The Pro-Life Cause in 2016: Some Bad Losses, some Hopeful Victories

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2016 saw losses and victories for the pro-life movement. The biggest loss was million-plus lives lost in the womb thanks to surgical, medical and drug-induced abortions.

But our movement also saw victories. Perhaps the biggest was when voters blocked strongly pro-abortion Hillary Clinton from the White House and elected Donald Trump instead, in part because he promised to end federal funding of abortion and to nominate a pro-life U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Here is The Stream’s list of some of the most consequential losses and victories this year.

Losses

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Texas’ laws mandating that abortion centers increase their standards of care. Specifically, the laws required abortionists to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, as well as requiring abortion centers to raise their standards to meet those of outpatient surgical centers. The laws had closed about half of Texas’ abortion centers.

The Court’s decision provided legal justification for lower courts to knock down similar standards in other states, including most recently the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision to overturn an admitting privileges law in that state.

A number of federal courts blocked state efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, for example one in Ohio and another in Utah.

The U.S. Supreme Court also refused to hear a pharmacy owner’s challenge to a Washington State requirement that the pharmacy provide abortion-inducing drugs to customers.

Illinois enacted a law requiring pro-life pregnancy care centers to refer women for abortions. That law is being challenged by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of pregnancy resource centers in the state. (Disclosure: One of the plaintiffs representing the centers is the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, which is a client of this reporter.)

In January, President Barack Obama vetoed a bill to defund Planned Parenthood.

President Obama’s administration recently finalized a rule that effectively bans states from blocking Planned Parenthood’s access to Title X program funds. (Title X gives states money for “family planning services,” including abortion-inducing drugs and devices.) The rule was created after many states attempted to defund the abortion giant thanks to videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood engaged in illegal abortions to illegally profit off of fetal harvesting.

California’s liberal Catholic Governor, Jerry Brown, signed a law written by Planned Parenthood that could jail pro-life journalists.

For the first time, the Democratic Party’s platform formally endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment. In effect since 1980, the amendment has been annually approved in a bipartisan manner, and one analysis estimates it has saved over two million children from abortion.

Planned Parenthood, which spends millions in each election cycle to elect pro-abortion politicians, gave its first endorsement in its 100-year history. The endorsement went to Hillary Clinton.

A Houston, Texas, grand jury chose to not indict Planned Parenthood over fetal harvesting charges. Instead, the jury indicted investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt for alleged lawbreaking. (On the good news front, those charges were dropped over the summer.)

The abortion industry and its allies used misleading rhetoric to create panic about the risk of microcephaly to the unborn children of women who contracted the Zika virus. That rhetoric likely was a reason that people across the country tended to support late-term abortions when the mother has contracted the Zika virus.

Victories

As mentioned above, the Center for Medical Progress’ Daleiden and Merritt saw charges against them dropped.

The U.S. Supreme Court sent to lower courts the Obama administration’s mandate that religious non-profits violate their employees’ consciences and participate in insuring contraceptives and abortifacients. Pro-life leaders said the decision was a partial victory for the Little Sisters of the Poor, Priests for Life, Oklahoma Wesleyan University and other plaintiffs..

A federal court rejected an American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) lawsuit meant to force a Catholic hospital chain to provide abortions and contraceptives.

As outlined in this Washington Post piece, South Dakota, South Carolina and Ohio passed bans on abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation were signed in 2016, making 18 states with such bans. Additionally, at least two states lengthened abortion waiting periods, and Indiana banned abortion if the mother was getting one because of the race or sex of the child, or because the child had Down Syndrome.

Several states have banned dismemberment abortions, which are used in 95 percent of second-trimester abortions. While most of the measures have been blocked by courts, and even if upheld would still allow abortions in the second trimester, supporters such as Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (R-OK) say the effort will educate the public on the realities of abortion.

A Created Equal-commissioned study in Canada found that graphic images of abortion victims modestly swayed people’s views of abortion towards supporting life. Graphic images of abortion victims are controversial both inside and outside the pro-life movement, so understanding their effectiveness is important. Additionally, the study noted, people’s personal views on abortion are often correlated to supporting pro-life policies. Thus, the study could have a secondary effect of leading to pro-life policies, at least in the area in which it was conducted.

Another study found that about two-thirds of babies born at 22 and 23 weeks’ gestation survive to leave the hospital if proper medical care is provided. This German study further weakens the abortion industry’s argument for the alleged necessity of late-term abortions — the earliest birth at which a baby has survived is prior to 21 weeks’ gestation — and is yet another rebuttal to the idea that abortion until the ninth month is an acceptable political and moral perspective.

In the third and last debate during the 2016 general election presidential campaign, Trump said about late-term abortions, “I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”

Trump said that in front of an estimated 72 million viewers. Millions of Americans also watched Mike Pence defend unborn life in the vice presidential debate with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). (For more from the author of “The Pro-Life Cause in 2016: Some Bad Losses, some Hopeful Victories” please click HERE)

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Drive the U.N. Into the Sea

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This weekend, on the eve of the Jewish holiday that marks that people’s resistance to savage pagan occupation (Chanukah), the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution that is stunning in its moral blindness. It condemned all Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — two regions where Jews lived for thousands of years before an Arab set foot in Palestine.

Those regions were captured from Jordan in one of Israel’s many wars of self-defense against genocide. They have never belonged to any Palestinian state, because one has never existed. Jordan doesn’t want them back. In a series of agreements, Israel has accepted that most of those conquered regions would form the basis of a Palestinian state, if it ever felt safe in granting one.

Jews are buying land and moving to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem for a new Palestinian state; these Jews would form a tiny minority of its citizens, much smaller than the Arab contingent of Israeli citizens. So why are Jewish settlements considered an obstructionist “barrier to peace”? Why condemn Israel for letting its citizens buy land and live there?

Need Palestine be Judenrein?

The answer, of course, is obvious: Because the Palestinians are viciously intolerant of Jews, and today only Israeli troops keep the Arab majority in the conquered territories from “driv[ing] the Jews into the sea,” as the charter of Hamas promises. (Hamas is the radical Islamist terrorist organization that most Palestinians support.) Jews were violently expelled from virtually every Muslim country in 1948, from ancient communities that long pre-dated the warrior cult of Islam.

So the assumption on which the UN based its resolution is that of course the Palestinians would do that to the Jews in these territories, the moment they got the chance. Therefore, because the Palestinians are so intolerant and wanna-be genocidal, to plant Jews in the territory which the Palestinians were promised is an obstacle to peace. Have you got that? Such is the moral logic that governs the “international community.”

Israelis, being realists, know this too — and they’re not going to hand over Jews to the tender mercies of a Hamas administration. So in a sense, you could say that by settling Jews in a region, Israel is laying permanent claim to it. That need not be true, of course — if a Palestinian government could be found that wouldn’t demand that every square inch of its territory be judenrein.

The U.N. Only Holds White People to Civilized Standards

The resolution condemning Israel was classic United Nations: A preening, self-congratulatory moralistic veneer that covers blank hatred and a vicious will to power.

Indeed, as Paul Johnson documents in his classic history Modern Times, passing such resolutions and promoting such bankrupt policies has largely been the function of the United Nations since the 1950s, when the loathsome Kantian moralizer Dag Hammarskjold transformed the international body into the action arm of the “non-aligned” nations — which were almost uniformly run by vicious dictators (Castro, Nasser, Idi Amin) who drove their people into unprecedented poverty and misery.

It was Hammarskjold who cozied up to post-colonial despots, some of them guilty of genocide, while damning the Europeans who were trying to leave their colonies in some kind of livable order. According to Johnson, Hammarskjold actually said that black-on-black genocide was none of the U.N.’s business; its job was simply to remove the white man from Africa. In other words, it seems that Hammarskjold invented multiculturalism — which boiled down, is the theory that only white people can be expected to hew to civilized standards. So only they should be condemned.

The U.N. Headquarters is Already a Madhouse

The latest piece of paper from the toxic United Nations applies the same logic to Jews. Of course they should be held to the very highest canons of civil rights legislation — while we take it for granted that Arab Muslims will slaughter Jewish women and children the first time they get the chance. Just accept that moral standard, as President Obama did when he waved the resolution through, and everything makes perfect sense.

The United Nations does not serve the high ideals of peaceful cooperation and human rights for which it was founded so much as it uses them as rhetorical masks for the exercise of power. Human rights panels are frequently chaired by intolerant tyrannies like Islamist Saudi Arabia. Western nations typically send to the U.N. their most utopian, ideological representatives, who use the institution to promote a “globalist” agenda that arrogates power from democratic governments into the hands of unaccountable committees.

Austin Ruse, who for decades has fought to defend the rights of unborn children and the family, has recounted here at The Stream how the U.N. tries to impose manufactured “rights” to abortion and “transgender” recognition on unwilling elected governments. It has invented global “crises” such as “overpopulation” and climate change catastrophe to serve as the pretext for U.N. agencies to grasp for ever more power over the wealth, laws and policies of nations such as ours.

In a sane world, which perhaps President Trump will help to bring about, the U.S. would not fund the United Nations, host it, or even dignify it by being a member. New York City would be a much better place without the lavish consulates of starving Third World countries dotting the Upper East Side. Take the U.N. headquarters, that massive monument to hypocrisy and double standards, and put it to proper use: as a public mental hospital. (For more from the author of “Drive the U.N. Into the Sea” please click HERE)

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Socialism: The Grinch That Stole Venezuela’s Children

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The Christmas season is a time to think of those less fortunate. This year, the children of Venezuela certainly qualify.

It’s not merely that they’re suffering through the third year of a crippling recession, although that’s bad enough. Thanks to the wealth-destroying policies of President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, more of them are hopeless, starving and effectively orphaned.

Decked out in black to mourn her murdered son, 40-year-old Dileida Palacios told her daughter that, this year, “everything is tough and Santa Claus isn’t coming.” Who can afford toys when a few food staples can absorb much of the $20 average monthly salary? Hyperinflation caused by runaway deficit spending has made the nation’s currency, the Bolivar, worth less than one U.S. penny, and inflation is expected to climb to 2,000 percent in 2017.

Socialism Drives Parents to Give Away their Children

The crisis has deepened to the point that a growing number of parents are doing the unthinkable: giving away their children. While the government does not release official statistics, Reuters reports that “three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family.”

Behold the fruit of the latest failure of socialism: the redistribution of children.

It may be inaccurate to describe as a “failure” one of socialism’s cherished goals. Friedrich Engels, the more obscure co-author of The Communist Manifesto, wrote in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family that Communism sought to transform raising children “into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike.” Statists of all descriptions must necessarily seek to undermine the family, and any pre-political or intermediary institution that competes for its loyalty.

It is a miracle that children are able to be born, as the economic crisis led to an increase in voluntary sterilization. Venezuela’s stagflation, crony wealth redistribution, growing indebtedness, punishment of investors, and nationalization of industries have succeeded in fraying the tightest of all bonds.

Parents simply cannot afford life’s necessities since Maduro — who insists that the nation’s economic woes are part of a conspiracy to topple him, and hence the people’s revolution, from power — imposed strict price controls on food and medicine. Shelves immediately cleared out and have only been restocked in areas where he lifted artificial price ceilings. But there are few goods and is even less investment in a market beset, as the World Bank delicately puts it, with “distortions.” (The Heritage Foundation describes the nation’s economy as “repressed.”)

Like Stalin Playing Santa Claus

To divert the people’s attention, this month Venezuelan authorities seized 3.8 million toys from the nation’s leading toy manufacturer, Kreisel, on the grounds that the company conspired to sell them for more than the state-mandated price. The toys were redistributed in the days before Christmas by the Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAPs), the same committees charged with distributing enough groceries to feed every needy family – and which have been credibly accused of starving Maduro’s critics.

The distribution of toys will be doubly problematic since many of the children, socialism’s refugees from their own families, no longer live at the address the government has on file.

Not Even Big Brother Can Really Run an Economy

All of this bears out Friedrich von Hayek’s observation that even the most enlightened government cannot properly manage an economy, because it lacks the necessary information to do so. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom:

There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the facts. But as the factors which have to be taken into account become numerous and complex, no one center can keep track of them. The constantly changing conditions of demand and supply of different commodities can never be fully known or quickly enough disseminated by any one center. Under competition — and under no other economic order — the price system automatically records all the relevant data.

Yet Venezuela’s socialists continue to practice the fatal conceit with no signs of mercy or self-knowledge. Upon confiscating Kreisel’s inventory the consumer protection agency, Sundde, tweeted: “Our children are sacred, we will not let you rob them of Christmas.” In a nationally televised speech announcing the toy distribution, Maduro modestly called himself “a reinforcement for Father Christmas” and “Saint Nicolas with a mustache!”

But the children of Venezuela need their families far more than the government’s purloined trinkets. They long to grow up in a society that has the building blocks of human flourishing: respect for the rule of law, inalienable rights, the sanctity of the family unit, and economic policies that reward productivity and private initiative. Far from the saintly bishop, who gave his own money to those in need, Maduro’s socialist policies are like year-round minions of the Grinch, snatching away Venezuelan children’s food, their families, and their future. (For more from the author of “Socialism: The Grinch That Stole Venezuela’s Children” please click HERE)

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How the FAA’s War on Drones Is Killing a Popular Pastime

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One year ago, officials at the Federal Aviation Administration rang in the holidays as only bureaucrats can: writing new regulations forcing drone owners to register themselves with the federal government before their first flight.

And because nothing says “Christmas” quite like criminal fines and jail time, the agency promised $277,500 in civil and criminal penalties and three years’ imprisonment to any overeager youngster who rushed out to play without first thinking about the wishes of a distant bureaucracy.

The FAA’s recreational registry was, and remains, one of the most egregious acts of regulatory overcriminalization in recent memory. Even the agency’s own registration task force reported that the criminal penalties drone owners would face were disproportionate in the hobby drone context. Nevertheless, the FAA charged ahead, releasing its interim final rule to the public just three weeks after the task force report, and a scant seven days before going into effect.

Before it could regulate, though, the agency first had to get around the Congress. In 2012, legislators passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, plainly stating that the FAA “may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding model aircraft” flown for recreational purposes.

The agency responded that the registry is not really a regulation, and that drones are not really model aircraft; they are “aircraft” for the purposes of federal law, so the agency always had the authority to require registration. Never mind that this claim contradicted all prior agency guidance on drone regulation.

Once it twisted itself in a knot to get around Congress’ prohibitions, the FAA then had to figure a means to bypass the public notice and comment process mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act, as well.

That standard rulemaking process can take months or years. It is designed to give the public a chance to review proposed rules and to ensure that administrative agencies are responsive to public concerns. Notice and comment brings at least a modicum of accountability and transparency to the regulatory process.

It also serves to ensure that citizens are not caught unaware by new rules that are promulgated suddenly and without warning—an especially grave concern when, as with the drone owners’ registry, they contain criminal penalties.

But the FAA got around these restrictions by using the narrow “good cause” exemption. If agencies can show that the normal process is “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,” it can skip public participation and issue a final rule.

In this case, the FAA claimed America’s skies were about to be overrun by hoards of drones that, like a modern take on a Hitchcock classic, would wreak havoc and endanger the national airspace. Because of this exigent threat, officials claimed, public safety demanded swift regulatory action.

There were some flaws to this line of reasoning. First, the FAA could not, and still cannot, point to a single collision between a drone and a civilian airliner.

Officials frequently cite figures that they claim demonstrate a rising incidence of near-collisions, but analysis has concluded that in only a tiny fraction of these purported instances did the pilot feel the need to take evasive action. In fact, in many cases, the object originally identified as a drone turned out to be something else altogether.

The FAA’s exigency argument fails because the skyrocketing popularity of drones was hardly surprising. Congress legislated on the subject three years before the FAA announced its registry. It seems reasonable enough that an agency specializing in aviation safety should have been able to anticipate the issue. Somehow, the “failure justifies fiat” argument worked—subject to a lawsuit pending in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, over whether the drone registration is illegal.

Finally, despite claiming that exigent threats to the national airspace required prompt action, the registry does nothing to deter or prevent bad actors from using drones to commit crimes or acts of terror, similar to how gun rights restrictions generally haven’t stopped bad actors from committing gun violence. Drone owners are not registered automatically at the point of sale, but instead are supposed to register at home before sending their drones on their first flight.

Someone buying a drone to use it for illicit purposes can also easily evade the registry requirement with little risk of penalty after the fact, because if the drone is crashed into an aircraft, explodes, burns, or otherwise evades capture, tracing the unmarked drone back to its owner will be virtually impossible.

Even for those who do comply, FAA-assigned unique personal ID numbers can be placed inside the drone, making remote identification impossible. Ultimately, the drone would have to crash, largely intact and in an area where it could not be retrieved by its owner, for the registry to be useful in tracking down responsible parties.

Certainly, for those who already want to fly responsibly, a registry may be a means of discouraging reckless conduct and reinforcing safety. But for those who want to use drones for ill purposes, the deterrent value is nil.

Fortunately, the FAA’s lawless actions have not escaped notice and scrutiny. Aside from the legal challenge to the registry requirement, the House Freedom Caucus recently identified the recreational rule as one of over 200 Obama-era regulations that should be repealed when the incoming Trump administration takes office in January.

Concerns about safety, whether to aircraft in the national airspace or to people and property on the ground, are not invalid, and should not to be taken lightly. Fortunately, a wide array of technology-agnostic criminal, tort, and property laws exist that address many of the harms and risks of drones. For example, it is already a federal crime to damage, destroy, or interfere with an aircraft.

The FAA should reconsider how it might work with partners in critical military and civil infrastructure, long-standing and self-regulating hobbyist communities, and technology groups to fashion sensible rules to address drone-specific harms or drone-related conduct that existing laws and regulations do not reach.

And of course, any restrictions on recreational drone activities must be authorized by Congress.

A year ago, the FAA began the process of overcriminalizing and over-regulating drones—a process that continues beyond just the recreational registry. Its redefinition of the term “aircraft” has exposed children to 20-year prison sentences for crashing toys. Its burdensome and restrictive commercial drone regulations have driven innovation and development abroad.

Clearly, the FAA won’t be stopping itself anytime soon. It’s time to rein them in. (For more from the author of “How the FAA’s War on Drones Is Killing a Popular Pastime” please click HERE)

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Impeachment Controversy Stokes Uncertainty Ahead of South Korean Election

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The next South Korean presidential election is scheduled to be held on or before Dec. 20, 2017. However, there is a possibility that South Korea will have its election in advance because of President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, which led to her immediate suspension.

Park’s impeachment must be ratified by the Constitutional Court within six months in order to become permanent. If the Constitutional Court votes to ratify, South Korea must then hold new presidential elections within 60 days.

Potential candidates are already starting to declare their intention to run for president, including a major South Korean opposition leader, Moon Jae-in.

However, there are concerns among experts in South Korea and the U.S that progressive opposition parties are attempting to reverse current South Korean foreign policies that have been pragmatic on North Korea and have seen an improvement in U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral relations.

Moon, the leading progressive candidate, has persistently expressed a desire to strengthen ties with China and reopen its banner of “inter-Korean dialogue.” He also suggested he would renegotiate and review the comfort women agreement and the General Security of Military Information Agreement with Japan.

During his interview earlier this month, Moon said, “The Kaesong Industrial Complex has to be resumed immediately, and the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense has to be left as a task for the next government.”

Moon also said he will “visit North Korea first” before the U.S. if he wins the election. This statement caused a public controversy and stoked the flames of a scandal that had been dogging Moon for several months.

In a recent memoir, former Foreign Minister Song Min-soon claimed that Moon was responsible for South Korea’s decision to abstain from a 2007 U.N. resolution vote on North Korea’s human rights situation after listening to Pyongyang’s opposition. At the time, Moon was chief of staff to President Roh Moo-hyun.

The question of Moon’s “suspicious security standards” has limited his increasing popularity, even as he has benefited from the recent impeachment. But according to a poll from Realmeter, Moon was still leading with a 23.7 percent support rate in early December.

There is speculation, however, that Moon will face a challenge from another progressive candidate, Lee Jae-myung, the mayor of a satellite city of Seoul. Lee ranks third in the polls and has a 14.9 percent support rate. In response to Moon’s earlier statement, Lee said he would “visit the U.S. first.” But his foreign policy proposals do not seem to vary much from Moon’s.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is currently polling ahead of Lee and behind Moon with 20.5 percent of popular support. He has not spoken much about his decisions at the U.N. or his policy views because his tenure as U.N. chief has not yet expired.

But Ban is considered to be the only moderate conservative candidate who has a chance over Moon. If the conservative party manages to recover from the recent scandal, it will probably reassemble under Ban, who is considered favorable to the U.S.

The South Korean presidential race is a multicandidate field. The two most likely scenarios are: Ban vs. Moon or Ban vs. Lee. Whether Moon or Lee compete as progressive candidates, Ban will have a hard fight considering the current political atmosphere in South Korea.

The next South Korean election is important because it may affect the future of U.S.-Korean relations. If the progressive candidate wins, South Korea might pivot to China, reverse pragmatic policies against North Korea that enforce U.N. resolutions, and raise tensions against Japan—all policy moves that contravene U.S. national interests.

In this period of relative political uncertainty, the U.S. should reassure its extended guarantee of deterrence to its allies, encourage an improving relationship between South Korea and Japan, and affirm its dedication to enhancing sanctions and targeted financial measures to increase pressure on the North Korean regime. (For more from the author of “Impeachment Controversy Stokes Uncertainty Ahead of South Korean Election” please click HERE)

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Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Prosecuted These Civil Rights Cases

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Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., spent a considerable amount of his time as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama pressing civil rights lawsuits. He also assisted local prosecutors in a case that helped wipe out the Ku Klux Klan in the state.

Yet accusations about the Alabama senator’s past on racial issues have become a focal point for those opposing his confirmation to be the next attorney general after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

NAACP President Cornell Brooks, in a written statement, accused Sessions of having “disdain for our nation’s civil rights laws.” Brooks said:

Senator Sessions’ record suggests that he will carry on an old, ugly legacy in this country’s history when civil rights for African-Americans, women, and minorities were not regarded as core American values. While Lady Justice may be said to be blind, we need an attorney general with 20/20 vision in seeing racial injustice. Whether Senator Sessions, with decades of failing grades on the NAACP’s report card, possesses a racial vision and commitment to justice is in serious question.

A letter to Senate leaders from member organizations of the Leadership Conference, a coalition of civil rights groups, asserted: “Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”

But the same letter goes on to say:

Senator Sessions’ record does include some positive actions. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center … acknowledged that he was helpful in the center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan following its role in the 1981 lynching death of Michael Donald.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hold a confirmation hearing for Sessions in the new year even before Trump, who picked him to run the Justice Department, is sworn in as president Jan. 20.

The old accusations against Sessions played a key role in stopping his 1986 nomination to serve as U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Alabama.

Sessions is no racist and such attacks are a means of personalizing policy differences, said Horace Cooper, co-chairman of Project 21, a black conservative group, and adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“All I’ve seen from Jeff Sessions is that he has followed the law as the Supreme Court has defined it and has not attempted to make law,” Cooper told The Daily Signal. “It’s proper for a U.S. attorney general or a state attorney general to make decisions based on the law, whether the law is popular or not.”

Responding to a question from the Judiciary Committee asking him to describe the 10 most significant cases he litigated, Sessions wrote that five regarded racial matters, such as voting rights, desegregation, and prosecution of a Klan-motivated murder. He also explained his role in a fraud case against a civil rights activist, who was acquitted.

Paul A. Hancock, a former Civil Rights Division lawyer now in private practice in Miami, said in an interview with The Daily Signal that Sessions worked with the division and never against it. Still, Hancock delivered negative testimony to the Judiciary Committee about Sessions in 1986.

“Civil rights cases are mostly handled out of D.C. but the U.S. attorney’s views are sought,” Hancock told The Daily Signal. “It’s not unheard of for the U.S. attorney to take credit for a lawsuit, just as it’s not unheard of for an attorney general to take credit. But we never had any difficulty with him as a U.S. attorney.”

In decades past, federal prosecutors in Southern states resisted Justice’s Civil Rights Division, a Trump transition source said, adding that Sessions never claimed to have prepared the cases or taken the lead. Instead, he was the public face of the cases when DOJ lawyers returned to Washington.

‘First Voter Suppression Lawsuit’: US v. Conecuh County

Sessions said in response to the Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire that he understood a case out of Conecuh County “was the first voter suppression lawsuit ever instituted by the United States Department of Justice.”

He added: “I am honored to have been part of it.”

Sessions worked with Justice’s Civil Rights Division in a suit first brought in October 1983 against Conecuh County, after allegations the county hired only white poll workers.

Some of those poll workers made racist comments to turn away black voters, allowed white voters to cast ballots when their names were not on the rolls at a polling place, and put limits on how many blacks could vote, according to the suit.

In March 1984, Sessions and the voting section of the Civil Rights Division filed a pleading. Sessions was also part of discovery motions.

In June 1984, the case was resolved with a consent decree that ensured election workers would stop harassing and intimidating black voters. The decree encouraged political parties to recruit black poll workers.

Voting Rights: US v. Dallas County Commission

In July 1982, Sessions co-filed an 80-page brief with the voting section of the Civil Rights Division that was a “finding of fact” stating that at-large districts used to elect county commissioners and school board members denied blacks full participation in the voting process.

The case dragged on until 1988, when a court ordered the county to have five districts for electing board members, with three containing majority black populations.

“Along with the [American Civil Liberties Union], my office continued to support extensive litigation,” Sessions wrote in reply to the questionnaire.

Prosecuting an Activist: US v. Turner

This is the case Sessions’ critics eagerly point to, largely because it involved bringing charges against Albert Turner, a former adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and mostly because Turner was acquitted.

The matter began in 1982, when Perry County District Attorney Roy Johnson urged a federal investigation after concluding the matter was too large for his office.

An Alabama grand jury, which was majority black and led by a black foreman, issued a report saying they were convinced “a fair election is being denied the citizens of Perry County, both black and white.”

The grand jury report asked the Justice Department for “vigorous prosecutions” and a federal monitor for elections.

However, the Civil Rights Division declined to investigate, and so did Sessions.

“We expected the local investigation would have caused all campaigners to re-evaluate their activities and conform to the law,” Sessions wrote in the Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

In 1984, when nearly every candidate for Perry County public office was black, several black candidates told Johnson, the district attorney, that they thought the election was being stolen.

Johnson, Sessions wrote, told him “extremely large numbers of absentee ballots were being taken to a central headquarters where the ballots were being altered to ensure that they were being marked by candidates endorsed by Turner.”

Sessions said he didn’t want to be involved, but reluctantly asked an FBI special agent to observe the post office where the activity allegedly was occurring.

Sessions said the FBI saw Turner and his wife Evelyn drop off more than 300 ballots for mailing at the post office, and also saw Turner associate Spencer Hogue Jr. deposit another 170 ballots on the same night. These ballots made up the majority of the 729 absentee ballots cast in the county.

The FBI’s investigation determined that at least 75 of the 729 ballots had erasures or alterations, and 25 individuals said they hadn’t authorized changes that the Turners and Hogue allegedly made.

Sessions’ office charged the Turners and Hogue with 29 counts, including mail and election fraud. The defense argued that the practice was legal and voters gave permission to make changes. A jury acquitted all three on all charges.

Taking Down the Klan: Hays v. Alabama

Henry F. Hays was the son of Ku Klux Klan leader Bennie Jack Hays. In 1981, the younger Hays and an accomplice slit the throat of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old black man, and hanged his body from a tree.

Sessions said his office worked with state prosecutors to bring the case and to ensure a death sentence.

“Because the federal government did not have an effective death penalty, I insisted Hays be prosecuted by the local district attorney, Chris Galanos,” Sessions wrote.

After Hays’ conviction, in an unusual move, the state judge overrode the jury’s life sentence and sentenced Hays to death.

Later, while Sessions served as Alabama’s state attorney general, his office defended the verdict when it was appealed to the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Donald’s family won a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, which essentially bankrupted the organization in the state.

Sessions worked on the case with Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Figures. In 1986, Figures, who is black, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions had said the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

This allegation was part of what sunk the Sessions’ nomination for the judgeship.

Sessions, before asking that his 1986 nomination be withdrawn, said the comment was meant as a joke to ridicule the Klan. He added, “I detest the Klan.”

Desegregation in Mobile County

In a case that began in 1963, parents filed a class action lawsuit against the Mobile County Commission, asserting that it continued to unconstitutionally segregate public schools. After numerous court rulings, the parties entered a consent decree.

“More than a decade after the district court approved the consent decree on behalf of the United States, and with the support of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, papers were filed with the court contesting the legally binding effect of the consent decree and alleging the school district had yet to fully integrate,” Sessions wrote.

The objections came after the county continued to allow several single-race schools.

As U.S. attorney, Sessions co-filed briefs in 1981, 1983, and 1985 with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division contending the school system was not fully integrated and challenging the validity of some of the consent decree.

The federal district court rejected part of the argument by Sessions and the agency, but still found the schools were not properly integrated.

Other Voting Rights Enforcement

In addition to cases Sessions highlighted in the Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Trump’s presidential transition team notes other cases.

In the case of the United States v. Marengo County Commission, a group of citizens in 1977 brought a class action lawsuit regarding the county’s at-large system of electing members to the county commission and board of education.

After Sessions became U.S. attorney in 1981, his office worked on setting up a redistricting plan. After the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1987 that the system diluted the impact of blacks’ votes, the county adopted a district plan.

In 1974, Alabama’s Hale County changed its district system to at-large races, which prompted federal litigation in 1976 that dragged over into Sessions’ time as U.S. attorney. Playing only a limited role, in October 1981, Sessions and the Civil Rights Division co-filed a response to the county’s district selection plan, and the court adopted the final alternative that December.

Another case, United States v. City of Demopolis, was similar in that Sessions worked with the Civil Rights Division to press a lawsuit against the city’s at-large system for electing members of the city council.

In March 1986, the case was settled after less than two months when the city agreed to enact racially fair, single-member districts. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Prosecuted These Civil Rights Cases” please click HERE)

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Israel Green-Lights Settlements After UN Snub

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Israeli authorities gave the go-ahead for the construction of hundreds of new settlement sites in East Jerusalem Monday after a United Nations resolution condemned Israel over the issue.

The defiant move comes after the U.S. government did not veto the U.N. condemnation of Israeli settlements, a marked change in U.S. policy. The Obama administration affirmed the decision to abstain in the vote on the resolution, despite being able to defeat it with its veto power, saying that Israeli settlements “puts at risk the two-state solution, as does any continued incitement to violence.”

“Israel is a country with national pride, and we do not turn the other cheek,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the wake of the resolution. “This is a responsible, measured, and vigorous response, the natural response of a healthy people that is making it clear to the nations of the world that what was done at the U.N. is unacceptable to us.”

President-elect Donald Trump more closely aligns with Netanyahu’s position, and lashed out at the U.N. in the wake of the vote.

Beyond approving more settlements, the Israeli government has cut diplomatic contact at the U.N. with countries that voted in favor of the resolution, and summoned the U.S. ambassador to Israel to admonish him.

Palestinian leaders immediately hailed the vote as a victory.

“Now we can talk about the boycott of all settlements, the companies that work with them, et cetera, and actually take legal action against them if they continue to work with them,” the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority told Palestinian media.

Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., even charged the Obama administration with orchestrating the vote. “The United States was actually behind that gang-up,” Dermer told CNN Sunday. He continued that the evidence of the Obama administration’s role would be presented to the Trump administration in due time. (For more from the author of “Israel Green-Lights Settlements After UN Snub” please click HERE)

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Dangerous Times for Israel Demand Renewed American Commitment

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“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking,” said a troubled Albert Einstein as he contemplated the horror of nuclear weapons. “The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

Dr. Einstein was right in echoing what the Prophet Jeremiah wrote in the 7th century B.C.: “The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). Like the permanence of human falleness, however, the technology and reality of militarized nuclear power cannot be undone.

When, this week, the United States failed to prevent the United Nations’ Security Council from condemning Israeli settlements in “occupied Palestinian territory,” the possible use of nuclear weapons became a more vivid fear for the Jewish State, a nation Albert Einstein supported vigorously in its early years.

Attacking Israel has become a cottage industry at what supposedly is the world’s forum to prevent international conflict. In November 2015 alone, the United Nations passed no less than 20 resolutions “singling out Israel for criticism — and only 3 resolutions on the rest of the world combined.”

Yet this week’s resolution is unique in that given the opportunity, America declined to stop a one-sided, anti-Israel bill from going through the Security Council.

The Connection Between U.N. Action, U.S. Indifference and Nuclear Weapons

So, what’s the relationship between the U.N. action, America’s indifference to it, and nuclear weapons? First, some background: Israel has control of areas it took from Arab Palestinian control following the 1967 Six-Day War. Its control of this territory is hotly disputed. What is indisputable is Israel’s strategic importance to American security interests throughout the Middle East, as is our moral duty to stand by one of our truest allies and friends.

Israel’s reaction to America’s failure to stand with her was swift and devastating. “Israel rejects this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. and will not abide by its terms,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said following the vote. “At a time when the Security Council does nothing to stop the slaughter of half a million people in Syria, it disgracefully gangs up on the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and calls the Western Wall ‘occupied territory.’”

And in an extraordinary public criticism of President Obama, Mr. Netanyahu said, “The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes. Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.”

Mr. Trump personally intervened earlier in the week in contacting the president of Egypt, whose Security Council representative was planning to offer the measure. Pursuant to the President-elect’s call, Egypt agreed to refrain from offering the resolution. Yet four other countries, including American ally New Zealand, took advantage of their outgoing membership on the U.N. Security Council to offer the resolution instead of Egypt.

And the Obama Administration did nothing.

Enter the threat of nuclear weapon use. Israel’s most intransigent enemy, Iran, may or may not have nuclear weapons. But clearly Iran has been pursuing the development of such for many years, and the deal struck by the Obama Administration with Iran concerning its nuclear program is hardly reassuring to close observers concerned that it contains atomic bomb-size loopholes.

America’s failure to support Israel at a time of enormous crisis in that interminably roiling region (Syria, ISIS, and Iran, to name but three continuing thorns in the world’s flesh) sends a signal of weakness and, thereby, opportunity for Israel’s dedicated foes. Although President-elect Trump promises to restore America’s unequivocal allegiance to Israel (“As to the UN, things will be different after Jan. 20th,” the Tweetmaster-in-Chief commented last week), the West’s cowardly collusion with Israel’s enemies (among other Security Council members, France and Britain voted to condemn the settlements) only strengthens the hands of the hard-liners in Iran who want to reduce Israel to a smoking smudge on the map of the world.

A few days ago, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said, “Today, the world public opinion is faced with this strong argument that the Zionist regime has never been after peace, and this argument and reasoning should be used to show that there is no way, but jihad and resistance for the Palestinians against the usurper regime.”

Israel is not for peace, and is a “usurper regime?” This from a man whose government pays for the terrorist group Islamic Jihad’s vicious violence against Israel.

Will Iran attack Israel with nuclear weapons tomorrow? No. But do American vacillation and Western anti-Israelism incentivize not only Iranian-sponsored terrorism but, in all likelihood, renewed clandestine efforts by Iran’s government to construct nuclear weapons? Almost certainly.

It can be hoped that when Donald Trump takes office, his bold support for Israel will not waver. He has promised to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and to ensure a robust U.S.-Israeli military alliance.

Let us pray that Mr. Trump’s commitment to the Jewish state will be dogged. If it is, perhaps Albert Einstein, were he still with us, would be a little less inclined to have been a watchmaker than the founder of modern physics. (For more from the author of “Dangerous Times for Israel Demand Renewed American Commitment” please click HERE)

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Be Vigilant: These Trump Cabinet Picks Don’t Bode Well for Privacy

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It may be premature to sound the alarm on future actions that Trump may or may not take as president. His public statements and Cabinet picks, however, certainly do give hints of trends and attitudes that may turn into policy over the next four years. And from that perspective, those of us who worry about protecting the 4th Amendment against the overreach of government mass surveillance may be in for a bumpy ride.

To begin with, the president-elect himself said during his campaign that he would be “fine” with reestablishing bulk collection and storage of phone metadata. You may recall that mass collection of this data was specifically outlawed under the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015 after Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the government was collecting — unconstitutionally — telephone metadata without a warrant.

Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, retired general Mike Flynn, is hard to pin down on the specific issue of surveillance. His defense intelligence background and his unabashed support for other extralegal practices such as torture do not inspire confidence that he would be a principled defender of due process. Senator Sessions, R-Ala. (C, 78%) too, Trump’s pick for the nation’s chief law enforcement post, has a record of supporting the expansion of the government’s ability to spy on Americans en masse.

But most concerning so far is Trump’s pick of Mike Pompeo, R-Kan. (C, 76%) to head the CIA. Pompeo made pretty explicit what he thought of constitutional restrictions on government surveillance in an article he co-wrote early in 2016. The article stated that:

“Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

While I like and respect Pompeo on many other issues, on due process and privacy he’s as wrongheaded as it’s possible to get. The right to not be subjected to government surveillance unless justified by a specific court order follows directly from the protection against undue search and seizure found in the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. That’s no mere “legal and bureaucratic impediment.”

As Rare’s Jack Hunter notes about Pompeo, he appears not to “understand that the purpose of the Constitution and our Bill of Rights isn’t to protect terrorists, but innocent civilians from rogue, unlimited government power.”

It’s worth noting that we don’t know who Trump will tap for the crucial roles of director of national intelligence or director of the National Security Agency. But early indications don’t point towards a good outcome there either.

Though the CIA and NSA are supposed to focus their intelligence gathering overseas, the never-ending War on Terror has provided them (and the FBI) with ample opportunity and motive to turn the defense surveillance apparatus upon U.S. citizens. In doing so, these agencies frequently ignore the 4th Amendment’s demands that such an invasion of privacy should at least be accompanied by a judge’s warrant.

This turn towards domestic surveillance isn’t necessarily malicious in intent. The intelligence community has a natural interest in constantly expanding their ability to spy on our information — it’s their job (though they do swear oaths to defend the Constitution as well). That’s why it’s crucial that someone be watching the watchmen to tell them “no” when they’ve overstepped their bounds.

We stand at a critical juncture in policy as it relates to digital surveillance. The rapid advance of technology leads us to create ever larger quantities of personal electronic data for the government to harvest, often in cooperation (sometimes indistinguishable from coercion) with the private sector. From access to bulk phone data, to collection of our actual communications and browsing habits, to the security of strong encryption, to the use of mobile data collection like license plate scanners and cell tower simulators, it is becoming increasingly possible for the government to know everything we do in real time.

That intimate level of knowledge can be used to protect us by identifying potential terrorists, but can just as easily be used against innocent citizens in the hands of less-than-benevolent stewards. This realization has led to the recent formation of a bi-partisan Fourth Amendment Caucus in Congress dedicated to providing legal boundaries against the expansion of government mass surveillance.

Judging by the early signs coming from the Trump administration, we will need this vanguard against the further erosion of our constitutional civil liberties. (For more from the author of “Be Vigilant: These Trump Cabinet Picks Don’t Bode Well for Privacy” please click HERE)

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Official: ‘Rather Ironclad’ Intel Shows Obama Behind UN Vote

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A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Israel has “rather ironclad information” that US President Barack Obama played an active role in both formulating and pushing for the UN Security Council resolution lambasting settlement construction, which passed on Friday after Washington decided not to exercise its veto and abstained.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem of Obama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution.

“We have rather ironclad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes told the US media outlet.

The White House has adamantly denied “cooking up” the resolution, rejecting accusations by Netanyahu to that effect.

“We did not draft this resolution; we did not introduce this resolution. We made this decision when it came up for a vote,” said Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes on Friday. But because of its opposition to settlement activity and concern for what it could mean for the region, the US “could not in good conscience veto,” he added. (Read more from “Official: ‘Rather Ironclad’ Intel Shows Obama Behind UN Vote” HERE)

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