Your Chicken Sandwich Costs More With a $15 Minimum Wage

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Progressives are touting a $15 minimum wage as a low-cost policy to reduce poverty and income inequality. However, the costs of a high minimum wage are higher than its proponents would like to believe.

In a recent Heritage Foundation backgrounder, James Sherk outlined the costs to consumers of a $15 minimum wage and took issue with methodological flaws in two studies that proponents of a higher minimum wage often cite.

Relying on peer-reviewed scholarship on the fast-food sector, Sherk estimates that increasing the minimum wage to $15 would raise fast-food prices 38 percent and reduce employment 36 percent. A chicken sandwich that currently sells for $3.05 would instead cost customers $4.21.

The logic is straightforward: With higher labor costs and already narrow profit margins, fast-food restaurants will have to raise prices. But with higher prices, consumers spend significantly less on fast food.

Sherk goes on to argue that two studies predicting little effect from a $15 minimum wage on fast-food business models include fatal flaws.

One study by Purdue’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management found that a $15 minimum wage would increase a fast-food restaurant’s costs by only about 4 percent.

However, the authors made a major mistake: They added up median costs, rather than average costs, which made 8 percent of all restaurant costs disappear. Since restaurants in the real world can’t make costs vanish, the study has little relevance for them.

A more respectable effort, by the Political Economy Research Institute, likewise found low costs to fast food from a higher minimum wage. However, the institute’s model assumed that fixed costs were constant in the industry, and that the fast-food sector’s future growth would be relatively low cost. With low cost growth ahead of them, restaurants could afford to pay workers more without raising prices.

However, the assumption of constant fixed costs is inappropriate in a multiyear, industrywide projection, since it implies that the industry will be able to grow without building any new stores or buying any new kitchen equipment.

The Political Economy Research Institute also assumed a lower level of price sensitivity than the scholarly consensus indicates. Finally, the institute assumed that turnover costs in the fast-food sector are unrealistically high, generating unrealistic savings from higher wages.

Correcting these three assumptions brings the institute’s model largely in line with Sherk’s.

Advocates of higher minimum wages have laudable goals: helping poor Americans become self-sufficient and showing respect for often thankless jobs.

But a high minimum wage would do more harm than good. It would raise the cost of living for low-income households, including many that don’t include a minimum-wage worker.

A higher minimum wage also would make entry-level employment harder to find, putting the bottom rung of the wage ladder out of reach to those with the fewest marketable skills.

Those who sincerely care about fighting poverty and improving economic mobility will find less costly ways to meet those goals. (For more from the author of “Your Chicken Sandwich Costs More With a $15 Minimum Wage” please click HERE)

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Liberal MSM Stoops to New Low, Using Persecuted Syrian Christians as Political Props

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This week, a Syrian Christian family was united with its loved ones in New York City after initially being denied entry to the U.S. due to President Donald Trump’s travel moratorium.

Tuesday morning, mainstream media outlets and liberal social justice organizations reported on the heartfelt family reunion, gleefully and conveniently overlooking the sheer hypocrisy of their past failure to cover the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

According to CNN, members of the Asali family had been waiting nearly 15 years to join their relatives in America. But when they finally made it to their initial destination of Philadelphia, one day after Trump issued a completely legal executive order temporarily barring immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, the Asalis were sent back to Doha, Qatar.

Sarmad Assali, a U.S. citizen (who spells her surname differently than her Syrian family members), filed a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union in protest. And after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against Trump’s executive order, the Asalis were able to return to the United States.

Now, the same media outlets and social justice groups that called Trump’s executive order a “Muslim ban,” and lamented the “discriminatory” nature of prioritizing persecuted religious minorities, are celebrating these Christian immigrants. Why, exactly, are they doing this now?

Not because they really care about the Asalis, but because the family serves as the perfect way for them to push their anti-Trump agenda.

See? This family got screwed over, too. And they’re Christians! Not the even anti-Muslim conservative bigots can support Trump now.

“The thrust is, the low influx of persecuted minorities facing genocide was one of the media’s best-kept secrets during the Obama administration,” said Conservative Review’s Nate Madden, who has written extensively on the plight of religious minorities in the Middle East. “Now that Trump has instituted a travel suspension that has provisions for them, they manage to find the compassion button.”

Indeed, religious leaders like Archbishop Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil in Iraq, have long begged the U.S. government and media to shed light and assist on the deadly struggles their people face.

In an interview with Crux magazine earlier this month, Archbishop Warda shared his thoughts on President Trump’s highly contested travel moratorium.

“Christians and other minorities have been largely ignored by the American government before now, so even if this step had a bumpy start and required clarification, we in Iraq appreciate that an American administration understands that we are here and wants to help the minorities here who have suffered so much,” Warda said.

“I do not understand why some Americans are now upset that the many minority communities that faced a horrible genocide will finally get a degree of priority in some manner,” he added.

For many Middle Eastern Christians, Trump’s executive order wasn’t a punishment imposed by a racist foreign tyrant, but a much-welcomed policy change that, in the long run, would benefit the truly destitute.

But of course, we have yet to hear this perspective from the liberal mainstream media, and we’re not likely to any time soon. (For more from the author of “Liberal MSM Stoops to New Low, Using Persecuted Syrian Christians as Political Props” please click HERE)

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DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary, Pence Casts Historic Tie-Breaking Vote

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School choice advocate Betsy DeVos was narrowly confirmed Tuesday as the next education secretary despite deep opposition from teachers unions and other groups, after Vice President Pence intervened to cast a historic tie-breaking vote.

Pence’s vote marked the first time in American history a vice president has broken a tie on a Cabinet nominee’s Senate confirmation – and the first tie-breaking vote by a VP since 2008. Pence was compelled to cast the vote after two Republican senators – Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – joined all 48 Senate Democrats in opposing DeVos.

“The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the nomination is confirmed,” Pence said, stepping into his role as president of the Senate in a brief appearance on Capitol Hill.

With his support, DeVos was confirmed on a 51-50 vote.

Devos was sworn in later by Pence in a ceremony at the vice president’s ceremonial office, which he called “the easiest vote I ever cast.” (Read more from “DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary, Pence Casts Historic Tie-Breaking Vote” HERE)

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‘The Future Is Female’: Hillary Clinton’s First Post-Election Statement Reminds Us Why She Lost

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On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton delivered one of her first public statements since losing the Nov. 8 presidential election. In a video addressed to those attending the MAKERS women’s conference in California, Clinton boldly declares, “The future is female.”

The former first lady praised the participants of last month’s anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington and encouraged women to “be bold” amid the fear and uncertainty that apparently plague women in America.

“Despite all the challenges we face, I remained convinced that, yes, the future is female,” Clinton asserts.

Really? This is how Hillary chooses to break the relative silence of her post-election pity party? By telling women to fight sexism with more sexism? Give us a break!

Conservatives on social media had similar reactions:

As Ben Shapiro so eloquently wrote Tuesday for The Daily Wire, “Women in America in 2017 are the luckiest women in world history, and are not at a systemic disadvantage to men. But Hillary continues to promulgate a victim narrative that does not align with the facts.”

He continued:

No, the future isn’t female. The future is free. And that distinction eluded Hillary during the campaign, which is why she lost. Identity politics can be lucrative business, but it isn’t the truth: the truth is that we all seek a future in which women around the globe have the same freedoms women in America do (although Hillary did little to forward that mission as Secretary of State). Labeling the future “female” is as benighted as labeling it “male” or “black” or “gay.” The future has yet to be decided, and we should all pray that the future isn’t owned by any particular social group.

Hillary, for the future, here’s a tip on how to win votes: Don’t isolate half of the population with contemptuous feminist mantras that needlessly stir dissension and deny reality. Remember, #LoveTrumpsHate. (For more from the author of “‘The Future Is Female’: Hillary Clinton’s First Post-Election Statement Reminds Us Why She Lost” please click HERE)

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Want to Take Back Our Sovereignty? Start by Breaking up the Ninth Circuit

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The spectacle of the U.S. government having to grovel before the Ninth Circuit to determine whether we are a sovereign nation or not should draw attention to another important initiative: the effort to break up the tyrannical Ninth Circus Court of Appeals.

Believe it or not, the courts did not create themselves. Congress has plenary control over lower courts and the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Congress can abolish the lower courts altogether and reroute their cases to state courts. Every aspect of the court system’s structure — administrative procedures, rules of adjudication, methods of interpretation, and logistics of proceedings — can be regulated by Congress in any way. As such, it goes without saying that Congress can, as it has done in the past, modify the geographical jurisdiction of an existing circuit.

The Ninth Circuit cesspool

The time has come to strip the Ninth Circuit down to size. This court is by far the most anti-constitutional circuit amidst a federal judiciary where the majority of the circuits don’t respect the Constitution as written. Most of the members of the Ninth have literally supplanted the written Constitution for an ever elastic set of ethos that are anchored to nothing more than the political values of these unelected judges at the time they woke up that day. Most importantly, what they have done to the sovereign state of Arizona is outrageous. Congress owes it to the good citizens of the Grand Canyon State to free them of the clutches of judicial tyranny.

To begin with, putting politics aside, the Ninth Circuit — which includes Alaska, Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana — is too big. As of the end of FY 2016, there were 13,334 pending appeals before the Ninth Circuit, more than twice the amount of the second busiest circuit (the Fifth) and more than ten times as much as the adjacent Tenth Circuit. The idea of breaking up the Ninth goes back respected figures like current Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a native Arizonan. Not to mention the fact that the Ninth Circuit is, by far, the most reversed appeals court in the country, making Anthony Kennedy look like James Madison in comparison.

To that end, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. (A, 0%) has followed in the tradition of many non-California residents of the Ninth Circuit’s tentacles and introduced H.R. 250 — the Judicial Administration and Improvement Act. This bill would limit the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit to California, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii. A new “twelfth circuit” would be created to oversee appeals from district courts in Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Personally, I’d limit the Ninth Circuit to California alone, as was suggested in a bill from a previous Congress, (or better yet, a few square acres in Death Valley), but overall this is a great starting point.

Now is the best time to create a new circuit. With GOP control of the Senate and the filibuster having been eliminated for lower court judges, Trump can flood the zone with originalists (to the extent they exist) and establish the first full circuit that actually follows the law and the Constitution as written. These judges can start fresh, unvarnished from lawless “precedent” of the past.

Cry for Arizona

Arizona is one of the most important states for the judiciary because so many immigration cases emanate from the Grand Canyon State. Words cannot describe how the Ninth Circuit has stolen the sovereignty of Arizona to the detriment of the state’s economy, security, and social cohesion. This officious panel has invalidated every single thing the legislature and the people (through ballot referendum) have done to protect their state. In addition, the Ninth Circuit has forced the state to give driver’s licenses to illegals, offer bail to the most violent criminal aliens, and has blocked the state from requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The Roberts Supreme Court has not lifted a finger to overturn almost any of the dozen or so decisions from the Ninth Circuit [Scalia and Thomas called them out for it]. With at least 630,000 illegals residing in the state, at a cost of $2.4 billion a year, Arizona is left defiled and helpless in protecting its own residents and even their right to vote in untainted elections.

Indeed, the Trump administration and the GOP Congress owe it to the state to provide them with a new federal appeals court. The Constitution [art. IV, § 4.] requires the federal government to “guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion.” Arizona has been invaded in the worst way possible and they have lost all republican representation by having their sovereignty and right to self-determination denuded by the unelected and unaccountable Ninth Circuit.

As I observed in Stolen Sovereignty [page 100]:

One of the indictments against King George listed in the Declaration was: “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.”

Certainly, when the federal government was created to replace King George as the national authority, they never intended to suppress states from passing laws to protect themselves and their taxpayers, not with a standing army, but at least with their legitimate state law enforcement and power over local issues. In fact, they guaranteed the help of the federal government to protect them from invasion.

In his dissent in Arizona v. United States, Justice Scalia concluded with a rhetorical question: “[W]ould the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding? … if securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.”

Our founders certainly feared that their experiment might result in the collapse into an executive oligarchy, but they certainly never envisioned powers of King George being wielded by a judicial oligarchy, much less a puny lower court existing at the pleasure of Congress. (For more from the author of “Want to Take Back Our Sovereignty? Start by Breaking up the Ninth Circuit” please click HERE)

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Shapiro: Is Trumpism the New Reagan Revolution?

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Last week, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Henry Olson released a revisionist look into the legacy of Ronald Reagan. The purpose: to recast Donald Trump in Reagan’s mold. According to Olson, Trump could be the New Reagan Revolution. Why? Because Reagan was not, in fact, “an anti-government ideologue.” Here is Olson’s breakdown of Reaganism:

Reagan’s conservatism was not a more attractive version of Barry Goldwater’s anti-statist ideology. From the moment Reagan started speaking out as a conservative in the late 1950s, he endorsed an active role for government. He believed that government should care for those who could not care for themselves, build public housing for the poor and expand public universities…Reagan’s conservatism even supported the idea of universal health coverage….Reagan did not shrink from endorsing government action when needed as governor or as president. He raised the gas tax in 1983 to fund road construction and repair. He also imposed sanctions on Japanese industries and companies for what he believed were unfair trade practices even as he sought to extend free-trade agreements throughout the world. Even Reagan’s support for immigration was limited by a belief in protecting U.S. workers….That’s not to say Reagan would have agreed with everything Trump says or does. But the overlap in their views on these issues stems from a broader overlap in philosophy.

And just like that – it’s magic! – Trump is the new Reagan.

Unfortunately, this is a dramatic overstatement of Reagan’s position in order to justify Trump’s. It turns Reagan into a big government advocate. He wasn’t. (Read more from “Want to Take Back Our Sovereignty? Start by Breaking up the Ninth Circuit” HERE)

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On Immigration, Winning Cheap Grace

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The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote scathingly of “cheap grace,” which is the warm fuzzy feeling we give ourselves, and the praise we win from others, by making little virtue-signals that cost us almost nothing — and might well impose suffering on innocent third parties. Jesus Himself denounced it when He saw it among the Pharisees, but Christians are not immune.

In Bonhoeffer’s time, German pastors won cheap grace by safely denouncing Communist atrocities, while pretending that the same crimes weren’t happening just down the train tracks from their churches, at the hands of their own Nazi government. Catholic philosopher Rene Girard spoke of a similar psychological trick, which he called “victimism,” or the cynical use of weaker people’s suffering to aggrandize yourself and win power.

Speak Soothingly to Power

Cheap grace can always be gained by signing on with the sins that are popular with the powerful, and denouncing some evil that is distant or widely despised. Hence pastors in the segregated South could safely denounce the crimes of Josef Stalin, while ignoring the “strange fruit” that hung in their own towns’ trees after brutal lynchings of black men. How many pastors piled up cheap grace aplenty in the 1980s by fighting apartheid in faraway South Africa, and ignoring the abortion clinics that killed black babies by the thousands right down the street?

Now open borders Christians, such as the media-savvy Fr. James Martin, SJ, are gathering cheap grace in bushel baskets on the subject of immigration. In a shrill, moralistic screed that The Stream already analyzed as contrary to Catholic doctrine, Fr. Martin told Americans that it is simply and blankly un-Christian to secure our country’s borders, enforce its labor laws, or carefully vet refugees to keep out those committed to terrorism or sharia.

That is meant to end the argument, to threaten us with eternal damnation if we don’t accept Fr. Martin’s political program — one which no Christian government has enacted anywhere for almost 2,000 years. As a leader in the movement to really implement Christianity for the first time, ever, on immigration issues, Fr. Martin claims his place as one of the best Christians in history. Or so he would like us to see him.

We Learn, 2,000 Years Late, that Borders are Un-Christian

Does Fr. Martin, or any of the bishops who echo him, really believe that no Christian may vote to secure his country’s borders? Is it sinful for Mexico to police its border with Central America? For Latvia to guard its frontier with Putin’s Russia? For Israel to police the crossing into Jordan? I’ve never read any such statements, and I think I know the reason: It’s perfectly obvious that international borders require the rule of law, that sovereign countries deciding who comes and goes is part of what we must “render unto Caesar.”

It doesn’t harm Fr. Martin, in his cozy Manhattan office, that drug cartels and people smugglers control the U.S.-Mexico border, honeycombing it with tunnels and planting it with “rape trees,” with the clothes ripped off young women. Nor does he find himself exploited in an underground economy, where greedy employers turn away poor American workers with enforceable legal rights, then fill their factories or fields with docile, frightened foreign people whom they can threaten with deportation.

Fr. Martin doesn’t have children whose public school is in chaos, overburdened with the hopeless task of trying to assimilate and educate kids in a dozen different languages. Fr. Martin’s health insurance is covered by the wealthy Jesuit order, so he never needs to worry about what it will cost him to use an emergency ward — at a hospital which treats long lines of undocumented and uninsured workers, and so has to soak its few paying customers to avoid going bankrupt. Fr. Martin will never lose his job at America magazine to a lower-paid foreign priest who came in on an H1-B visa, whom he is forced to train.

The Cheapest Grace in the History of the Church
There is a long list of people, both foreign and American, who pay a heavy price for our blithe acceptance of immigration chaos. Few such people have columns in prestigious magazines, or get hired as faith consultants by Martin Scorcese — which Fr. Martin was, for the movie Silence. (As you’ll read here at The Stream, that movie’s ending was an icy apologia for priests who renounce Jesus, betray the Faith, and make a comfortable living helping pagans to persecute the church.)

Those people exist, from the villages emptied of men in rural Mexico, to the ghettos of America where black and Latino teens cannot find entry-level jobs. But it’s easy to ignore them.

Likewise it’s easy for Fr. Martin and others like him to call for utopian policies, wave Jesus around to silence our reality-based objections, and refuse to examine their real-world impact on the poor and the vulnerable. Better still, they can wield their “high-minded” demands to blunt the force of the growing pro-life movement, by insisting that all of us swallow their Seamless Garment poison pill, before we’re allowed to stop killing a million children each year. That wins them points with their powerful friends like Joseph Biden and Tim Kaine, both Jesuit allies and pro-choice Democrats. So men like Fr. Martin coast through life on a cushion of unearned praise and cultural privilege, while sneering at their weaker fellow citizens as “un-Christian,” cruel, and selfish.

I’ll give this to open borders Christians: They have found the source of the cheapest grace in the history of the church. Simon Magus would be proud. (For more from the author of “On Immigration, Winning Cheap Grace” please click HERE)

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Judge Robart’s Ruling Against Trump’s Immigration Order Is Baseless

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If the law means anything, the Trump administration will succeed in overturning the so-called court ruling against its travel ban.

The nationwide stay of the ban issued by Judge James Robart, a Washington state-based federal district judge, is tissue-thin. It doesn’t bother to engage on the substance, presumably because facts, logic and the law don’t support Robart’s sweeping assertion of judicial authority in an area where judicial power is inherently quite limited.

This doesn’t justify President Donald Trump tweeting that Robart is a “so-called judge.” That slam earned Trump bipartisan blowback and may encourage other judges to tilt against Trump’s ban in response to a perceived threat to the independence of the judiciary. But Robart’s handiwork is shoddy and usurpatory, despite the fact that he is indeed a literal judge.

Even if you assume that the states of Washington and Minnesota have standing to pursue the litigation (Robart asserts implausibly that they “face immediate and irreparable injury” from the executive order, the heart of which is a three-month pause on most travel from seven countries), the stay falls down. It ignores our constitutional scheme and Supreme Court precedent, as the Justice Department brief seeking to reverse it persuasively argues.

First, Judge Robart is trespassing on a core executive responsibility. “The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty,” the Supreme Court held in the 1950 Knauff case, “inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation.” The courts are not meant to second-guess the executive’s conduct of foreign affairs, or intrude on its plenary power in this area. “It is not within the province of any court,” the court noted in that decision, “unless expressly authorized by law, to review the determination of the political branch of the Government to exclude a given alien.”

Second, it’s hard to get around the relevant federal immigration law, which says, “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

This is as explicit and wide-ranging as it gets. When the president has such authorization from Congress, the Supreme Court held in the Youngstown Steel case in 1952, his “authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.”

Finally, aliens residing outside the United States have no right to come here. The Supreme Court held in the 1982 Landon case, “an alien seeking initial admission to the United States requests a privilege and has no constitutional rights regarding his application, for the power to admit or exclude aliens is a sovereign prerogative.”

It’s not clear how Judge Robart expects opponents of the Trump ban to overcome these substantial and well-established obstacles. A more extensive and carefully reasoned decision by a Massachusetts-based district judge reached the opposite conclusion of his.

It is true that the ultimate source of the Trump executive order is his ill-advised call for a Muslim ban during the campaign. But the executive order, focusing on seven war-torn or hostile countries that had already been singled out for special scrutiny during the Obama administration, is manifestly not a Muslim ban.

Judge Robart may not like the Trump policy, but that doesn’t mean that it is illegal or unconstitutional. His ruling is worthy of the generally unhinged opposition to President Trump. If the judge doesn’t deserve the abuse that Trump heaped on him on Twitter, he produced what should rightly be considered so-called jurisprudence. (For more from the author of “Judge Robart’s Ruling Against Trump’s Immigration Order Is Baseless” please click HERE)

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An Appeal to the President and Vice-President to Reconsider Their LGBT Strategy

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Dear Mr. President and Mr. Vice-President,

I write this letter as a supporter and advocate, not a critic or adversary. As someone who voted for you and who regularly calls on millions of Americans to pray for you. I also write this with the understanding that you have been elected to serve the American people as a whole and not just one particular faction of Americans.

The great challenge, however, is one that you must deal with on a daily basis: When you stand up for what you believe is right — be it securing our borders or nominating a solid pro-life justice to the Supreme Court — you will alienate a certain number of Americans who oppose your policies and choices. That is inevitable, although regrettable, but if there is any political leader on the planet who is more concerned with acting on convictions than with pleasing people, it is you.

And this brings me to the heart of this appeal.

While you have consistently positioned yourself as a friend of the LGBT community during your campaigning, having Peter Thiel speak at the Republican National Convention and holding up a “LGBT’s for Trump” flag at one of your rallies, you have never positioned yourself as a champion of the gay and transgender agenda.

Conversely, you have most certainly positioned yourself as a champion of religious freedom, and you know that without the vote of conservative Christians (with whom I identify), you could not have gained the presidency. In that respect, we are a unique and important part of your constituency and some of your strongest supporters.

In your first weeks in office, we have been tremendously heartened by some key choices you have made, and we were encouraged by the forcefulness of your speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. It is clear that our religious liberties are very important to you, and they should be, since they are at the very foundation of our nation.

We were also encouraged to hear that you were considering legislation that would have protected religious groups from the negative effects of one of President Obama’s executive orders, namely, the order that put sexual orientation and gender identity on a par with skin color and ethnicity, as if gay was the new black or as if a man identifying as a woman was the same as him being Asian or Hispanic.

As it turns out, you decided to uphold Mr. Obama’s pro-LGBT activism, meaning, that while standing strongly for religious liberty you are unintentionally undercutting that very same liberty.

Mr. President, I truly believe that you desire to stand with LGBT Americans and you do not want to see them hurt or attacked by others, and I second your sentiments wholeheartedly. At the same time, your actions will potentially punish conservative Christians and others for simply living out their faith. Not only so, but I believe you will soon learn that there is no appeasing LGBT activists and that as long as you demonstrate loyalty to your conservative Christian base, you will be considered their enemy.

To make matters worse — and here I turn my appeal to Mr. Pence — when the vice president recently appeared on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos, discussing this very issue, Mr. Pence responded to a pointed question about this action by stating that “throughout the campaign, President Trump made it clear that discrimination would have no place in our administration.” He added, “I think the generosity of his spirit, recognizing that in the patriot’s heart, there’s no room for prejudice, is part of who this president is.”

Mr. Vice President, I know you are a committed Christian yourself, but may I ask if you are saying that it is prejudiced and discriminatory for someone to believe that it’s best for a child to have a mother and father (rather than two fathers or two mothers)? That it is prejudiced and discriminatory to believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman (and therefore not the union of two men or two women)? That it is prejudiced and discriminatory to believe that a 15-year-old boy who believes he is a girl should not be allowed to play on the girls’ sports teams or share their locker rooms and shower stalls?

Last year in England, a 42-year-old Christian evangelist was handing out gospel pamphlets on the street when a 19-year-old gay teen asked him what his God said about homosexuality. The preacher quoted Genesis to him, explaining that God made Adam and Eve to reproduce and have children.

Subsequently, the preacher was arrested and held in custody overnight and “accused of threatening or abusive behaviour ‘aggravated by prejudice relating to sexual orientation’ — despite not swearing or using any form of offensive language.”

Vice President Pence, with all due honor, I ask you: Do you see how your choice of words reinforces the same mentality that led to the arrest of this Christian evangelist, specifically, that his actions were allegedly “aggravated by prejudice relating to sexual orientation”?

And President Trump, with the utmost respect, I ask you: Do you see how the executive order you upheld is a step in the wrong direction, a direction that ultimately leads to discrimination against Christians?

I’m quite aware, Mr. President, that the case in England is different than the federal legislation that you signed, but having monitored the trajectory of LGBT activism for more than a decade, I can assure you that you will not win the widespread support of the LGBT community until you distance yourself from the evangelical Christians who helped elect you and who gave you wise counsel throughout your campaign. In other words, you will not be viewed as a real friend of the LGBT community until you side with gay activism at the cost of Christian liberties.

May I ask you to give these matters your prayerful consideration, inviting some of your most trusted spiritual advisors for input as well? And may I ask you, at the least, to go ahead and write the executive order we were expecting, namely the one enshrining our religious liberties?

If you put religious liberties first, it will be for the good of the nation as a whole.

If you side against these precious liberties, it will hurt the nation as a whole.

May God Himself give you wisdom. You have my prayerful support. (For more from the author of “An Appeal to the President and Vice-President to Reconsider Their LGBT Strategy” please click HERE)

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Obama’s Lasting, Damaging Legacy: Leftist Judges

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Barack Obama may lose his Obamacare legacy when Congress repeals and replaces it, but he has left the nation a far bigger and more damaging legacy. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) gloated in 2014, “one of the most profound changes this Congress made was filling the bench” with Obama’s appointments of federal judges. He went on: “This will affect America for a generation, long after the internecine battles on legislative issues are forgotten.”

Obama is proud of his record. “I am — not to brag — but I have transformed the federal courts from a diversity standpoint with a record that’s been unmatched,” he said. That is mostly true. A scholar of judicial appointments, Sheldon Goldman, observed that “The majority of Obama’s appointments are women and nonwhite males.” Though only 43 percent of his appointments were women, the former president appointed 11 openly gay judges, more than 10 times as many than any other president. (President Clinton appointed lesbian Deborah Batts as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1994.)

Why does this matter? Everyone focuses on the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court hears fewer than 100 cases a year. The lower federal courts handle about 135,000 per year. The vast majority of cases decided by the lower courts become law in their respective circuits. A liberal bench there means a huge number of liberal decisions affecting almost every aspect of American life.

Obama’s Liberal Legacy

Obama got 329 federal judges appointed to the circuit and district courts, all lifetime appointments. The Daily Signal characterizes the change in composition of the courts as a revolution that has been “comprehensive, dramatic, and under the radar.” Liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says Obama’s legal legacy is especially strong in the areas of same-sex marriage and blocking voter identification laws.

When Obama entered office in 2008, only one of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals had more Democratic appointed judges than Republican. 99 circuit court judges had been appointed by Republicans, 65 by Democrats. Now, nine of the appeals courts have more Democratic-appointed judges.

One-third of judges currently serving on the federal bench were appointed by Obama. He got two more judges confirmed than George W. Bush did during his two terms as president. Carrie Severino, chief counsel for Judicial Crisis Network, observed that “Obama was just very aggressive in getting those spots filled.”

Obama appointed left-leaning judges. He stealthily appointed judges who appeared to be non-ideological but then ended up “on the same side as outspoken liberals,” according to conservative legal experts quoted by Politico. The Ethics and Public Policy Center‘s Ed Whelan, for example, noted that between one of Obama’s leftist appointments and his “moderate” appointments, “on a broad range of matters there’s not a dime’s worth of difference.”

But did the Republicans object? Over 200 of Obama’s nominees were confirmed unanimously. Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, said Senate Republicans “handed over the keys to the judiciary without a fight.” Republicans successfully filibustered just two nominees.

Not all senators completely caved. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) has continued to block one of Obama’s nominees for district court, even though the judgeship has been vacant since 2005. Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both Republicans, objected so strongly to many Obama nominations that many of the vacancies are now considered “judicial emergencies” due to large caseloads.

Changes in the Courts of Appeals

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (informally considered the 13th circuit) is considered the second most powerful court in the country, after the Supreme Court. It hears cases involving the federal government.

When Obama assumed office, the court consisted of six judges appointed by Republican presidents, three named by Democrats, and two vacancies. When Senate Republicans objected to three of Obama’s nominees for that court, Democrats invoked the “nuclear option.”

On November 21, 2013, the Democratic majority shut down the ability of Senate Republicans to filibuster Obama’s judicial nominees. The rule requiring 60 votes to bring up a nominee for a confirmation vote was interpreted to only require 51.

Democrats successfully pushed through the three judges, as well as a fourth later on, changing the composition to a 7-4 split in favor of Democratic appointees. How did this affect the court’s decisions? The new court rejected a challenge to Obamacare in Halbig v. Burwell. In another decision, an Obama appointee cast the deciding vote upholding the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality censorship regulations.

When Obama took office, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had more Republican-appointed judges. It was known as one of the most conservative circuit courts in the country, encompassing West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Obama’s appointees changed the balance.

Two Obama appointees out-voted a Reagan appointee on a three-judge panel to rule against North Carolina’s voter identification law. They also held that a transgender student (a male identifying as female or vice versa) must be allowed to use the opposite sex’s restrooms and showers. One of the two justices was confirmed by the Senate in a 96-0 vote. Severino says the Fourth Circuit “is now on the cutting edge of liberal activism.”

But He Couldn’t Change the Supreme Court

Obama couldn’t change the composition of the Supreme Court, however. It remains divided between conservative and liberal judges, with Anthony Kennedy in the middle. Obama merely replaced two left-leaning judges with Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice, and Elena Kagan, his former solicitor general.

Republicans in the Senate prevented Obama from replacing the late Antonin Scalia last year. That would have changed the balance. They refused to bring Obama’s nominee Garland Merrick up for a vote. The senators argued that the decision should be left to the next president.

The left had hoped SCOTUS Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would retire during Obama’s terms so he could replace them with liberal justices. Breyer is 78. Ginsberg is 83 and suffers from health issues. They didn’t, but are thought likely to retire during Trump’s first term, and almost certainly during his second if he has one.

The Pendulum Swings Back

When Republicans took over the Senate in 2015, they stopped the easy approval process, leaving 86 district court and 17 circuit court vacancies for Trump to fill. In contrast, Obama only had 59 total vacancies to fill when he became president. Just 22 appointments were confirmed during the Senate’s 2015-16 session. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell let 25 nominations expire instead of scheduling confirmation votes.

With Republicans in control of the Senate and Donald Trump as president, it should be fairly easy to confirm right-leaning judges. Democrats knew when they implemented the nuclear option that it would eventually be used against them. Trump has said he will encourage McConnell to use it if Democrats filibuster Neil Gorsuch, his pick to replace Justice Scalia. (For more from the author of “Obama’s Lasting, Damaging Legacy: Leftist Judges” please click HERE)

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