Meet the Only Republican to Vote Against Re-Electing Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House

/0 Comments/in , , /by

On the first day of the 115th Congress, Paul Ryan was re-elected as speaker of the House. The vote would have been unanimous, except for the vote of one conservative dissenter.

In an effort to “drain the swamp,” Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky cast the lone Republican vote against Speaker Ryan, and voted for Florida Rep. Daniel Webster.

Massie had better company two years ago. In January 2015, 25 conservatives dissented from the Republican caucus and voted against re-electing John Boehner as speaker. Twelve of those dissenters voted for Rep. Webster. Webster’s previous experience as speaker of the House in Florida — where he was known for restoring regular order and honest practices — was a big selling point to the defecting conservatives.

But with a new Republican administration coming in and with conservatives in Congress still hoping to work with Speaker Ryan, there was much less dissent leading up to Tuesday’s vote, versus two years ago.

While Massie wasn’t joined by his fellow conservatives, he was suspected as a possible dissenter:

No one can say Rep. Thomas Massie isn’t afraid to go against the grain (For more from the author of “Meet the Only Republican to Vote Against Re-Electing Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Rand Paul Has a Novel Idea: Let’s Kill Obamacare and Try Freedom

/0 Comments/in , /by

Congress is going to vote on Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. (40%) has promised that an Obamacare repeal resolution will be the first item on the Senate’s agenda, but there is some disagreement among Republicans as to what the replacement for President Obama’s failed health care reform law should be.

Sen. McConnell’s fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. (A, 92%) suggests “freedom.”

In an op-ed written for Rare, Sen. Paul suggested it would be “wise” for the GOP to immediately vote on a replacement health insurance reform law, guided by four principles.

1. The freedom to choose inexpensive insurance free of government dictates.

2. The freedom to save unlimited amounts in a health savings account.

3. The freedom to buy insurance across state lines.

4. The freedom for all individuals to join together in voluntary associations to gain the leverage of being part of a large insurance pool.

Rand Paul’s guidelines come as other Republicans in Congress have begun to back away from full ACA repeal, to some form of partial repeal and a replacement plan that keeps parts of Obamacare.

“It’s a partial repeal first of all, it’s not a total repeal,” Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga. (C, 75%) told reporters in late November. “Let’s get that out of the way. It’s a partial repeal, and I think there are pieces of it in there that have to stay in place for awhile and that is what we are going to be working on.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas (F, 42%) floated a “three-year transition” period to delay the effective repeal of Obamacare while lawmakers develop a replacement plan. One of those plans in development, authored by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La. (F, 47%) and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas (F, 57%), “does not purport to repeal the [Affordable Care Act],” in the words of Health Affairs contributing editor Timothy Jost.

Sen. Paul warns that anything less than a full repeal will end in disaster:

My fear is that if you leave part of Obamacare in place (the dictate that insurance companies must sell insurance to individuals with pre-existing conditions) then you will see an acceleration of adverse selection and ultimately mass bankruptcy of the healthcare insurance industry.

Don’t misunderstand me. We should repeal Obamacare, but partial repeal will only accelerate the current chaos and may eventually lead to calls for a taxpayer bailout of insurance companies.

And he is joined by other conservatives in Congress.

Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah (A, 100%) and Rep. Mark Walker R-N.C. (C, 75%) wrote, in a joint op-ed, that President-elect Trump’s administration and the new Congress must not “fumble” full repeal. “We can’t afford to just squeak by with the bare minimum, while preserving many of Obamacare’s most burdensome and intrusive provisions,” they wrote.

Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (A, 94%) has unequivocally stated Obamacare “should be repealed and replaced, and all of that should be done in the 115th Congress,” and “not left to a future Congress to deal with.”

And, of course, Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 97%) has made his position on Obamacare abundantly clear:

“Principled opponents of Obamacare rejected it because we reject the use of state force to mandate that we buy a commercial good from a private seller. Pragmatic opponents want to keep the feel good aspects of Obamacare while cleaving the individual mandate that forces people to buy insurance,” Paul writes.

Will the principled conservatives in Congress be enough to dissuade GOP leadership’s partial-repeal agenda? Sen. Paul’s conclusion is pessimistic.

“Partial repeal of Obamacare will likely win the day,” he predicts. “But when the insurance companies come to Washington crying for a bailout don’t say that no one warned of this preventable disaster.” (For more from the author of “Rand Paul Has a Novel Idea: Let’s Kill Obamacare and Try Freedom” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Is God Capturing the Heart of Donald Trump?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

When I walked in Mr. Trump’s office in April 2016 at his invitation, I knew I had been sent by God. I went with confidence in the Lord, trusting that He would speak through me. I was impressed to ask Mr. Trump’s second son, Eric, to join us for the first few minutes. I felt he would want to say some things about his father, and I would say some things about the need for a fatherless nation to have a father. The interaction was gratifying — more than I could have hoped.

Eric said, “I have a great father.” I said, “Let’s join in prayer and hope that he will learn what it is to be a wise father figure to a fatherless nation.” Eric agreed, and I don’t think we’ve ever stopped agreeing in our hearts and in prayer that President-elect Trump can actually become that kind of example.

Not many thought what is happening with Mr. Trump would have been likely, perhaps even possible, and certainly not probable. As I look in from the outside, and also from the inside as a result of the journey I’ve had in interaction and prayer with Mr. Trump, I sense that he is being captured by the heart of our Father.

I think many of his decisions may even surprise him — not that he lacks a brilliant mind, tremendous insight and ability to make a deal. This is beyond that. In my opinion, Mr. Trump is receiving wisdom only God can provide. The Lord freely offers it to anyone willing to hear, seek and heed. I think Mr. Trump is hearing, and I believe he is diligently seeking to heed what every American must know: America cannot be great without God.

The Great Shepherd in Stormy Times

I believe God is seeking to impart to President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence and every prospective cabinet member the very heart of the ultimate Father and the Great Shepherd. Our Lord made it clear that when we allow Him to become our Shepherd, we need not want. He is our source. However needy we may be, He is the solution and He will often use compassion-filled people to meet our needs. But we will never, never become dependent on a source other than God our Father and Shepherd.

When we understand the freedom the Shepherd offers, we refuse to become pawns to any power-broker, power source or political party; for the Shepherd, who loves us with the love of the Father, will lead us in green pastures, not barren deserts. He will meet our needs. He will give us opportunity and productivity. He will lead us beside water made calm by His Spirit.

The raging storms of terrorist activity and continual threats to freedom can be miraculously calmed. The enemy will not cease to scheme, plot and attack, but when we move into the presence of overwhelming peace that only God can offer, there will be supernatural calmness and security. We will find our souls being restored, just as Betty’s and mine are being restored now.

Four years ago, just three days after Christmas and three days before the new year, we lost our baby girl, Robin — our miracle baby. That beautiful baby we did not expect and was so difficult to carry to term came into this world to sow seeds of life for the next 40 years that will reap eternal dividends. When we think of our precious daughter, our Lord restores our soul. He binds up our broken heart. Yes, it is still broken, and He is still binding it with His love and peace. We will depend on that from now until we see our beautiful daughter in His presence when we enter forever the house of the Lord. And we will say with her, “I was glad when they said, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’”

I can promise you that God our Father and Shepherd wants to restore the soul of every person reading these words and every broken heart in this nation. He will lead us not in paths of religious pretense and the “traditions of men taught as the commands of God” but rather in His righteousness, and He will do it for His name’s sake, for His glory — and He will be exalted.

“Surround Me”

I want to be honest with you. I think the leadership we have chosen in our nation wants that deep in their hearts. They may not say it the way we as Christians would want to hear it, but I believe it is the longing of their hearts. Yes, I believe it is the longing of President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Pence. I believe Mr. Trump wants for you something so far beyond what he can give you that he knows it must come from above. The morning after the election, I talked to him by phone. “We’re going to keep surrounding you with prayer, love and all the help we can give you,” I said. He responded, “Surround me. Don’t let me ever forget! Surround me!”

I’m saying to every person who knows how to pray, who knows God as Father, and who has experienced the watch-care of the Great Shepherd, please pray for our nation’s leadership and all they appoint, for they will be under fierce assault.

You can rest assured there will be a non-stop, all-out attack on every decision Mr. Trump makes. Some will be as fierce and potentially damaging as the father of lies, the enemy of truth and wisdom, can bring to pass. You will see venomous hatred spewing from expected and unexpected sources.

The poisoned darts will also be aimed at those he appoints. I’ll be sharing in another column their willingness to wear the bull’s-eye on their backs and sacrifice for their country, knowing the cost for taking this journey with President-elect Trump.

Our experience with our daughter confirms that even when we “walk through the valley of the shadow death,” we “fear no evil” because He is with us. As the passage says, “His rod and His staff comfort us.” That means we receive His correction and direction through the rod and the staff of the loving Shepherd. He will, in fact, “prepare a table before us in the presence of all our enemies and anoint our heads” with the oil of His love, compassion and mercy. We will be able to say we are witnesses of the fact that “goodness and mercy” indeed follows us all the days of our lives and throughout eternity. And we know that we “will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” beginning now, as we choose to live in His shelter.

This is the heart of the Father and the heart of our Shepherd. I believe it’s what the people who voted for correction, hope and change in our nation desire — whether they’ve confessed the Lord or not. How I pray that all will come to know Him and experience Him with all the evidence of His grace and glory. I believe the desire of our Father and Shepherd is the desire of the leadership we have chosen in our nation. We must pray for that because if that is not their desire, it must become their desire. Our desire must be His desire.

We Can Make a Kingdom Imprint

Let me sum it up. Although I was not initially a Donald Trump fan or supporter, God sent me to him. The love God has given me for him is totally supernatural. Although he might not put it in these terms, I believe Mr. Trump wants what our Father in heaven wants for all people: God’s best for you and every American. I think he knows that if we receive God’s best, we are in fact going to be a blessing and an inspiration to the nations of the world, and we will be a beacon of hope and freedom until Christ comes. We can make a kingdom imprint in today’s very sick world. (For more from the author of “Is God Capturing the Heart of Donald Trump?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

What Would Jesus Do to Nazi War Criminals?

/1 Comment/in , /by

Are you looking for a book that will change your life?

No, neither am I. I’m tempted like everyone else to find instead erudite and witty titles that confirm what I already think. But since (as I’ve learned) it turns out that such a reading plan was the exact one that Hitler followed, I’ve had to reconsider it.

Now, I’m not suggesting you start the New Year by running out and buying some radical feminist manifesto — except the really crackpot ones that are good for a laugh, and are fun to read aloud to friends over pints and pretzels. See nun-turned-witch Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and Valeria Solanas’ Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) Manifesto. Those are a lot of fun.

Read Something that Makes You Uncomfortable

No, instead I’d like to suggest you find a book that takes a sane and wholesome, even spiritual view of a deeply uncomfortable subject. So you will look with the eyes of reason and faith, but at something you’d rather not think about. Consider the topics that make you just want to turn away and switch on the television, or spend an hour “evangelizing” on Twitter.

It might be global poverty, aggressive Islam, abortion, the collapse into doctrinal mish-mash of a church you’ve always loved, or some other ugly subject. Consider whether your aversion might be a sign that you really do need to give this topic (whatever it is) some hours of your attention. Perhaps there is something you really are called to do, in your own small way, to make things better. Maybe it’s just important that you be better informed on it as a voter, parent, or general purpose Christian.

Recently I hunkered down to tackle a deeply disquieting subject: The nexus point of cheap grace, repentance and genocide. They all come together in Tim Townsend’s fascinating, carefully researched book Mission at Nuremburg. It tells the story of Henry Gerecke, a good-hearted Lutheran pastor who became an army chaplain during the Second World War, and got assigned to pastor some of the worst human beings on earth: the Nazi defendants at the Nuremburg war crimes trials. It wasn’t Reinhold Niebuhr or Karl Barth whom the American military authorities chose to interview and counsel these architects of aggressive war, eugenics programs and large scale genocide. It was an ordinary, middlingly-educated Lutheran minister from St. Louis. Most of his previous experience was with small-town Midwestern German-American farmers, and urban missions to the homeless — with some time spent in U.S. prisons ministering to run-of-the-mill criminals.

Alongside equally ordinary Catholic chaplain Rev. Sixtus O’Connor — a humble Franciscan philosophy teacher from upstate New York — Gerecke was the man whom Providence placed in the cells that held Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler, Julius Streicher, and the top Nazi generals who survived the collapse of the Reich. Their task? From the perspective of the U.S. military which dispatched them, it was to comply with the terms of the Geneva Convention by providing prisoners with access to religious counseling and services. But Gerecke knew that much more was asked of him than that. It was his job to confront men who had risen to the top of the world — gained wealth and fame and the power of life and death over millions — by discarding the Christian vision of human dignity, in favor of a pagan fetish of a single race and nation.

Treading the Tightrope Between Judgmentalism and Cheap Grace

He had to hold them accountable for their crimes, the fruits of which he’d witnessed on visits to the bloodstained cells of Dachau, where countless clergy and political prisoners had been brutalized, starved and shot. He had to be on guard against a cheap, last minute “repentance” on the part of these conquered Nazis, embraced for the sake of leniency in sentencing — or even worse, as a cynical means of evading their guilt before the fearsome judgment seat of Christ (which is, when you think about it, also a ploy for leniency in sentencing).

But Gerecke also knew that he had to minister to these men with all sincerity, to offer them if possible the chance to reclaim the Christian faith of their youth, and accept the Grace of forgiveness that Christ offers to all — even the worst of men, if they will accept it.

Townsend depicts with power and spiritual sensitivity Gerecke’s attempts to discern how sincere each war criminal is in his belated approach to the Gospel, pursed under the shadow of the gallows that would claim all but a few of them. The story also highlights how spiritually beneficial capital punishment can be — in that it forces such criminals to confront the inevitability of judgment, and starkly underlines the sanctity of innocent life, by imposing the ultimate earthly penalty for profaning it. How much less likely such habitually arrogant, ideologically self-poisoned men would be to repent if instead of facing the hangman they were sitting comfortably in prison, reading fan letters from neo-Nazis around the world.

Holy Communion for Hermann Goering?

The most powerful scene in the book is Gerecke’s last interview with Hermann Goering — the most comprehensibly human among the leading Nazi criminals. Here was a man motivated not by an almost psychotic hatred of Jews — as Streicher, for instance, was.

Instead, he had lived in the grips of deadly sins such as gluttony, vainglory, and greed, stuffing his belly with the finest foods till the end of the war and hoarding stolen works of art. He didn’t detest Christianity as a Jewish plot to undermine Aryan vigor, as Baldur von Schirach had. Instead, Goering treated the Gospel with a modern, world-weary shrug, as a fable designed to console women and children.

It’s with that blasé, self-serving attitude that Hermann Goering asks Gerecke to administer him Communion. As a registered member of the Lutheran church, he claims that he is entitled to it. And he thinks it couldn’t do him any harm. It might even do him some good in case — you know, all that redemption business turns out to be true after all.

Gerecke agonizes over this, but finally sees that he must deny him. Communion given to the unrepentant is not an opportunity of grace, he remembers, but a sin of sacrilege. Rather than heap yet another sin on Goering’s impressive record, he gently shakes his head but firmly refuses. He is appalled, but not quite surprised, when Goering’s pride drives him to suicide to avoid the shame of the gallows.

At a time when my own Catholic church is agonizing over the question of Communion for those living in sexually active, non-sacramental relationships, I wish that a clear ray of Lutheran light from Nuremburg could shine on certain quarters in Rome. (For more from the author of “What Would Jesus Do to Nazi War Criminals?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Incentivizing Sex: Where Social and Fiscal Conservatives Must Learn to Agree

/0 Comments/in , /by

As I was eating at a restaurant on Saturday, a young woman wearing a Rosary caught my eye. Raised Catholic, she told me that she doesn’t believe in abstinence until marriage, she doesn’t need to marry the father of her child and that women’s bodies must be liberated from the control of the Church’s male hierarchy.

She also argued that more welfare would be needed if people had more kids, and that drug overdoses were the greatest population control methods in America.

Drug Overdoses Versus Abortion

Are drug overdoses the greatest population control method in the nation? The answer is definitely “no.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, over 52,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2015. The pro-abortion research organization Guttmacher Institute calculated that about 1.1 million unborn children were aborted in 2011, the latest figures they have. (This doesn’t include all the unborn children aborted using abortion-inducing drugs and devices.)

Using Guttmacher’s numbers, about 21 times as many pregnancies were ended by abortion than the number of people who died due to drug overdoses. Whether one believes an unborn child is human, stopping over one million pregnancies from coming to completion is the definition of population control. Additionally, tens of millions of women use contraception to stop themselves from getting pregnant.

The woman agreed with both of these points, once they were spelled out. But a simple mathematical “smell test” would have sniffed out this falsehood.

Welfare and Kids

She was partly right about welfare. America would spend more than its current hundreds of billions of dollars on welfare if people had more kids irresponsibly. What she didn’t realize is that welfare as it’s now administered makes irresponsible parenting more common.

And that what raises the costs. Consider an analogy.

As former Obama administration economic adviser and former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers says, government programs like welfare provide people with “an incentive, and the means, not to work.”

Summers explained that “each unemployed person has a ‘reservation wage’ — the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase that reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer.”

According to a 2013 Cato Institute report, 13 states provided welfare that equaled a wage of more than $15 per hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. The highest minimum wage in the country is $15, in cities like Seattle. Why would anyone get off welfare to work, unless they could make more than what they’re getting from the government dole?

The same logic applies to family size and welfare. With so much “free” money for single mothers, men and women alike are encouraged to engage in irresponsible sexual practices that often leave women pregnant, ready to rely on the government. In other words, families are incentivized to replace a father in the home with a government check.

It’s simple math and incentives. For another example, the federal government provided $60 million for the Title X program in 2014. The program provides “family planning services.” The government is telling tens of millions of women that they can have sex without getting pregnant. It’s telling all their partners that they can have sex without worrying about becoming a father.

Your tax dollars are encouraging promiscuity.

But what’s the reality? Greater access to contraception reduces neither unintended pregnancies nor abortions. Contraceptives sometimes fail, for one thing. They also make people over-confident, which leads to riskier sexual behavior with more partners — and therefore, many more unintended pregnancies. And, therefore, more demand for welfare.

Think About Incentives

It’s long past time for all Americans to think about incentives when considering public policy. Liberals understand this when it’s convenient — they raise soda taxes to reduce obesity. The idea is that the more something costs, the less of it that people buy. But by that same economic theory, doesn’t a welfare payment that’s higher than the wages people will get paid reduce their reason to work?

A Heritage Foundation analysis found that over $400 billion in “means-tested welfare” went to “low-income families with children” in 2014.

Conservatives have no excuse not to understand the basic truths about incentives. Fiscal conservatives regularly complain about high welfare costs, and social conservatives frequently point to Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer-funded promotion and provision of contraceptives and abortion.

Yet both groups often fight different battles that are intertwined because of incentives, and thus their effectiveness is limited. One worries about the family, and the other worries about the budget … but as shown above, they are intertwined.

Social conservatives should work with fiscal conservatives to reduce budgets that incentivize poor sexual behavior that breaks down families and leads to more abortions. Fiscal conservatives should work with social conservatives to encourage strong families, because strong families use fewer government resources and are more economically powerful.

That’s one way to make America great again. (For more from the author of “Incentivizing Sex: Where Social and Fiscal Conservatives Must Learn to Agree” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

God’s Relentless Pursuit: One Woman’s Journey From Darkness to Light

/0 Comments/in , /by

The story of Yvette Castillo is a testament of God’s love and pursuit of his children — even children who, like Yvette, have struggled with drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, abortions, suicidal thoughts and even a pact with the devil.

Lasting Pain and a Pact with the Devil

Yvette was 3 years old when she was molested. As Yvette tells her own story on YouTube, her alcoholic father and “disappointing” mother failed to protect her, and the act of selfishness that took her innocence set her up for a life of self-destruction, Yvette said in her testimony on YouTube.

One day, alone in her bedroom, Yvette invoked satanic power. “I said, ‘Give me the power to hurt everyone, to stop people from messing with me. … I didn’t know that I was making a pact with the devil. I knew who I was talking to, but I didn’t know how serious it was.”

Her life spiraled downhill from there. She began cutting, using drugs, fighting at school and disrespecting teachers. Given multiple opportunities to change, she refused each time. At 14 years old she gave birth to her first child — but being a new parent couldn’t change her. “Not even my child stopped me from doing bad things,” she says. “It was a force that had taken over me, and nobody could stop me.”

She became involved with an abusive boyfriend — and says she felt like she deserved every hit. She had two abortions; then one day her boyfriend kicked her out and she became homeless. Pregnant once again, Yvette continued to use drugs and drink alcohol. She ended up in a crack house where she was raped. “I was trusting the drugs instead of trusting God to make me happy. I thought it was an easier solution, but it wasn’t.”

No Heart

“I no longer had a heart,” she says. “I couldn’t love my kids, I couldn’t love myself. I was so drained.”

A new boyfriend accepted Christ and began attending church. He asked Yvette to go with him. For a while she went, but became disenchanted with “older Christians whose lives she thought didn’t align with Jesus’ teachings.” She left the church and Christianity — saying, “God I’m sorry, but this is not going to work.”

“Little did I know that this was the enemy messing with me. I ran from God for five years.”

Yvette returned to her partying ways, but soon experienced depression, anxiety and panic attacks. She began hearing voices. At one point she heard the devil laughing: “This is where I wanted you. We’re going to destroy you and your children.”

‘You and God are Good’

In this moment of desperation Yvette cried out to God. She returned to church, initially thinking she would just drop off her teenage daughter, who was also struggling. Convinced by friends to stay, Yvette ended up walking to the altar following the service for prayer. Out of the blue, the preacher came up to her and said, “God just wants you to know that you and Him are good. He doesn’t hold anything against you.”

Those words broke through the hardness of her heart and tears rolled down her face. “I felt so much lighter. It was crazy. Something awoke inside of me that God spoke to me and said, ‘I love you.’” She cried out, “I’m sorry God!”

But a real moment of surrender came on a Thursday morning as she walked in a park. After years of struggling with drugs and praying for deliverance, she felt the atmosphere change. “Something spoke to me: ‘Worship God. Lift up your hands and worship God.’ That voice kept coming and got so overwhelming.” She looked around and felt embarrassed, but did it anyway. “As soon as I lifted up my hands, something began to happen. I started to cry and couldn’t stop crying. I started feeling the presence of God, his holiness, his love, his mercy. It was like I wasn’t even at the park. I was in front of His throne. It was God.”

A New Creation

She says God’s forgiveness and mercy were beautiful to her then, that God truly made her into a new creation. “God told me: You are no longer bound to sin, to addiction, to anxiety. I have rescued you from darkness.” She envisioned Jesus descending and wrapping her in His robe. “When I saw that, I was in tears because I knew that God had made me clean,” she said, “It was such a beautiful experience.”

Yvette went home and threw out all of her drugs. She had no desire for them anymore — in fact, they made her nauseated. “Never am I going to put that inside of my body again. I’ve abused the temple of the Holy Spirit. God delivered me. God brought me back even stronger.”

“His grace … I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve His love, I didn’t deserve His grace,” she says. “Even though I walked away from God, God loved me so much that He brought me back again.”

(For more from the author of “God’s Relentless Pursuit: One Woman’s Journey From Darkness to Light” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Court Strikes Down Transgender Mandate, Protecting Doctors, Children, and Hospitals

/0 Comments/in , /by

While family and friends were counting down to the new year, I was watching a different kind of countdown—whether doctors and health care providers would be forced to violate their medical judgment and provide procedures, including gender transition services and abortions, under a new government mandate.

The mandate is a 362-page regulation that claims to interpret part of the Affordable Care Act. It was issued in May 2016, and major portions of this mandate would have kicked in on Jan. 1.

Becket Law had asked a Texas court for an order protecting health care providers. It was less than nine hours to midnight when we heard the good news: A Texas court issued an injunction protecting doctors and the families they serve from the mandate.

The court ruling came after eight states, an association of almost 18,000 doctors, and a Catholic hospital system challenged a new federal regulation that requires doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children, even if the doctor believes the treatment could harm the child.

Doctors who followed the Hippocratic oath—the historic medical vow that doctors take to act in the best interest of their patients—would have faced severe consequences, including losing their jobs.

This is a commonsense ruling. The government has no business forcing private doctors to perform procedures on children that the government itself recognizes can be harmful and exempts its own doctors from performing. The ruling ensures that doctors’ best medical judgment will not be replaced with political agendas and bureaucratic interference.

The federal regulation applied to over 900,000 doctors—nearly every doctor in the U.S.—and would have cost health care providers and taxpayers nearly $1 billion.

The government itself does not require its own military doctors to perform these procedures. It also does not require coverage of gender transition procedures in Medicare or Medicaid—even for adults—because the government medical experts that oversee those programs did not believe medical research demonstrates that gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes, with some studies demonstrating that these procedures were in fact harmful.

But under the Department of Health and Human Services rule developed by political appointees, doctors citing the same evidence and using their best medical judgment in an individual case would have faced potential lawsuits or job loss.

A website about this court case provides leading research on the issue, including guidance the government itself relies on. This research shows that up to 94 percent of children with gender dysphoria will grow out of their dysphoria naturally and live healthy lives without the need for surgery or lifelong hormone regimens.

The government desperately wanted to avoid a court ruling on these facts, telling the Texas court that no injunction was needed. Instead, doctors should wait around to see if they got sued and then see whether the government would agree, based on the circumstances, that they were entitled to protection.

That argument was pretty rich coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, which has spent the last five years fighting lawsuits to limit conscience protections for groups like the Green family, who own Hobby Lobby, and the Little Sisters of the Poor.

In those cases and others, the government has been quick to argue for strict limits on protections like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Church Amendment, which protects providers from having to perform abortions.

Never did the government claim that rulings on the contraceptive mandate should wait until someone brought a lawsuit and the government had time to weigh the issues and pick a side. The court didn’t buy that excuse, instead recognizing that the mandate would create immediate and irreparable harm to doctors nationwide.

This ruling is an across-the-board victory that will ensure that the deeply personal medical decision of a gender transition procedure remains between families and their doctors.

This case was brought jointly by Becket Law—which defended Franciscan Alliance, a religious hospital network sponsored by the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations—and by the Texas attorney general and the states of Texas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, Arizona, and Mississippi. (For more from the author of “Court Strikes Down Transgender Mandate, Protecting Doctors, Children, and Hospitals” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Democrats Take Aim at Trump Nominees, Unlike Republicans’ Speedy OK of Obama Cabinet

/0 Comments/in , /by

Senate Democrats are mounting an aggressive effort to reject or delay President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for major Cabinet positions, in a reversal of the deference Republicans showed in speedily confirming President Barack Obama’s nominees eight years ago.

In January 2009, the Senate confirmed 10 of Obama’s Cabinet choices within his first week as president, nine of them by voice vote, in which senators’ yes and no votes aren’t recorded.

Now, though, the Senate’s top Democrat has put the chamber’s top Republican on notice that at least eight of Trump’s picks are in Democrats’ crosshairs, beginning with one of their own colleagues—Trump’s choice for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

Others targeted are Trump’s picks for secretary of state, treasury, education, labor, and health and human services.

“Any attempt by Republicans to have a series of rushed, truncated hearings before Inauguration Day and before the Congress and public have adequate information on all of them is something Democrats will vehemently resist,” new Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday in a statement to The Washington Post.

“If Republicans think they can quickly jam through a whole slate of nominees without a fair hearing process, they’re sorely mistaken.”

In addition to Sessions, The Washington Post reported, those targeted by Democrats include Rex Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil CEO who is Trump’s choice for secretary of state, and Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive who is Trump’s pick for treasury secretary.

Other Trump choices on the hit list, Democratic aides told the newspaper:

— Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., for secretary of health and human services.
— Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-N.C., for director of the Office of Management and Budget.
— Philanthropist and education activist Betsy DeVos for education secretary.
— Restaurant chain executive Andy Puzder for labor secretary.
— Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt for environmental protection administrator.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., answered the Democrats on Tuesday by releasing statistics and quotations he said illustrate how much deference Republicans gave to Obama’s nominees in 2009—and how much Schumer and other Democrats have said they respected such deference.

Why Democrats Have Few Options

Democrats don’t have the numbers to outright defeat Trump nominees, thanks to a procedural change they made when they last controlled the Senate.

Republicans need a simple majority of 51 votes to move to confirm the president’s Cabinet appointments, rather than the supermajority of 60 previously required, and they have 52 seats. In addition, incoming Vice President Mike Pence will have the power to break any tie votes.

Democrats’ requirement of only a simple majority to avoid a filibuster and put a confirmation to a floor vote, or advance other business, is known on Capitol Hill as “the nuclear option.”

“They have tied their own hands on this,” Heritage Foundation procedural expert Rachel Bovard said of the Democrats, “and because of ‘going nuclear,’ essentially they have put every … nominee at a 51-vote threshold and there’s 52 Republicans.”

Referring to Republican leadership and the Trump transition team, Bovard added in a phone interview with The Daily Signal:

So, if they can get every Republican on board for each nominee, which I think that they’ll be able to do, there’s not much that Senate Democrats can do against that. It’s completely their own fault.

Sixty votes still are required to end debate and proceed to a vote to confirm a nominee for the Supreme Court, though a simple majority is required to confirm.

Democrats controlled the Senate in 2009, and would for two years, but Republicans put up little or no resistance to the choices of a new Democrat president, Obama, for top executive branch offices.

Now that Republicans control the Senate, however, Democrats appear to be showing little such deference to a new Republican president’s picks to run major government departments.

‘A Longstanding Tradition’

Bovard, director of policy services at The Heritage Foundation, previously was policy director for the Senate Steering Committee and an aide to several Republican senators and House members.

She told The Daily Signal that Obama’s Cabinet nominees enjoyed an easy confirmation process because of the well-established tradition of senatorial respect for a president’s major appointees, who run executive branch departments as the president expects.

Bovard said of the traditional attitude of senators:

They may not agree with everything that the nominee says or does or pledges, but it has been a longstanding tradition particularly in the Senate just to say, ‘Look, the president has the right to pick his own people.’ That is sort of the underlying trend.

Obama’s immediate predecessors as president, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, also enjoyed relatively speedy Cabinet confirmations.

The Senate confirmed 11 of Bush’s Cabinet appointees in the first week of his first term; it confirmed 17 of Clinton’s nominees in the first week of his first term, according to Senate records.

Interestingly, the Senate used the voice vote more in confirming Obama’s initial Cabinet choices than it did in conforming Bush or Clinton nominees.

The Senate confirmed eight of Bush’s initial Cabinet picks by voice vote, and three of Clinton’s initial choices.

McConnell’s release of confirmation statistics for Obama includes a quote from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

“I think we owe deference to a president for choices to executive positions, and I think that that is a very important thing to grapple with,” Kaine said at a 2013 hearing held by the Armed Services Committee.

In November, the release from McConnell’s office reminded, Schumer suggested he would work with Republicans to get things done in Congress and avoid needless delays.

“We have a moral obligation, even beyond the economy and politics, to avoid gridlock and get the country to work again,” Schumer told Bloomberg. “We have to get things done.”

Senate Democrats can do little to derail Trump’s nominees, Bovard said, but they can use various procedural maneuvers to delay the process. Among them: failing to show up to a committee meeting so that a quorum is not present, and, on the Senate floor, prolonging debate for up to 30 additional hours.

‘Confident in the Nominees’

Conservatives in Congress appear eager to work with the department heads and other executive branch officials Trump has assembled, Bovard said.

“I think for the most part conservatives feel confident in the nominees that have been put forward. I think they are trying to give Trump’s Cabinet a chance,” she said. “They have not come out swinging in any direction except forward.”

This positive attitude is largely due to the stalwart conservative convictions of Trump’s picks, Bovard said, citing three:

Betsy DeVos is really well-known to conservatives for her work on school choice, Jeff Sessions has been a titan of the conservative movement for decades, even Ben Carson [Trump’s pick for secretary of housing and urban development] has been a longtime proponent of reforming HUD. So these people aren’t unknown to conservatives.

Questioning his honesty, the Democratic National Committee demanded on New Year’s Eve that Sessions recuse himself from the Senate vote to confirm him as attorney general. A hearing for Sessions before the Judiciary Committee is scheduled for Jan. 10, which is 10 days before Trump is sworn in as president.

The Democratic National Committee accused the Alabama senator of withholding information in filling out the screening questionnaire issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a statement, Adam Hodge, DNC communications director, said:

Jeff Sessions has fiercely argued in the past that omitting information isn’t just wrong, that it may also be illegal. So what does he do once he’s nominated to be the attorney general? He omits information from his dark past, particularly when he was deemed too racist to be a federal judge.

Based on his own reasoning, and in keeping with Senate tradition, Sessions must recuse himself from voting on his own nomination.

Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for Sessions in the confirmation process, says such attacks are unfounded.

“Sen. Sessions’ four-decade career in public service includes bipartisan victories on criminal justice issues with folks like Sens. [Edward] Kennedy and [Dick] Durbin,” Flores said, citing two Democrats in a written statement provided Tuesday to The Daily Signal. She added of Sessions:

He has bipartisan endorsements that include law enforcement, victim rights organizations, and African-American leaders because they understand he will refocus the Department of Justice on upholding the rule of law and ensuring public safety. The time for playing politics should have ended on Election Day.

A Question of ‘Previous Political Activity’

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, earlier said Sessions’ questionnaire was incomplete and asked Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to postpone the Jan. 10 hearing to allow for more time to review the materials he submitted.

Grassley, in response, said Sessions has been upfront about his past, including old accusations, and that he submitted more material to supplement his answers. The committee chairman added that hearings would not be postponed.

Among her concerns, Feinstein said, is that Sessions, an early supporter of Trump for president, was not clear enough in explaining his involvement in “any political campaign.”

Grassley replied in a letter to Feinstein: “The question regarding previous political activity is of course designed to ascertain whether and how a nominee has been politically active. There can be no surprise that a sitting United States senator is politically active.”

Feinstein said another concern is that Sessions has not submitted the text of some speeches.

“Regarding the claim that several speeches were not included, of course you also know that we and our colleagues are frequently called upon to speak at a variety of constituent and other events,” Grassley replied. “Senator Sessions explained that he made his best effort to identify and locate copies of such remarks where available.”

The committee chairman added that Sessions produced all items requested in the questionnaire.

Grassley noted that past Cabinet nominees have not been able to provide transcripts for every speech they ever gave. And, he said, Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, “supplemented his questionnaire materials several times.”

“In December 2008 alone, Attorney General Holder supplemented his questionnaire responses with more than 200 items of information,” Grassley said. (For more from the author of “Democrats Take Aim at Trump Nominees, Unlike Republicans’ Speedy OK of Obama Cabinet” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

New York Proposed Free College, but Not Everyone’s Buying It

/0 Comments/in , /by

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an “aggressive” new plan to provide free college tuition to families earning up to $125,000 a year. Under the proposal, nearly a million families would qualify.

“We’re making college tuition-free for middle-class families,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said. “This is the most aggressive plan ever proposed.”

To participate, students are required to enroll full time at a state university of New York (SUNY) or city university of New York (CUNY) two- or four-year college.

Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a professor of economics at Ohio University, called the proposal “extortionately inappropriate.”

“You’re taking money from the general taxpaying public—including some low- and middle-income people—and redistributing that to a group that will probably include a very significant part of a somewhat more affluent population,” Vedder told The Daily Signal. “It’s certainly not a redistribution to the poor; it’s a redistribution to the middle class—and a fairly affluent middle class.”

Cuomo is billing the proposal as “the first of its kind in the nation.” But while the plan appears to be the most far-reaching, it’s not the first time states have leveraged tax dollars to pay for at least some of their students’ college tuition. Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Louisiana have all done so in various forms, but not all of those programs have proven sustainable.

Louisiana, said Norbert Michel, an expert in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, provides a case study for why free tuition is “bad public policy.”

“It simply is not true that ‘everyone’ must have a college education,” Michel told The Daily Signal. “Pretending otherwise devalues the college degree, and it isn’t really free. Someone always ends up paying more for a college education when we pretend it’s free because we transfer tax dollars over to universities.”

Under the Louisiana college scholarship program, called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS), any student earning a 2.5 GPA or above who scores at or above the state average on the ACT or SAT is eligible for money to cover the full tuition of any public university in the state, despite how much or little their family earns. Scholarships can also be applied to private schools, although they won’t cover the full cost.

Last March, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said due to a historic budget shortfall, the state no longer had adequate money to fund the program. According to CNN, more than half of Louisiana State University’s 26,000 undergraduates receive state-funded scholarships, totaling “about $58 million.”

From 2000 to 2010, Louisiana saw a 20 percent spike in the number of high school students who headed to college in one year. But in the wake of the budget shortfall, thousands of students received notifications last year that the scholarship program would only cover 42 percent of tuition costs for the spring 2017 semester.

To address the costs of college affordability, Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity said he’d “do nothing.”

“I think we’re over-invested in higher education,” he said. “But if you’re going to do something—and maybe there’s a political case for doing something—I would reduce subsidies to the state universities that are already being given, and convert that money to vouchers and give it to the low-income students.”

Cuomo’s Excelsior Scholarship program aims to provide free tuition to students from middle-class families making up to $125,000 per year, which according to the governor, accounts for 80 percent of New York households. He estimates the plan will cost approximately $163 million per year.

In creating the plan, Cuomo took a page from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ playbook. Sanders, an independent from Vermont, appeared alongside the governor on Tuesday at LaGuardia Community College to announce the new proposal.

“If the United States is to succeed in a highly competitive global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world,” said Sanders, who campaigned on the issue of free tuition while running for president. “We must make public colleges and universities tuition-free for the middle-class and working families of our country.”

The program, called the Excelsior Scholarship, will be paid for “by leveraging New York State’s generous aid programs,” Cuomo’s press release reads. It adds:

Currently, the Tuition Assistance Program, or TAP, provides nearly $1 billion in grants to college students statewide and New York is one of only two states in the nation that offers this type of entitlement. Under the program, eligible students would still receive TAP and any applicable federal grants. Additional state funds would cover the remaining tuition costs for incoming or existing eligible students.

Average tuition costs for a bachelor’s degree fall between $6,000 and $7,000 at SUNY and CUNY.

Cuomo’s proposal still needs approval from the state Legislature. He and Sanders are hopeful if the measure passes, other states will follow.

“Mark my words,” Sanders said. “If New York state does it this year, state after state will follow.” (For more from the author of “New York Proposed Free College, but Not Everyone’s Buying It” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

When Energy Efficiency Rules Hurt the Public and the Environment

/0 Comments/in , /by

Over the last several years, an extreme and ideologically-driven environmental agenda has hijacked our national energy policy.

Whether its goal is to keep fossil fuels in the ground or to electrify America based on a naïve belief that all electricity will be renewable within 30 years, or some combination, this bias is what we now have come to expect from the Department of Energy and its Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program.

The example I know well is its effort to increase the minimum energy efficiency for natural gas furnaces. The Department of Energy has ignored due process and subverted sound science to satisfy an ideological result that is not justified by the facts.

The American Public Gas Association was compelled by the Department of Energy’s bias to fund research to demonstrate the incredibly negative impact the proposed natural gas furnace regulation would have on American homeowners.

Approximately 56 million homes across the country are heated with natural gas furnaces because of their energy efficiency and cost benefits. As proposed, the department’s rule would incentivize homeowners to switch to less efficient home heating options, such as electric resistance, which would more than double their home heating cost and yield greater carbon dioxide emissions.

The American Public Gas Association’s technical analysis exposed even greater flaws within the Department of Energy’s rulemaking process and the economic model it depends upon to justify the purported benefits of new regulation.

Procedurally, the association has been forced to take the Department of Energy to court and file multiple complaints with its inspector general because of the arrogance of its bureaucrats.

When the department attempted to set a new efficiency standard via a direct final rule in 2011, it clearly failed to touch all the bases and make appropriate findings of consumer impacts. So the American Public Gas Association appealed and the rule was withdrawn three years later.

We believe the Department of Justice urged the Department of Energy to withdraw the rule because government attorneys did not want this particular matter to be the case of first impression on the final rule process when the government so clearly failed to address public comments opposing the rule.

In 2014, the Department of Energy published a proposed furnace rule (supplemented this year) that went far beyond the initial proposal. During these proceedings, the department twice issued extensions of deadlines after the deadline had passed.

In both cases, the American Public Gas Association had filed timely comments supported by extensive technical analysis in opposition to the rule when major proponents of the rule were yet to file. The association has filed a formal complaint with the Department of Energy’s inspector general and requested an investigation of this perversion of fair play.

On the substance, the American Public Gas Association’s work with the Gas Technology Institute has revealed how the Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have used nonpublic data, flawed consumer economic modeling, and unfounded economic justifications.

Over the years, its life cycle cost analysis has become absurdly complex and thus ripe for manipulation. We have seen the use of unjustifiable assumptions to obtain particular results to hide the true consumer costs of the proposed regulation.

Most importantly, the Department of Energy is ignoring the fact that natural gas is the most energy efficient and environmentally sound manner for the vast majority of Americans to heat their homes.

Technological advances are making natural gas residential furnaces more efficient, and the public is snapping them up when they save money. This is proof that the market is working.

Higher Efficiency Condensing Furnace Trends

Between 2006 and 2011, high efficiency condensing furnaces saw a slight artificial bump in sales due to government tax credits. But even with those tax credits, the market trends were not altered much. The use of such furnaces has been steadily rising since 1980, and it continues to rise after the artificial bump.

The upshot is clear. Consumers who benefit from a more expensive technology will purchase that technology—and in this case, it is a higher efficiency condensing natural gas furnace. People should drive markets, not the federal government.

The American Public Gas Association has been one of the leading opponents of the Department of Energy’s proposed furnace rule. This group represents municipally- and community-owned natural gas systems across the country.

These systems are owned and accountable to the citizens within their communities. Who is better equipped to make decisions that impact the lives of Americans, unelected Washington bureaucrats or the homeowners themselves?

The Department of Energy admitted its current proposal would negatively impact 20 percent of American homes. In addition, the overwhelming majority of people who would be hurt are low-income families.

Set aside the fact that the department freely acknowledges and accepts that its proposal would harm 1 in 5 families—its open willingness to do so is incredibly disturbing.

The American Public Gas Association is not opposed to energy efficiency. However, the Department of Energy’s proposed furnace rule will ultimately undermine efficiency goals while significantly increasing costs for American consumers. (For more from the author of “When Energy Efficiency Rules Hurt the Public and the Environment” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.