Federal Appeals Court Rules Obamacare Individual Mandate Is Unconstitutional

/1 Comment/in , /by

A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is based in New Orleans, ruled on Wednesday that Obamacare’s individual mandate, which required everyone to have health insurance, was unconstitutional in its present form.

“However, the appeals court ruling largely ducked the central question of whether the Affordable Care Act remained valid after Congress removed the penalty for not having health insurance and it sent the case back to a Texas federal judge who previously ruled the entire law was unconstitutional to reconsider how much of it could survive,” Politico reported. “The high-stakes ruling keeps the legal threat to Obamacare alive while reducing the likelihood the Supreme Court could render a final verdict on the law before the 2020 elections.”

The 5th panel wrote, “The individual mandate is unconstitutional because it can no longer be read as a tax, and there is no other constitutional provision that justifies this exercise of congressional power. On the severability question, we remand to the district court to provide additional analysis of the provisions of the ACA as they currently exist.”

“Having concluded that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, we must next determine whether, or how much of, the rest of the ACA is severable from that constitutional defect,” the ruling said.

“It may still be that none of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate, even after this inquiry is concluded,” the panel added. “It may be that all of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate. It may also be that some of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate, and some is not.”

(Read more from “Federal Appeals Court Rules Obamacare Individual Mandate Is Unconstitutional” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Domestic Violence Shelter Posts 7-Year-Old’s Heartbreaking Letter to Santa, and the Response Is Overwhelming

/0 Comments/in , /by

A heart-wrenching letter from a 7 year old child in a domestic violence shelter in Texas has inspired many to donate in order to help those in dangerous situations. . .

Here’s what the letter said:

Dear Santa,

We had to leave our house. Dad was mad. We had to do all the chores. Dad got everything he wanted. Mom said it was time to leave and she would take us to a safer place where we don’t have to be scared.

I’m still nervous. I don’t want to talk to the other kids. Are you going to come this Christmas? We don’t have any of our stuff here. Can you bring some chapter books, a dictionary, and a compass and a watch? I also want a very, very, very good dad. Can you do that, too?

(Read more from “Domestic Violence Shelter Posts 7-Year-Old’s Heartbreaking Letter to Santa, and the Response Is Overwhelming” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Ilhan Omar Has Freak out on House Floor (VIDEO)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar was reportedly caught on audio yelling “Stop it!” multiple times during Wednesday night’s impeachment proceedings as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy brought up a fellow “Squad” member’s prior comments about impeachment.

“Democrats have wanted to impeach President Trump since the day he was elected, and nothing was going to get in the way, certainly not the truth,” McCarthy said. “Madam speaker, Chairman Schiff said he had evidence, more than circumstantial, of collusion. That was false. In January, where we all stood in this body, we stood up, we raised our hands, we swore that we’d uphold the Constitution.”

After a round of applause presumably from fellow House Republicans, McCarthy brought up Tlaib’s comments to supporters, spoken shortly after being elected, about helping fellow Democrats “impeach the mother f**ker.” . . .

At which point someone, later reportedly identified by PBS Newshour senior reporter Daniel Bush and others as Rep. Omar, could be heard yelling “Stop it!” at least three times.

(Read more from “Ilhan Omar Has Freak out on House Floor” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Trump Campaign Raised More Than $5 Million on Day of Impeachment; Here’s How Tulsi Gabbard Voted on Impeachment

/0 Comments/in , /by

By Daily Caller. President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said Wednesday night that it raised over $5 million on the day House Democrats voted to impeach the president.

The president “has raised over 5M dollars (still growing) today as Americans use their wallet to show support against @SpeakerPelosi’s impeachment hoax!” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, wrote in a tweet following the vote. . .

Parscale linked to a website the Trump campaign created to collect donations for the president’s reelection bid. (Read more from “Trump Campaign Raised More Than $5 Million on Day of Impeachment” HERE)

_________________________________________________

Tulsi Gabbard Votes ‘Present’ at Impeachment Vote Against Trump

By Daily Caller. Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday voted “present” during the vote to impeach President Donald Trump, after saying earlier in the week she would be in favor of censuring him.

“I am standing in the center and have decided to vote Present. I could not in good conscience vote against impeachment because I believe President Trump is guilty of wrongdoing. I also could not in good conscience vote for impeachment because removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country,” Gabbard said in an emailed statement.

“When I cast my vote in support of the impeachment inquiry nearly three months ago, I said that in order to maintain the integrity of this solemn undertaking, it must not be a partisan endeavor. Tragically, that’s what it has been,” Gabbard continued.

Gabbard announced Tuesday that she is still undecided on impeaching President Trump and reportedly that she would vote to censure him. Reporters had been speculating all day on wether Gabbard would vote, as she was not seen on the House floor and was not responding to press inquiries. She was the only Democrat to vote “present.” (Read more from “Tulsi Gabbard Votes ‘Present’ at Impeachment Vote Against Trump” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Democratic Congress Finds Its Cheapest Trump Remedy

/0 Comments/in , /by

Impeaching the president is a grave matter. It should be undertaken only gravely and after great reflection.

Democrats didn’t have time for that, so instead, Nancy Pelosi just wore black and tried to shush her party’s raucous cheers.

Let’s face it: Democrats have been planning to impeach Donald Trump since he won the presidency. They hoped they would get some good dirt, and not without reason. Trump has consistently failed to separate his business interests from his public office. But they never found a high crime or misdemeanor, so they impeached him with whatever they could find.

We believe that Trump misused the power of the presidency when he tried to utilize foreign aid to coax Ukraine’s president into announcing an investigation of the Bidens. He “deployed the United States’ diplomatic capital to advance a partisan political agenda,” we wrote in September. . .

But not every presidential misdeed is impeachable. Every president abuses power. There’s almost no precedent for impeaching a president (it’s now happened only three times in history, and the first one was clearly a farce), and so it’s hard to know when abuse of power warrants impeachment. (Read more from “Democratic Congress Finds Its Cheapest Trump Remedy” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Citizenship for 4,000 Illegal Aliens… Snuck Into a 3,430-Page Defense Bill

/0 Comments/in , /by

“Invade the world, invite the world.”

That is essentially the foreign policy and national security strategy of the bipartisan elites in recent years. That principle was enshrined in a massive 3,400-page defense authorization bill that just passed both houses of Congress and received Trump’s praise and promise of signing it. No, this is not the 2,000-page set of omnibus bills full of bad provisions, including amnesty for MS-13 traffickers. This is another massive bill full of provisions nobody has read. One of them is an amnesty provision.

The defense bill contains no provision to rectify our mistakes in Afghanistan, nothing about arming our soldiers on bases after the Pensacola terror attack, nothing about refocusing our military mission on our border, and nothing about ending military training and aid for dubious and often unreliable actors in Afghanistan and in Lebanon. So what does it contain? An amnesty for Liberian illegal aliens that was likely missed by almost every single member and the president himself.

Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) is one of the many amnesty programs concocted by the executive branch over the years. Aside from the statutorily grounded humanitarian deferments of removal for various classes of illegal aliens, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), DED was fabricated by President Bush specifically to shield Liberian illegal aliens who claim they can’t return to their home country. President Trump promised to end this lawless program created in 2007, which would end amnesty for 4,000 Liberians, but in March he agreed to extend it for another 12 months. Now, the NDAA, if Trump follows through with his promise to sign it, will give them a permanent pathway to citizenship.

On page 2,659 of the NDAA conference report is the Orwellianly named “Liberian Refugee Immigration Fairness.” It bars their removal and offers a pathway to citizenship to any Liberian here illegally since before November 2014. . .

Liberia has overcome its civil war and is now prospering. Now is the time to repatriate its citizens so they can help rebuild their country.

This bill establishes a terrible precedent, namely that any time a president lawlessly creates an amnesty program for illegal aliens, Congress will come in and codify it, the exact opposite of how the legislative process works. Isn’t it sad that the numerous immigration enforcement laws that are not enforced by the executive branch and the courts don’t seem to be of concern to Congress, while benefits for illegal aliens who violate law get approval from Congress? American citizens last: Who saw that coming in a national defense bill? What about immigration “fairness” for Americans?

How many other anti-security provisions are in a 3,400-page national defense bill? We have no way of knowing, nor does the president.

Both the omnibus and the NDAA are the last two remaining leverage points of the president for his first term. Sadly, we got nothing but a lump of coal. The president wrongly tweeted out that we got “all out priorities.”

If by that, he means amnesty, endless social engineering in Afghanistan, and the socialist paid family leave for government workers who already have more generous benefit packages than taxpayers, then he’s right. Other than that, he can do better. He must do better.

This is the perfect opportunity for the president to veto both the omnibus bills and the defense bill by demanding that the public discover and debate the new provisions in these bills that are thousands of pages long. At its core, this is what the president was elected to stop. There will be no government shutdown if the NDAA doesn’t pass quite yet. An extra few weeks of sunshine won’t harm anyone, except for those working against the security of the American people.

Mr. President, don’t reward those impeaching you with all their budget and policy priorities. Make your veto pen great again. (For more from the author of “Citizenship for 4,000 Illegal Aliens… Snuck Into a 3,430-Page Defense Bill” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

America’s Illegal Alien Population Is Three Times Europe’s

/0 Comments/in , /by

American conservatives are concerned that we are a step or two behind Europe in committing open-borders suicide. But if you actually look at the numbers, in many respects America is blazing the trail to destruction much more swiftly than Europe.

A recent Pew Research report estimated the entire illegal immigrant population of Europe is 3.9-4.8 million. That is for an entire continent of 747 million people. The U.S. is less than half the size, yet the estimates of the illegal alien population range from 11 million to as high as 22 million.

Pew, as well as other left-leaning groups, likes to say there were only 12 million illegal aliens last decade and that the number has actually gone down in recent years. But the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) notes how they rely on census data that has traditionally undercounted illegal aliens by 15-35 percent. Moreover, given the massive influx of Central Americans in recent years, it is laughable how some of these organization can say that the numbers haven’t moved. ICE’s docket of non-detained aliens targeted for removal alone has grown by roughly one million since 2017, while the immigration court backlog has grown nearly tenfold over the decade.

Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was asked at a hearing last December whether the number of illegal aliens was closer to 11 or 12 million or 22 million, as estimated by a recent Yale/MIT study. Nielsen admitted that there definitely are somewhere between 12 and 22 million, “higher than originally estimated.” That was before one million illegal aliens were apprehended the following year and countless snuck through the border in one of the worst border crises in recent memory.

FAIR therefore estimates that there are 14.3 million illegal aliens at a minimum, not including the 4.8 million children born to them on our soil that are erroneously viewed as citizens by the courts and bureaucrats. Most European countries don’t have such a policy.

That is an enormous number, even if it’s not up to 22 million. The burden is incalculable, which is why it’s so dishonest for politicians to continue demanding that we bring in more refugees. At most, Great Britain has 800,000-1.2 million illegal aliens, Germany has 1-1.2 million, and France has 300,000-400,000, according to Pew.

Sadly, we will never know our number for sure, because the Trump administration genuflected to an insidiously illegal court ruling blocking us from using the census to ask the question that is most pertinent to our reapportionment and representation. Congress just appropriated record funding for the census, $1.5 billion more than what the agency requested, yet we will never even find out exactly how many immigrants and illegal aliens we have, broken down by jurisdiction.

When comparing America’s number of refugees compared to that of other parts of the world, illegal immigration, which is like refugee resettlement in all but name only, must be taken into account. While it’s true that Europe has brought in many people from the Middle East and North Africa through legal immigration, their illegal immigration burden is a fraction of ours. In addition, aside from the illegal immigration, we bring in more immigrants than any other country. In that vein, how can so many GOP governors support bringing in even more refugees?

President Trump gave the grassroots a gift by requiring both the state governor and county officials to sign off on resettlement in order for the private contractors to bring refugees into a given jurisdiction. Yet the Left has been outgunning us because our entire movement is focused on impeachment.

Activists in Appomattox County, Virginia, got their county officials to be the first to reject refugees. But there should be hundreds more. Remember, even though the governorships are split roughly down the middle, Trump carried around 84 percent of the nation’s 3,100 or so counties. That means there are a lot of conservative counties within states that are governed by Democrats, such as in Virginia, where the grassroots can make their voices heard.

Kentucky and North Carolina are important states in which conservatives must engage. Both states now have Democrat governors. They were the #5 and #7 states respectively in terms of refugee intake in fiscal year 2019. In 2016, Trump carried 118 of 120 counties in Kentucky and 76 of 100 counties in North Carolina. There is no reason conservatives cannot pressure their county governments in these states to halt refugee resettlement while we deal with the backlog of illegal immigration and asylum claims.

Although we have welcomed immigrants in the right numbers and with proper assimilation for most of our history, we are a nation of citizens, not a nation of immigrants. We’ve never experienced this degree of illegal and legal immigration for such a protracted period, coinciding with the collapse of patriotic assimilation. It’s time for the citizenry to stand up and be counted, even as our own census refuses to distinguish us from illegal aliens. Where is our sanctuary city? (For more from the author of “America’s Illegal Alien Population Is Three Times Europe’s” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Liberal Lawyer TORCHES Democrats’ Impeachment Circus; Black Voter Support for Trump at ‘Highest Levels’

/0 Comments/in , , /by

By Townhall. . .Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz scorched Democrats for pushing two articles of impeachment that simply do not meet constitutional standards. I mean I don’t think you need to go to law school to know that these charges are just liberal speak for “we don’t like this guy.” We all know that Democrats haven’t been able to handle Trump’s 2016 win. That’s not a good enough reason to impeach a duly elected president. He won. Hillary lost. Deal with it. Most Americans have done so, but for the most liberal, most disgusting parts of this country—it’s been an obsession top impeach Trump. It’s quasi-stalker-like behavior (via The Hill):

Neither of these proposed articles satisfy the express constitutional criteria for an impeachment, which are limited to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Neither are high or low crimes or misdemeanors. Neither are mentioned within the Constitution.

Both are so vague and open ended that they could be applied in partisan fashion by a majority of the House against almost any president from the opposing party. Both are precisely what the Framers had rejected at their Constitutional Convention. Both raise the “greatest danger,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton, that the decision to impeach will be based on the “comparative strength of parties,” rather than on “innocence or guilt.”

(Read more from “Liberal Lawyer Torches Democrats’ Impeachment Circus” HERE)

_________________________________________________

Black Voter Support for Trump at ‘Highest Levels’ and Could Seal 2020 Win

By Washington Examiner. A growing number of polls show that President Trump is gaining the support of black voters above what any Republican president has ever received. Both Emerson Polling and Rasmussen Reports have it at about 34%, a stunning number.

And a new Zogby Analytics survey found that African American support is at the “highest levels of the year,” driven by a strong economy, historically low black unemployment, and Trump’s agenda to support minority small businesses, historically black colleges and universities, and passage of criminal justice reform.

“Not surprisingly, all African Americans do not hate Trump!” pollster Jonathan Zogby said in sharing his data with us. . .

In all cases, while black support for Trump dropped when an alternative was offered, it was higher than the 8% he received in 2016 and maybe enough to push him across the finish line first in 2020.

Against Joe Biden, Trump receives 12% of the black vote. Against Sen. Bernie Sanders, it was 14%. And against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, it was 17%. (Read more from “Black Voter Support for Trump at ‘Highest Levels’ and Could Seal 2020 Win” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Justice Ginsburg Inappropriately Wades Into Impeachment Mess, Criticizes Trump as ‘Not a Lawyer’

/0 Comments/in , /by

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested President Trump doesn’t know what he is talking about amid his calls to stop impeachment.

“The president is not a lawyer,” Ginsburg, 86, said Monday at an event in New York, according to CNN.

The House, where Democrats hold a majority, is expected to pass two articles of impeachment on Wednesday, charging Trump with abuse of power and obstructing Congress after an investigation into his pressuring of Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and alleged interference in the 2016 election.

Ginsburg also said she hopes “good people on both sides of the aisle [will] say let’s stop this dysfunction” and “work together for the good of the country,” though it’s unclear if she was specifically referring to the impeachment proceedings. (Read more from “Justice Ginsburg Inappropriately Wades Into Impeachment Mess, Criticizes Trump as ‘Not a Lawyer'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Mormon Church Allegedly Stockpiled $100 Billion in Donations

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints allegedly amassed $100 billion in tax-free funds “intended for charitable purposes,” a whistleblower claimed in a report to the Internal Revenue Service obtained by the Washington Post Monday.

The allegations: Per WashPost, the Nov. 21 complaint to the IRS alleges church leaders misled congregants “by stockpiling their surplus donations instead of using them for charitable works” and “possibly breaching federal tax rules.” . . .

The big picture: The complaint by David A. Nielsen, a 41-year-old Mormon who until September worked at Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment division of the church, offers a glimpse into the finances of the church, which has not publicly disclosed its financial statements in the U.S. since 1959, per the Salt Lake Tribune.

By the numbers: Nielsen’s complaint estimates the church collects $7 billion in annual contributions, $6 billion of which covers yearly operations costs, while the remaining $1 billion goes to Ensign Peak Advisors for he church’s investment portfolio.

(Read more from “Mormon Church Allegedly Stockpiled $100 Billion in Donations” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE