, and the environment.

Soros’ philanthropic network, the Open Society Foundations, has spent more than $13 billion over the past three decades on initiatives to defend human rights abroad and shape the democratic process in Eastern Europe.

Soros gave an unprecedented $27 million to various 527 groups trying to defeat President George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign, describing the effort as a “matter of life and death.”

Soros also helped launch the Democracy Alliance, a group of major liberal donors seeking to advance progressive policymaking by investing in organizations such as Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, and Organizing for Action, which was set up to advance the agenda of President Barack Obama.

Soros has not personally spoken with or met any of the candidates he supported in district attorney races this year and last, his advisers say.

In most of the dozen prosecutor races he helped finance, Soros did not coordinate at all with the candidate he supported, they said. Instead, he operated independently by giving money to various state-level political action committees (PACs) and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each identified by a variation on “Safety and Justice.”

The form of his contributions depended on local and state campaign finance laws, Soros’ advisers say, and in some cases, as in Harris County, the collaboration was more direct.

Soros’ efforts are part of a new, broader push by progressives to locate, prepare, and fund challengers to unseat incumbent prosecutors. Such upsets are notoriously difficult to achieve in local district attorney races, where name recognition and outside interest are usually low and voters give deference to the candidate with a record.

“Criminal justice reform efforts must take many forms,” Whitney Tymas, an adviser on Soros’ project challenging sitting prosecutors, said in a statement to The Daily Signal. Tymas added:

Changing laws and redirecting funding streams is critical. Because of the enormous discretion vested in those who enforce the laws, including prosecutors, it is also important to elect officials who are committed to public safety and equal justice. These officials are a key leverage point in a complicated system.

David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University professor and former federal prosecutor, told The Daily Signal that only a “handful” of races for the 2,500 district attorneys’ offices nationwide included candidates with “reform-oriented” agendas, and of those that did, most did not involve contributions from Soros.

“In a number of high-visibility district attorney races around the country, incumbents this year were unseated by challengers who promised a more moderate approach to criminal justice, backing away from a simple ‘tough on crime’ agenda and paying more attention to fairness, proportionality, and equity,” Sklansky said. “Many of these successful candidates also pledged to improve the investigation of police shootings, to rein in prosecutorial misconduct, and to be more vigilant in avoiding and correcting wrongful convictions.”

Still, Soros’ role in local prosecutor races is significant. It touches counties big and small, urban and rural; northern, southern, western, eastern, and midwestern. In total, Soros spent nearly $11 million on 12 district attorney races this election cycle, campaign filings show.

A Democrat candidate supported by Soros ultimately won in 10 of the 12 races.

The trend of outside funding worries opponents of Soros’ tactics, including veteran district attorneys who say the outsize contributions threaten prosecutorial independence, which is especially important in a role as powerful and all-encompassing as theirs.

“The amount of money we are talking about is staggering,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney of Clatsop County, Oregon, since 1994 and a board member of the National District Attorneys Association.

“And it’s amplified because it’s extremely difficult to raise money as a prosecutor,” Marquis told The Daily Signal, adding:

To ask for money when you are a prosecutor, there is something inherently icky about all of it. The argument on one side is this is good, and it’s just turning on a searchlight and looking at these issues. But that’s naive in the extreme because it’s the money that is funding debates and actual discussions. If you are able to pay for and tell your side of the story over and over again on television ads, you are going to win.

‘Couldn’t Compete’

Matthew McCord faced an uphill challenge to counter his Soros-backed opponent.

McCord, a Republican who ran for district attorney in Henry County, Georgia, was not an incumbent and did not have a prosecutor’s record to run on.

He had $60,000 in his campaign fund and a supportive family, but in September he decided that wasn’t enough. McCord dropped out of the race after learning Soros had contributed $100,000 to a political action committee supporting his opponent, Democrat Darius Pattillo.

“The joke was people were saying to me, ‘You need to fight to the death,’ and I said, ‘To whose death, mine?’” McCord told The Daily Signal in an interview. “Soros apparently had a single-minded mission to make sure I was not successful. I couldn’t compete.”

McCord, a municipal judge and local lawyer, said he ran on a platform similar to Pattillo, a deputy chief assistant district attorney in nearby DeKalb County. McCord said both candidates called for relieving overburdened courts and crowded jails by providing more alternatives to prosecution for low-risk offenders as well as better community outreach.

Pattillo did not respond to a request for an interview from The Daily Signal.

“I am viewed as a fairly centrist conservative,” McCord said. “I don’t know there was much difference between my approach to justice and his [Pattillo]. When did progressives and liberals get a monopoly on the idea of criminal justice reform? Soros doesn’t even know me. He didn’t ask me what my views were or what I would do.”

Soros so far has backed only Democrats in district attorney races, but his advisers insist his support for candidates isn’t based on political party and say Soros would consider making a large contribution to a “reform-minded” Republican prosecutor.

McCord said he doesn’t know if he will run again for district attorney—his dream job. But he said he knows what would stop him from trying.

“I’d rather be a private citizen doing the right thing than be a bought man,” McCord said.

‘A Little Bit of Love’

Prosecutors drive critical decisions in the criminal justice system, choosing when, whether, and against whom to bring criminal charges, as well as making recommendations for sentencing and setting the terms of plea negotiations.

These decisions are receiving more scrutiny at a time where there is a growing bipartisan consensus around the need to reduce incarceration, provide more alternative punishments, and expand rehabilitation opportunities for low-level drug offenders.

As part of this effort, Soros, along with progressive groups advocating racial justice and gender equality, is trying to elect more minority prosecutors in response to what he sees as an insufficient response by incumbent district attorneys to the fatal shootings of black men by police officers.

Several candidates who Soros backed are members of minority groups.

The Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network, found in a 2015 study that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors were white.

“Of course, what was happening with Black Lives Matter and police shootings was a huge wake-up call [for progressives, who began] realizing how much power these offices have and the need for us to be focused on getting great people elected,” Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

“District attorney races have historically just been completely ignored, like most down-ballot races, in the progressive and Democratic community,” Steele said. “I am just thrilled to see that if you give a little bit of love to these races, a small investment yields a huge outcome.”

In Chicago’s Cook County, Soros funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx, who is black, defeat the incumbent state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, in the Democratic primary. Foxx then easily beat her Republican general election opponent.

Alvarez drew widespread criticism for her handling of the 2014 fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old. She took 13 months before charging the Chicago police officer who shot and killed McDonald, a delay that sparked protests.

“Soros’ funding was a big factor in my loss, obviously,” Alvarez, the first female and first Hispanic candidate to be elected as Cook County’s top prosecutor, said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Some people want to say I lost my election simply because of the McDonald video, but I felt this movement prior to my charging that officer. When you have these outside influences, it’s scary because they don’t know the climate—that Chicago has a serious violent crime problem, a serious gun problem.”

Under Alvarez’s leadership, Cook County created a nationally recognized pretrial diversion program. Diversion is intended to promise low-risk defendants a second chance. Eligible individuals are not prosecuted, but instead receive supervision services such as counseling and job training, and can have their criminal record expunged.

Such diversion programs exist in almost every state, but Cook County’s is considered especially innovative because defendants pay no fee to participate, meaning poorer individuals can benefit from the services.

“It would have been a wonderful thing if George Soros actually would have looked at my record,” Alvarez said. “He probably would have liked what he saw.”

Soros’ money also helped Aramis Ayala upset incumbent Jeff Ashton in the Democratic primary for Florida state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties.

The Soros funding paid for TV ads and mailers accusing Ashton of carrying out racially disparate policies—a claim he denied.

Ayala, a black woman, became the first African-American elected as a state attorney in Florida.

“Race does not explicitly play a role, but in seeking candidates who understand the injustices of the current system, many of them turn out to be African-American or Latino, because it is people of color who have been disproportionately affected by those injustices,” Tymas, the Soros adviser, told The Daily SIgnal.

‘Couldn’t Stop Them’

Last year, Scott Colom took a risky approach to his run for district attorney in a four-county stretch in Mississippi.

Colom, who is black and a Democrat, promised voters he would promote more rehabilitation and less incarceration for drug offenders, especially young people—although he also said he’d be tough on violent criminals.

Voters validated Colom’s agenda. It also was backed by Soros, who gave almost $400,000 to a Mississippi PAC supporting Colom’s campaign to defeat a long-entrenched incumbent, Forrest Allgood, an aggressive prosecutor whose record had been heavily criticized.

That PAC also backed the re-election campaign of another local prosecutor, Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith.

Colom now has served a year as district attorney of Mississippi’s 16th District. He has implemented some of his proposed policies, including expanding eligibility for pretrial diversion to defendants arrested for offenses such as selling marijuana.

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Colom said personal experience shapes his worldview. He grew up in Columbus, Mississippi, and watched high school classmates go to prison.

While in law school, Colom interned with the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, witnessing poverty and gaining an understanding of how government policy can hold people back.

“I had the courage to run on this criminal justice reform message based on my own personal convictions, before I had any idea there would be any national money, or a George Soros, supporting me,” Colom said. “I decided to run this way having no idea on how it polled. This is how I believed I should be elected.”

Colom, like Ogg in Harris County, said he didn’t know how Soros learned about who he is and what his positions are.

Colom said he never has been in contact with Soros, or anyone associated with him—and does not plan to connect with him now. He said he learned about Soros’ contribution only after seeing and hearing television and radio ads supporting his election.

Colom said the nearly $400,000 in outside money likely helped him, but that he also raised $150,000 on his own and knocked on doors every day from 3 to 7 p.m. during campaign season.

“This was a trying experience,” Colom said. “The most difficult thing I have done was to run for this office. It is important people get the whole picture of how I ran, not just one aspect of it.”

Colom added:

I don’t know George Soros. Do I think his spending money to spread my message helped me? I think any time your message spreads to more people, that helps that candidate get their message out. But what I emphasize is, the message has to be something someone agrees with. The people agree with my message. The people understand if you can avoid sending someone to prison and avoid the scar of a felony record, you should do that.

Colom’s candidacy for attorney general in Mississippi’s 16th District was one of the first such races that Soros has supported. As the Soros effort spreads, Colom says, it’s a difficult thing for candidates to counter.

“His support is not even something I can accept or decline,” Colom said. “They spend money independent of me. I couldn’t stop them. Honestly, I wouldn’t know who to ask if I wanted them to stop.”

Overcoming ‘Radical Agenda’

Pete Weir was able to halt Soros’ momentum by winning.

Soros dedicated $1.2 million to defeat Weir, the incumbent Republican district attorney of Gilpin and Jefferson counties in suburban Colorado.

Soros contributed to a PAC running negative ads against Weir in support of Democrat challenger Jake Lilly, a former prosecutor and Iraq War veteran. One mailer said the incumbent “can’t be trusted to keep us safe from sex offenders.”

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Weir said he overcame Soros’ influence by emphasizing his 37 years of criminal justice experience. The record, he said, includes a longtime dedication to reform—the cause that Soros says he is promoting.

“There was a backlash and outrage over the negative ads directed to me and an outrage over the prospect of an East Coast billionaire trying to buy our justice system,” Weir said, adding of Soros:

He knows nothing about our community, and what the criminal justice issues are in our counties. But it didn’t change my tactics or the way we campaigned on a positive message, on my experience. What he could not overcome were the relationships we had built in the community.

Weir said he spent about $80,000 on his re-election campaign, using that money to spread the message that his office is “progressive,” combining “aggressive prosecution when it’s called for with innovative, problem-solving courts.”

Weir is a member of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, which has helped pass state legislation reducing prison sentences for drug crimes.

He says he will continue to support reforms as prosecutor, because it’s what residents of Gilpin and Jefferson counties want. Even if he shares some of Soros’ goals, he said, those efforts should be dictated by local officials.

“It sounds immodest to say, but you would be hard-pressed to find another prosecutor in Colorado who has led reform efforts realizing we can do a better job in more areas,” Weir told The Daily Signal. “As a prosecutor community, we realize the system is imperfect and changes can and should be made. But to see some East Coast billionaire who has no idea of local interests acceding to a radical reform agenda at the expense of our democratic process is incredibly dangerous.”

‘Be More Political’

Soros and allied progressive groups say they will continue grooming and supporting prosecutor candidates who share their goals.

Steele, of Emerge America, says she already is looking ahead to the 2018 elections, with plans to recruit and train at least 25 Democratic women to run in district attorney races.

Women, she says, are uniquely sensitive to the consequences of incarceration and, as prosecutors, are likely to use their powers more carefully.

“I am hopeful that Emerge will have women running for district attorney in 2018 and make it onto Soros’ radar screen,” Steele said. “The George Soroses of the world can’t get the outcomes they desire unless you have great candidates. So what we are doing is a critical piece.”

She does not apologize for the aggressive outreach, arguing that because a state’s top prosecutors are elected, the process to become one is inherently political.

“All of these races are political,” Steele said, adding:

You have to run a race in order to win. I would say these races need to be even more political. Because the progressive community wants to see certain outcomes, less mass incarceration, that’s the outcome. In order to see that, we need to win races, and get qualified, good people running for these offices that had previously been uncontested.

Marquis, of the National District Attorneys Association, says he doesn’t doubt the sincerity of Soros and of progressive groups. He emphasizes that many members of the association, which represents state-level district attorneys across the U.S., support reform.

Indeed, the National District Attorneys Association made headlines earlier this year when it endorsed compromise legislation in Congress meant to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders in the federal prison system.

Yet Marquis said he worries that despite these efforts, some incumbent members of the association could lose their jobs to better-funded challengers.

“This is the source of great conversation among district attorneys,” Marquis said. “A lot of us are sitting around saying, ‘What if it’s me next? What if I am targeted?’” (For more from the author of “The ‘Staggering’ Campaign of Liberal Billionaire George Soros to Swing Local Prosecutor Elections” please click HERE)

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Leading Critic of Trump’s Attorney General Pick Withdrew Accusation in 1986

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A vocal opponent of confirming Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as U.S. attorney general recanted part of his critical testimony 30 years ago against Sessions being confirmed as a federal judge.

J. Gerald Hebert, a former Justice Department lawyer, made racially charged allegations against Sessions before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was considering his nomination as a district judge in Alabama.

More recently, Hebert said Sessions would be “frightening” as attorney general.

Immediately after President-elect Donald Trump announced he would nominate Sessions to be attorney general, Hebert—despite having corrected part of his testimony in 1986—issued a public statement opposing Sessions.

A few days later, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Hebert explaining why Sessions shouldn’t be attorney general.

Hebert testified March 13, 1986, in opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions to be a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of Alabama.

Part of Hebert’s testimony to the Judiciary Committee included allegations that Sessions, while serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, attempted to block an FBI investigation into a voting rights case in an Alabama county.

Hebert said Sessions bypassed proper procedure by not first informing the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Three days later, however, on March 16, Hebert and another lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, Paul A. Hancock, filed affidavits asserting it was a different U.S. attorney, Sessions’ predecessor, who tried to stop the FBI probe.

The matter is significant in exposing unfair attacks on Sessions when Reagan nominated him for a judgeship, now that Trump plans to nominate Sessions for attorney general, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation.

Von Spakovsky said the affidavits “destroy Hebert’s credibility on anything connected with Sessions.”

“These affidavits correcting the record, which got almost no media attention, are another sign that the claims made against Jeff Sessions 30 years ago were baseless and entirely manufactured,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal.

Hancock had made his assertion against Sessions before the Judiciary Committee on March 12, one day before Hebert did.

“I answered that my own recollection of that matter was consistent with Mr. Hancock’s,” Hebert said in his affidavit, referring to his testimony three days earlier. “When I rendered that testimony, it was true to the best of my knowledge, recollection, and belief.”

The one-page affidavit continued:

My recollection on this matter has now been refreshed. I have no knowledge that Mr. Sessions ever interfered with any voting investigation in the Southern District of Alabama. … I apologize for any inconvenience caused Mr. Sessions or this committee by my prior testimony.

Because of the allegations, Reagan’s nomination of Sessions for the judgeship failed to clear a Republican-controlled Senate; Sessions eventually withdrew and continued serving as a U.S. attorney, a role he held from 1981 to 1993. He was elected to the Senate in 1994.

Hebert did not correct other parts of his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In that testimony, he recalled telling Sessions about a rumor that a federal judge referred to one lawyer as a “traitor to his race.” To this rumored comment, Hebert claimed Sessions responded: “Well, maybe he [the lawyer] is.”

Hebert also told the committee that Sessions referred to the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”

Sessions denied some of the charges made against him in the 1986 confirmation hearing, but regarding Hebert’s other allegations, he reportedly testified: “I’m often loose with my tongue. I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or communist, but I meant no harm by it.”

Sessions denied accusations by Thomas Figures, a former assistant U.S. attorney who is black, who said Sessions called him “boy” and told him to watch himself around “white folks.”

Today, Hebert is the director of a voting rights and redistricting program for the Campaign Legal Center, which advocates campaign finance reform and restrictions on money in politics.

Hebert did not respond specifically to The Daily Signal. A spokesman for the Campaign Legal Center referred to a November statement in which Hebert said:

Jeff Sessions has not demonstrated a commitment to fairness and equality under the law, a commitment that should be a minimum qualification for the position of attorney general. To the contrary, he has repeatedly demonstrated racial insensitivity to black citizens of Alabama and this country through both his words and actions. He has never apologized for his racially charged comments during his last tenure at the Department of Justice. I believe that Sessions represents a threat to voting rights for all minorities. It is frightening to think that Sessions will run the U.S. Department of Justice and have the opportunity to roll back voting rights through voter suppression in communities that have long struggled for equality.

Hancock, the other civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department who filed a corrective affidavit after testifying to the Judiciary Committee, said the mistake was corrected almost immediately and likely didn’t affect the judicial confirmation process in 1986.

He added that the matter should not affect Trump’s intended nomination of Sessions for attorney general.

“I regret that it happened with me,” Hancock told The Daily Signal, referring to the inaccurate testimony that Sessions sought to block an FBI investigation. “Nobody asked me to correct it. Nobody pressured me to correct it.”

While a lawyer in Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Hancock said, he worked with Sessions because there were many civil rights cases in Alabama and he “never had any difficulty.”

That was not the case with Sessions’ predecessor as U.S. attorney, William Kimbrough Jr., who was in the position from 1977 through 1981.

It was Kimbrough, not Sessions, who tried to stop the FBI investigation of the voting rights case, Hancock explained in his affidavit.

Further, the locale in question was Clarke County, Alabama, not Conecuh County, Alabama, as both Hancock and Hebert originally told the Judiciary Committee.

Hancock’s affidavit corrected his testimony on March 12, 1986, a day before Hebert testified. The affidavit was three pages long, with three supporting attachments regarding the Clarke County case from May 1980.

Kimbrough gave his approval for the investigation to resume and apologized for not notifying Justice’s Civil Rights Division before asking the FBI to discontinue it, according to an attached memo.

Heritage’s von Spakovsky compared the incident to the Democrats going after and denying confirmation to Robert Bork, Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 1987.

“The Borking of Sessions then was shameful and dishonest, and the same misbehavior should not be allowed to occur now,” he said. (For more from the author of “Leading Critic of Trump’s Attorney General Pick Withdrew Accusation in 1986” please click HERE)

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Middle School Girl Gets Suspended for Possessing a Butter Knife

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Who would have thought a butter knife could become the center of a school controversy?

Last month, officials at Silver Trail Middle School near Miami, Florida, suspended an 11-year-old honors student for violating a county policy strictly prohibiting weapons on campus. The girl’s weapon of choice: a butter knife fit for a toddler.

To highlight the dangers of having this dull knife on campus, the police noted to state prosecutors that the girl used it to cut a peach. Such is the folly of overcriminalization: Every minor mishap gets crammed into the criminal justice system when it could be easily resolved by other means.

In defense of their daughter, the girl’s parents explained that they gave her a set of utensils “made for children to learn how to eat properly.” But despite this educational purpose behind the possession, school officials pounced when the girl brandished the short, dull, rounded utensil, cut a peach in half, and shared it with a hungry friend during lunch time in the school cafeteria.

A commonsense response? Give the girl a gold star for sharing. But instead, the county’s zero tolerance policy toward weapons required punishment.

The zero tolerance policy prohibits possession of a Class B weapon on school premises. This includes such items as razor blades, nunchakus, shotgun shells, and knives—including “blunt-bladed table knives.” Possession of these weapons is considered a criminal incident and can trigger a host of consequences, including not only a minimum six-day suspension from school, but also a mandatory report to law enforcement.

That’s failure No. 1 by the adults in the room. A student using a butter knife is not an incident that requires the time and attention of law enforcement.

And here is failure No. 2: After examining the evidence—a single butter knife—the police department turned over the investigation to the local Florida state attorney’s office, which is now weighing whether to bring criminal charges against the student.

A spokeswoman for the school district maintains that the school followed district policy throughout the incident, while pointing out that the district is working with the family of the suspended student by agreeing to reduce her suspension from six to three days. Needless to say, the family is not satisfied with the ongoing investigation and has hired a lawyer to represent them in the matter.

Surely, there must be someone along the chain of command with the requisite discretion to understand that an 11-year-old cutting a peach with a child’s butter knife is not the type of evil that a school weapons ban is intended to protect against.

The rigidness of a zero tolerance policy that requires taxpayer dollars to fund a criminal investigation into a student who simply cut a peach illustrates a systemic flaw in school discipline procedures.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, but yet another example of an overreaction to minor infractions due to a zero tolerance school weapons ban, which can have serious consequences.

In Ohio, 10th-grader Da’von Shaw gave a class presentation on how to make a healthy breakfast, which included an apple that he sliced in front of the class. Da’von received a five-day suspension for possessing a weapon on campus due to his demonstration.

In California, high school senior Brandon Cappelletti was not nearly as fortunate. He faced a misdemeanor charge after school officials discovered pocket knives left over from a family fishing trip in the console of his car, which was parked on school grounds. Cappelletti narrowly avoided expulsion due to community outrage against the disproportionate punishment.

Cappelletti’s football coach opposed the severity of potential consequences by sharing, “I’m willing to stick my neck out for these kids because they are the kind we want representing us in society … I hope their lives won’t change because of an innocent mistake.”

Criminal charges carry a multitude of collateral consequences, which could have prevented Cappelletti from following in his father’s footsteps and joining the Marines. He enlisted shortly after charges were dropped.

In all of the aforementioned incidents, schools relied on zero tolerance policies that can produce harmful and unexpected results. To be sure, schools must take weapons seriously, but in a way that requires educators to exercise discretion in evaluating what is in fact a weapon, as well as the nature of an offense.

This one-size-fits-all approach to discipline is a significant contributor to overcriminalization, which is the effort to punish every mistake and attempt to solve every problem through the use of the criminal law and penalties.

This ill-suited suspension and investigation into an 11-year-old with a butter knife is an apt opportunity for school districts and localities to use a little common sense and re-examine how to handle rules violations in a more constructive and equitable manner. (For more from the author of “Middle School Girl Gets Suspended for Possessing a Butter Knife” please click HERE)

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Brave New World: Terrifying Pro-Life Consequences of UK’s 3-Parent Decision

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It’s official. We are living in a brave new world.

This week, the British government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority approved new reproductive procedures that will allow doctors to “create babies” by combining the DNA of three “parents.” HFEA Chair Sally Cheshire called it a “life-changing” decision that could prevent a small group of at-risk children from inheriting life-threatening mitochondrial diseases (like muscular dystrophy and major organ failure) from their mothers.

Proponents of the methods have assured that the decision will not activate a new age of genetically modified babies, as the procedures will be implemented on a case-by-case basis. British pro-lifers responded with a collective, “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

Each of the new techniques involves manipulating a mother’s egg, a father’s sperm, and a donor egg to ensure that the mother’s mitochondrial DNA is not passed on. The DNA from the donor amounts to an estimated one percent of the child’s genes (hence the three “parents” claim).

“The fact that there are now calls in Newcastle for egg donors — in practice, to produce healthy embryos solely for spare parts — tells us much about attitudes to women used to produce embryos this way, and harms and endangers us all,” bioethicist Anthony McCarthy, education director at Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, told the Catholic Herald.

Per Dr. McCarthy, only one of the two approved procedures, pronuclear transfer, destroys two viable human embryos in order to create what doctors hope will be a healthy, disease-free child. And while the alternative procedure, maternal spindle transfer, doesn’t require that an embryo be destroyed, Dr. McCarthy noted that “the new life has come to be through a production process which fragments maternity and will in practice be subject to quality-control.”

The doctors and scientists who advocated for the approval of these procedures undoubtedly believe, in their quest to give all children healthy bodies free of any deformity, that the procedures are humane. But in order to achieve their desired end, these individuals are willing to discard countless lives. If that sounds like eugenics, it’s because it is. These procedures approved by the British government aim to rid society of “undesirables.” Not very humane when you put it that way, right?

Even when the embryos are spared, as in the case of maternal spindle transfer, these procedures raise concerns regarding the purpose of procreation and parenting.

If mitochondrial DNA manipulation is permissible, why couldn’t this lead to other forms of selective DNA manipulation? For example, what if the donor has a higher IQ than the mother? Better hair? A nicer voice?

Is it fair to subject a child, who has rights of his own, to such a procedure? Shouldn’t he at least be given the choice of having a full 50 percent of his DNA come from his mother, and his mother alone?

Pro-life advocate and chairman of Oxford’s Conservative Policy Forum, Mark Bhagwandin, called the new procedures “very uncertain and potentially dangerous.”

“Whilst we are deeply sympathetic to the plight of people with mitochondrial related diseases, the ends [do] not always justify the means,” Bhagwandin told Catholic Herald. “We would encourage and support greater investigation and research into ethical remedies which do not seek to genetically modify human beings.”

At the core of the pro-life movement is the belief that children who are physically, mentally, and economically “disadvantaged” are still better off alive, with two (not three) parents who love and care for them. The pro-life community is rightfully troubled by progressive efforts that attempt to defy this belief. (For more from the author of “Brave New World: Terrifying Pro-Life Consequences of UK’s 3-Parent Decision” please click HERE)

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An Inconvenient Right: Ninth Circuit Fails to Protect 2nd Amendment

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There are all sorts of rights the federal courts have invented. There is a right to an abortion with no restrictions on the clinics; there is a right to force states to recognize any relationship as a marriage; there is a right for Planned Parenthood to get state funding; there is a right to 20 days of early voting and ballot harvesting.

Yet, when it comes to the unambiguous, natural right of self-defense, enshrined into the Second Amendment, the courts tell the states that they are free to regulate the unalienable right all they want.

The latest example is the notorious Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding California’s law requiring a 10-day waiting period to take possession of a gun after a purchase. Writing for a three judge panel, which overturned a district judge’s opinion in favor of the Second Amendment, Judge Mary Schroeder wrote that “[A] 10-day cooling-off period would serve to discourage such conduct and would impose no serious burden on the core Second Amendment right of defense of the home.”
Let’s be clear here: There is only one enumerated right in the Bill of Rights for which the unequivocal language of “shall not be infringed” is used. That language is not used for abortion or forced recognition of alternative lifestyles as marriage against the will of the states. (In fact, it doesn’t talk about those things at all in the Constitution. Yet, the courts are saying states can’t even implement common sense health regulations on abortion clinics.) The one right that is mentioned explicitly in unmistakable language, on the other hand, seems to be open to all sorts of political arguments by the courts.

Putting aside the fact that criminals don’t submit themselves to background checks and have plenty of avenues to purchase a gun immediately, these are not constitutional arguments. Placing a 10-day waiting period is a substantial burden, especially for first-time purchasers who often make the decision out of an imminent sense of fear or need for self-defense.

Such a restriction is manifestly unconstitutional for those who are approved quickly by the federal background check system, especially in the eyes of judges who think everything not in adherence to the DNC platform is unconstitutional.

The same courts that nullify every legitimate state power — from marriage and abortion regulation to election maps and even adhering to natural law — are suddenly deferential to state laws that are incontrovertibly against the plain language of the Constitution.

Whereas they apply strict scrutiny to any regulation of a clear state power against the ACLU’s assertion of a fundamental right, they only applied intermediate scrutiny to this gun regulation against a natural right that pre-dated our Constitution.

There are a couple of other observations in order here:

1. The lower courts are killing the Second Amendment. SCOTUS remains silent.

This gun ruling is part of a growing trend where lower courts are severely limiting the scope of the Heller ruling (not that we need the court to affirm a natural right). In Heller, the Supreme Court made it clear that governmental interest cannot be factored in to mitigate an individual right to own or bear firearms because the Second Amendment “is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people,” and “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government … the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”

Yet every single circuit that has heard cases on gun restrictions — the Second, Third, Fourth, Ninth, and 10th Circuit Courts — has ruled there is no right to self-defense outside the home in contravention of the plain language of the Heller decision and the undeniable text of the Second Amendment. They have also upheld state “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazine bans in the Second, Fourth, and Seventh, and Ninth Circuits.

Thus far, we can’t even affirm a foundational right to self-defense with a single circuit, and the Supreme Court has therefore declined to grant cert (accept an appeal from the lower courts) to gun rights activists in an effort to overturn these lower court decisions on appeal.

Even when SCOTUS has broached the topic of guns since the Heller ruling, all but the few conservatives have clearly gone along with limiting Heller. The conservatives on the court have called them out for surreptitiously allowing the Second Amendment to be killed in the lower courts.

2. The courts are a one-way dead-end for conservatives

Ever since the federal judiciary has erroneously been given the distinction of the sole and final arbiter of constitutional interpretation, conservatives have been on the losing side of judicial supremacy well over 90 percent of the time. Heller was one of the few cases where we benefited from judicial supremacis

But notice the difference between liberal victories in the courts (even when built upon unconstitutional jurisprudence) and the few conservative victories (even when the jurisprudence is rooted in the plain text of the Constitution).

Immediately after Obergefell where the courts redefined the building block of all civilization, every red state pretty much immediately threw in the towel. Conversely, when conservatives won in Heller, the blue states immediately got to work to chip away at the scope of the victory by continuing to enforce anti-carry laws, assault weapons bans, and sundry restrictions. The dividends of liberals’ “Never surrender” mentality have paid off as the lower courts are upholding their shenanigans.

Thus once again, I must say, the federal judiciary is a dead-end for us to enforce true constitutionalism in blue states and will only serve as an anti-constitutional juggernaut for our policies in red states. Which is why we need judicial reform — badly.

Yesterday was the 225th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Years after the courts have been crowned king over our Constitution, everything under the sun has been retroactively enshrined into those critical amendments, except for the principles that were actually adopted in plain English. (For more from the author of “An Inconvenient Right: Ninth Circuit Fails to Protect 2nd Amendment” please click HERE)

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Shame Is Not a Hate Crime. Let’s Bring It Back in 2017

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In our modern culture of political “correctness,” one of the easiest ways to silence criticism is to smear a person’s character by accusing them of “shaming.” The “sin” of shaming comes in many varieties: slut shaming, fat shaming, or body shaming, mom shaming, gender shaming, race shaming, victim shaming, etc., etc. All of these accusations, however, boil down to the single worst indictment of our day: intolerance.

There was once a time when shame played a vital role in civil society. It was a tool that incentivized good, moral behavior by creating social consequences for immoral behavior. Today — in America, at least — shame has not so much disappeared as it has been blacklisted.

Bad Santa

Consider the recent high-profile shaming incident of the young North Carolina boy who accused Santa of fat shaming.
Earlier this month, a family’s trip to go see Santa took a turn for the worse. After having his picture taken with the jolly old elf, 9-year-old Anthony Mayse of Forest City, N.C., says Santa told him to “lay off the hamburgers and French fries.”

“It affected me so bad that I was crying until I went to bed that night,” Anthony told the local News 13. “And I want to say to him, ‘You don’t want to disrespect a 9-year-old. Even though what shape and size you are, it doesn’t matter.'”

The story went viral, sparking international outrage and widespread calls for the fat-shaming Santa (real name: Earl Crowder) to be fired. He eventually resigned and apologized to the family, but the viral coverage of the incident sealed Crowder’s fate as “bad Santa.”

Was Earl Crowder wrong to tell 9-year-old Anthony Mayse to cut back on the junk food? Probably. But the problem in this case wasn’t so much what was said, as who said it. In general, random strangers shouldn’t try to parent other people’s kids. But this doesn’t take away from the fact that Anthony’s mother, Ashley Mayse, who is also considerably overweight, should be encouraging healthier eating habits for the sake of her son’s health.

“You do you”

Today, there are no longer social norms that aim to secure a degree of common morality and propriety in America. For example, there is no commonly held belief that gluttony is a sin … or even a health threat, for that matter. Because of this, we see social justice groups like Healthy at Every Size, which teaches that “obesity” is a term of oppression used to unjustly shame individuals who are simply “different.”

Our “you do you” culture has redefined “shame” to mean any comment or action that does not “validate” an individual. The only people deemed worthy of such judgement, the thinking goes, are the so-called bigots who hold permanent, transcendent values (e.g. conservatives and the religious).

A stranger telling an overweight kid that he should exercise some self-discipline is not OK, because the statement calls that child’s choices into question. But it’s fine — nay, just — to shame Christian (and only Christian) business owners who won’t service a gay wedding against their conscience. What’s the difference here? The business owners’ belief in traditional marriage implies that the gay couple’s lifestyle and decision to marry are misguided. And who are these business owners to judge what is right or wrong for other people?

Shame on who?

One could argue, as many do, that forcing Christian business owners to service a gay wedding violates their personal choice to honor biblical teaching. But as we’ve seen in the many court cases leading up to and following the Obergefell gay marriage decision, the judicial consensus has been that deeply held religious beliefs are secondary to political correctness and the personal choices of others. When relativism and autonomy rule the day, anything the smacks of objective moral judgement is marked as bigotry.

Shame was once an effective and extralegal way to maintain order in society. It didn’t outlaw certain decisions so much as it made those actions lose their appeal. Shame caused many young people to be weary of having children out of wedlock. It discouraged thoughtless and obnoxious behavior in public spaces like grocery stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. It discouraged people from overeating, and deterred spouses from cheating. Like real civil laws, shame was originally a tool used to preserve public health, safety, and morals.

When the act of discerning right from wrong, good from bad, healthy from unhealthy, becomes a matter of personal choice and feelings, the end result can only be chaos and confusion. Each person is free to make his or her own decisions in this country, but to assert that all choices are equally good, correct, or acceptable is to deny the societal benefits of right action. If the end result of shame is a happier, healthier, better-behaved society, perhaps we should stop treating it like a hate crime. (For more from the author of “Shame Is Not a Hate Crime. Let’s Bring It Back in 2017” please click HERE)

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Obama Says Media Helped Putin in ‘Obsession’ with Leaks That Hurt Clinton

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President Barack Obama used part of his final White House press conference of the year to take shots at Russia and the media, and to argue that Ronald Reagan would disapprove of what he called Republican voters’ warming to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The main topic Friday afternoon was alleged Russian hacking and interference in the U.S. election, after reports that the intelligence community determined Putin’s government sought to help elect Donald Trump as president.

But aside from hacking the email of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, Obama said, there was no tampering with votes in local and state election systems.

“I can assure the public that there was not a kind of tampering with the voting process that was a concern and will continue to be a concern going forward,” the president said, when asked if the election was free and fair.

“The votes that were cast were counted. They were counted appropriately. We have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with.”

Obama also said relentless coverage of the email leaks were “unfair” to Clinton.

“I’m finding it a little curious that everyone is acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every single day,” he said in the White House’s packed press briefing room. “This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage.”

He added:

I do think it is worth reflecting how a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake and such a contrast between the candidates, seemed to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks.

Obama, who departed later Friday with his family for a 17-day holiday vacation in Hawaii, also appeared to put coverage of the email scandals in the category of “fake news”:

If fake news that is being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being issued by partisan news venues, then it’s not surprising that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched compared to some of the other stuff folks are hearing from domestic propagandists.

Obama also suggested that Republican voters are warming to Russia’s Putin, which he said was entirely about politics.

“There was a survey from a reputable source that found 37 percent of Republican voters approved of Putin,” Obama said. “Over a third of Republican voters approved of Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave.” (For more from the author of “Obama Says Media Helped Putin in ‘Obsession’ with Leaks That Hurt Clinton” please click HERE)

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4 Ways Congress Sought to Change or Scrap the Electoral College

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On Monday, 538 presidential electors selected by voters on Nov. 8 will choose a president when the Electoral College votes in states across the country.

This year marks the fifth time in history the popular vote winner lost the presidency. The other elections were in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.

Though Donald Trump won 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232, it may not be over yet. Several activist groups are demanding electors reject their state’s voters and cast a vote for someone other than Trump.

More than 50 of the 232 Democratic electors, and one Republican elector, have even asked for a national security briefing on the potential Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails before casting a vote.

President Barack Obama opted against weighing in on what electors should do, but spoke during his Friday press conference more generally about the Electoral College. Obama said:

The Electoral College is a vestige of an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states. It used to be that the Senate was not elected directly, it was just decided by state legislatures. It’s the same type of thinking that gives Wyoming two senators with about half a million people and California with 32 million get the same two. There are some structures in our political system that disadvantage Democrats. But the truth of the matter is, if we have a strong message, if we are speaking to the issues the American people care about, typically the popular vote and the Electoral College vote will align.

Congress has considered 850 separate proposals to amend the Constitution to change the way a president is elected, said Christine Blackerby, co-curator of the “Amending America” exhibit at the National Archives Museum.

Here is a look at a few of those efforts.

12th Amendment

The first major proposed change to the Electoral College was the only successful reform, coming in response to a glitch exposed in the 1800 election.

Presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and his vice presidential running mate Aaron Burr got the same number of Electoral College votes, 73 each. The problem was, in those days, the second place finisher in a presidential race was the vice president. The House of Representatives voted 35 times before finally electing Jefferson president.

Congress passed the amendment on Dec. 9, 1803, and it was ratified on June 15, 1804, putting the president and vice president on a ticket for electors to choose.

Lottery President

In 1846, a proposal was floated in Congress to replace the Electoral College with a lottery system.

Under this proposal, each state would have its own election. The winners of each of those elections would then be chosen by lot in Washington. Balls with names of candidates would be placed in a bowl, similar to lottery drawings seen today on TV. The first name drawn would be president, the second name drawn would be the vice president, Blackerby explained.

The proposal, House Joint Resolution 8, introduced on Jan. 13, 1846, never came to a vote.

Still, the “Amending America” exhibit allows visitors to see the most popular person from each state based on Google searches, then entered into a random drawing, to see who could be president today if this system had been enacted.

Executive Committees

Although the biggest complaint against the Electoral College is typically that it’s undemocratic, the exhibit lists two occasions that Congress considered taking matters entirely out of voters’ hands.

In 1808, a constitutional amendment was introduced in Congress to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a special committee of retired U.S. senators to choose the next president.

Congress introduced a similar proposal in 1860, just before the Civil War broke out. In this case, Congress and the executive branch would appoint a three-person committee that would choose the president every four years.

Direct Popular Vote

Of the hundreds of proposed changes to electing a president, a popular vote was far and away the most common. Similar bills have been introduced in nearly every session of Congress, but in most cases they were never debated nor acted upon.

The most recent examples where a popular vote proposal nearly passed were in 1969 and 1975, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

After the 1968 presidential election, third-party candidate George Wallace won 46 electoral votes. This prompted enough concern about third parties that Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., proposed a resolution abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a popular election, in which the winner would have to win at least 40 percent of the vote. The resolution passed the House by a 338-70 vote, but it was blocked by a filibuster in the Senate.

After the close 1976 election, Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., proposed a bill to amend the Constitution and switch to a direct popular vote. The bill failed by a close 51-48 vote

In other examples of action on the proposal to move to a popular vote, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the proposal in 1947, 1949, 1951, and 1969. The Senate subcommittee on constitutional amendments held hearings in 1948, 1953, 1955, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1967, and 1969. (For more from the author of “4 Ways Congress Sought to Change or Scrap the Electoral College” please click HERE)

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