‘Not Over’: 4 Legal Probes Hillary Clinton Still Faces

/0 Comments/in , /by

Hillary Clinton would have been a bigger target for investigators if the presidential election had gone differently, but that doesn’t mean the Democratic nominee and former secretary of state can put such legal questions behind her.

The FBI is conducting an ongoing investigation into potential “pay to play” at the Clinton Foundation, although it appears to have closed its investigation of Clinton’s official email.

During the presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump vowed to name a special prosecutor to continue the investigation into Clinton for her use of a private email server while conducting government business as secretary of state.

Immediately after his stunning victory over Clinton, the president-elect had only praise for Clinton’s campaign and public service.

In response to questions about prosecuting Clinton in the next administration, two Trump campaign surrogates rumored to be under consideration to be the next attorney general seemed to suggest turning the page on the matter in TV interviews Thursday.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, also a former U.S. attorney, told CNN:

It’s been a tradition in our politics to put things behind us. On the other hand, you have to look at how bad was it? Because suppose somebody comes along a year from now and is alleged to have stolen $50,000 from a charity—and [Clinton] was never investigated for hundreds of millions.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another former U.S. attorney, said of Trump and Clinton on NBC:

I will tell you they had an enormously gracious conversation with each other Tuesday night. Again, politics are over now, people have spoken, time to move on.

While FBI Director James Comey opted against recommending charges against Clinton in July, he said she acted recklessly in sending and receiving classified information on the nonsecure system.

Congress also will continue inquiries it began into the Clinton Foundation, the email matter, and questions about potential political interference in the FBI’s investigation of the private server.

“The House Judiciary Committee will continue to press for answers to questions about whether the investigation was thorough and whether there was special treatment given to the political elite,” a House Republican Judiciary Committee aide told The Daily Signal on Thursday.

One poll taken just before the election found that just more than one-third of Americans saw Clinton as honest, while another poll found an overwhelming majority believed she did something illegal or unethical with her private email server.

Such findings could make it difficult to rationalize dropping the investigations.

Judicial Watch, a leading conservative watchdog group, plans to continue its own investigations into Clinton through the use of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. That’s because it isn’t relying on the Trump administration’s Justice Department or Congress to hold anyone accountable.

“The Trump administration and new Congress must focus on restoring the rule of law and accountability after the eight years of a lawless Obama administration,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a statement, adding:

Corruption in government is an overwhelming problem. We expect, but won’t rely on, D.C. politicians to do the right thing. Judicial Watch will continue its independent investigations and lawsuits in order to hold politicians of both political parties accountable to the rule of law.

After Judicial Watch asked a D.C. court to compel the State Department to answer more questions about Clinton emails, Fitton tweeted Wednesday: “No, it’s not over.”

Here’s an overview of investigations likely to continue even as Clinton moves out of the political arena.

Email Investigation

Comey told congressional leaders just 11 days before Election Day that the FBI would reopen its probe into the private email server Clinton maintained while secretary of state. Then, two days before the election, he said the FBI concluded nothing would change the original decision not to recommend charges.

This won’t deter Congress.

“Because Secretary Clinton was not forthcoming about her use of a private email server to send and receive classified information, a number of questions still remain and have not been answered by the Obama administration,” the same House Judiciary Committee aide told The Daily Signal ahead of the election. “The House Judiciary Committee will continue to seek answers about Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server.”

Based on the FBI’s initial findings, House Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said in August that Clinton may have lied under oath to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015. They asked the Justice Department to investigate.

The Clinton Foundation

Reports surfaced days before the election that the FBI had made the Clinton Foundation a “very high priority” investigation, one that it has conducted for more than a year.

Throughout the course of Clinton’s campaign, she dealt with “pay to play” charges based on what some alleged was direct State Department action after larger foreign donations to her family foundation.

In May, 52 House members asked IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to investigate the Clinton Foundation to determine if it was abiding by the rules of a legitimate tax-exempt charity. In July, 64 House members asked the IRS, FBI, and Federal Trade Commission to look into the foundation. The FTC has some regulatory authority over nonprofits.

WikiLeaks exposed numerous emails related to the Clinton Foundation, including one from 2015 in which Clinton staffers were debating whether it would look proper for her to go to Morocco to collect a $12 million donation for the foundation.

Among the most noteworthy cases, Uranium One Chairman Ian Telfer gave $2.35 million to the foundation. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, collected $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow at an event promoting Uranium One stock. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was among U.S. officials who approved the Uranium One sale to Russian investors.

Members of Congress also noted that Bill Clinton accepted $16.5 million to serve as the honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities, a company founded by businessman Douglas Becker that gave between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, an appendage of the State Department, reportedly gave $55 million to Becker’s International Youth Foundation. Laureate denied any quid pro quo, noting the International Youth Foundation is a separate entity that has received State Department funding since 1999.

Investigating a Cover-Up?

Beyond the underlying matters, the committees could seek to find out more about how the Justice Department, the FBI, and the State Department reacted in the course of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official business.

“We’ve seen the politicization of federal agencies and possible felonies by government officials in the course of the FBI investigation, with possible obstruction, destruction of evidence, and perjury,” Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“The DOJ itself should be investigated,” Flaherty said of the Justice Department.

Multiple congressional committee chairmen wrote Attorney General Loretta Lynch to ask about the unusual restrictions placed on the FBI during the initial probe of Clinton’s use of email, such as orders to destroy laptops after the investigation concludes.

Fox News, citing House Judiciary Committee sources, reported that Clinton aides with immunity deals had a side arrangement with the FBI to destroy their laptops after a review.

Chaffetz, Goodlatte, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., signed the letter to Lynch.

Goodlatte also asked the Justice Department to investigate emails from Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, who in one message appeared to offer to place FBI agents in additional overseas locations if the bureau would agree to declassify some documents related to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, that left four Americans dead.

While members of Congress made these inquiries before the election, Justice Department officials generally are obligated to respond to their questions.

Further, news accounts raised questions about FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his connection to longtime Clinton fundraiser and campaign adviser Terry McAuliffe, now the Democratic governor of Virginia.

Before he became deputy director of the FBI, McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, ran for the Virginia state Senate in 2015. During her campaign, McAuliffe’s political action committee, Common Good VA, gave $467,000 to her campaign.

Chaffetz sent an article to committee members about McAuliffe’s campaign donation to the wife of someone who would go on to become a top FBI official, The Washington Post reported.

“It seems like an obscene amount of money for a losing race,” Chaffetz told the newspaper. “The ties between the governor and the Clintons are well known. He raises money for a lot of people, but why so much for this one person?”

Campaign Dirty Tricks

Aside from the Justice Department and Congress, the Federal Election Commission could investigate Clinton’s campaign. The agency delves into credible allegations of campaign finance violations regardless of whether the campaign was victorious.

Investigative filmmaker James O’Keefe made the FEC complaint against the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action Fund released videos that appeared to show evidence of coordination among the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and three super PACs. In one video, an Americans United for Change director is seen saying the organization paid mentally ill people to disrupt Trump rallies. Direct coordination between a campaign and independent groups is not permitted by law.

Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in an October tweet that he was “stunned” by O’Keefe’s recent undercover videos.

(For more from the author of “‘Not Over’: 4 Legal Probes Hillary Clinton Still Faces” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Portland Police Declare Riot in Third Day of Anti-Trump Protests

/0 Comments/in , /by

Chaos rocks Oregon on the third night of protests against Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States.

Police in Portland declared the situation a riot after windows were smashed and cars demolished.

As The Oregonian reports:

Police declared the demonstration a “riot” more than three hours after its 5 p.m. start, citing “extensive criminal and dangerous behavior.” The bureau said it warned the crowd about the designation, then tweeted that rioting is a class C felony.

The crowd – at least on par with the 2,000 that gathered the night before — started at Pioneer Courthouse Square in the early evening before taking off on a route that included a stop at the Portland waterfront and trip over the Hawthorne Bridge into Southeast Portland.

(For more from the author of “Portland Police Declare Riot in Third Day of Anti-Trump Protests” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump’s Victory Presents a Golden Opportunity for Conservatism

/0 Comments/in , /by

The polls were wrong, the pundits were wrong, the establishment was wrong. But the people got it right, electing the populist billionaire Donald Trump—and rejecting the ultra-progressive Hillary Clinton—as our 45th president.

They also gave Trump a Republican Congress, as well as 33 Republican governors to work with. It was a tsunami victory for the GOP and the conservative movement that supplied its politicians with ideas.

For more years than anyone can remember, the American people have been saying that the country is headed in the wrong direction and that they wanted change. Serious change.

They found it in the person of Donald Trump, who took his campaign where no Republican had gone in decades—to Michigan, Wisconsin, and other parts of rustbelt America—and brought back into the GOP a group previously known as “Reagan Democrats.”

Trump also performed better than expected in the African-American community because, it appears, he took time to visit and talk with them.

This election may go down as a realigning election because it meets two key criteria: (1) A major political party has been seriously weakened, and (2) a new political leader with new ideas has acquired the reins of power. Certainly the Republican Party—that is, the conservative party in our country—now dominates the political landscape.

In the new year, the new president and the new Congress must begin delivering on campaign promises such as repealing Obamacare, nominating respecters of the Constitution to the Supreme Court, improving border security, and repairing our badly run-down bridges and roads.

For their part, conservatives can offer solutions based on the first principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual freedom. The Heritage Foundation has already been working with the Trump transition team, at its invitation, on policy alternatives and personnel possibilities.

Heritage is using as a model the 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” manual that President Ronald Reagan adopted for his administration. Reagan liked the conservative proposals of “Mandate” so much that he had copies placed before each member of his Cabinet at their very first meeting.

Almost two-thirds of the “Mandate” recommendations were eventually adopted, either in whole or in part, during the Reagan years. Heritage would like to match that record in the next four years.

As it moves forward, the Trump administration will face many powerful pressures to compromise, to settle for less, and to cut deals with special interests. As it has for 40 years, Heritage will argue that conservative policies are the best policies because they are based on one basic, time-tested idea: freedom works.

The historic results of the 2016 election offer a golden opportunity that must not be wasted. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Victory Presents a Golden Opportunity for Conservatism” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How Republicans Could Overcome Filibusters by Senate Democrats

/0 Comments/in , /by

As Democrats strategize on how to stop conservative legislation from making its way to Donald Trump’s desk in the White House, Republicans have a little-known rule in their toolbox that would allow them to pass legislation, including a repeal of Obamacare, with a simple majority.

Democrats were able to keep 48 seats in the Senate after Tuesday’s election, giving the party the power to filibuster legislation and effectively prevent conservative policies from being enacted.

But Republicans can turn to a seldom-used Senate rule that would allow them to pass legislation by a simple majority vote—legislation that has a greater chance of earning Trump’s signature after he assumes office Jan. 20.

Called the two-speech rule, the tool limits senators to giving only two speeches in one legislative day on a question before the Senate. A legislative day, which differs from a calendar day, ends when the upper chamber adjourns.

Once a senator gives those two speeches, he or she is not allowed to speak again.

The Senate then would vote on the bill up for debate when there aren’t any more senators who are permitted to speak.

Senators don’t often use the two-speech rule, a December 2014 report from the Congressional Research Service states. However, the report acknowledged that senators may choose to invoke the rule “as a means of attempting to overcome a filibuster.”

Republican senators explored using the two-speech rule earlier this year, when both the House and the Senate were focused on passing 12 individual appropriations bills to fund the government for 2017.

A memo early this year from a Republican Senate aide, James Wallner, urged conservative senators to enforce the two-speech rule to avoid filibusters by Democratic colleagues.

At the time, Wallner was executive director of the Senate Steering Committee, the upper chamber’s conservative caucus. Wallner currently is group vice president for research at The Heritage Foundation.

His Jan. 11 memo says, in part:

The strategy should increase the costs (both physical and political) on individual Democrats for obstructing the Senate’s appropriations work. Doing so forces them to bear the burden of blocking consideration of specific appropriations bills. It also makes the minority’s obstruction tangible to the American people, thereby increasing the public’s awareness of Democrats’ efforts.

Senate Republicans need to secure 60 votes to advance legislation, but will fall short of that threshold in the 115th Congress, when they will hold 52 seats.

Republicans currently occupy 54 Senate seats.

But invoking the two-speech rule would circumvent the chance for a filibuster, as senators instead would voice their opposition or support rather than vote on whether to advance legislation.

Although the Wallner memo focused on how to move appropriations bills forward, the two-speech rule could be applied to future legislation addressing Obamacare—Republican leaders have said they are committed to repealing the health care law—as well as to Supreme Court nominations.

Since Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, one seat has remained vacant on the high court. President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a D.C. appeals court judge, but Senate Republicans refused to move the nomination and chose instead to wait for a new president to be sworn in.

Since Republicans took control of the Senate in 2014, GOP lawmakers have been stymied in their ability to pass legislation that has any Democratic opposition.

Instead, Democrats have withheld votes on motions to proceed—which advance legislation for final passage—in an effort to “extract concessions” from Republican leaders, the Wallner memo stated.

Democrats’ efforts have been especially noticeable during spending fights in recent years. In response to filibusters from the minority party, Republicans frequently have removed GOP-favored policy riders attached to legislation or raised spending levels once they return to the negotiating table, action that has angered conservative members. (For more from the author of “How Republicans Could Overcome Filibusters by Senate Democrats” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Is the Wall Possible? What Trump Can Do on Immigration

/0 Comments/in , , /by

When Donald Trump is inaugurated as president in January, he has the authority to dramatically reshape immigration policy by himself.

While Trump would need Congress to appropriate money to fund his biggest campaign promise — building a wall across the southern border — he can act alone in other areas, just like President Barack Obama has, in deciding how to enforce immigration law.

“The president does have a lot of executive authority and discretion to enforce the law as he wishes,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “There is a lot of immigration enforcement discretion.”

How Trump Can Act Alone

In interviews with The Daily Signal, Leopold and other experts described how Trump could act on the many promises he made to overhaul U.S. immigration policy.

Trump can take immediate actions by himself, starting with canceling Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has provided deportation protection and work permits to about 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

The program grants protection for two years, after which beneficiaries can apply again. New applicants can still request DACA protection through the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

“One of questions is whether he would cut [DACA] off immediately or let the program sunset so that when people’s protection expires, he does not allow for renewals,” said Faye Hipsman, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “USCIS is still receiving first-time DACA applications, so that would occur in a pretty staged and staggered manner.”

Trump could also permanently cancel a broader Obama program that made more people eligible for DACA protection and extended legal status to include the parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents. The Supreme Court has blocked that program.

In addition, Trump, if he wishes, can change the priorities of the Department of Homeland Security on who it seeks to deport.

The Obama administration asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that handles most deportations, to focus its resources on those who are considered threats to public safety, or are have been convicted of crimes, usually a felony.

Other priorities for deportation include individuals who have been convicted of multiple misdemeanors, and recent arrivals who came here illegally after Jan. 1, 2014.

“Right now, the way the Obama administration is treating it, is unless you are a priority, we won’t actively go after you. Trump can flip that,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a former policy advisor at the Department of Homeland Security.

After calling for mass deportations early on in his campaign, Trump has walked that back to say he would focus enforcement on illegal immigrants with criminal records.

“Right away, border security is one of the top five things he will try to address right out of the starting gate,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies. “That includes taking the handcuffs off the immigration agencies and letting them get back to doing their job according to the law. I don’t want to say there will be immediate drastic change. But there are many things the Trump administration can do on their own right away to restore control to immigration policy.”

Seeking Help From Congress

Trump would need Congress’ cooperation on his signature proposal — finishing the construction of a wall across the southern border.

The border security mechanism that Congress would support would likely not come in the form of a brick-and-mortar wall described by Trump, but as extended fencing.

Immigration experts say the U.S. has spent billions in recent years fencing about one-third of the border.

The next president has the template to finish the job.

In 2006, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which authorized 700 miles of additional fencing along the border with Mexico. President George W. Bush signed the law. However, his administration later pushed for an amendment to the bill to give the government the discretion to determine what type of fencing was appropriate in the various areas of the border, depending on environmental and land-use restrictions.

As a result of that amendment, the majority of the fencing erected as a result of the law has been vehicle barriers — designed to stop vehicles rather than people, and single-layer pedestrian fencing. The original law called for double-layered fencing. Subsequent Republican attempts to require double fencing have failed.

“Depending on what type of infrastructure he wants, [Trump] probably already has the authorization to do it,” Brown said. “He just needs Congress to appropriate money.”

Similarly, Congress would have to approve the funding for another major Trump proposal: tripling the number of ICE agents who focus on deporting immigrants living in the country illegally.

Brown says personnel costs already make up about 80 to 90 percent of the budgets of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency that protects the border.

The border patrol, meanwhile, has faced challenges fulfilling hiring goals mandated by Congress.

Republicans in Congress who share Trump’s hardline positions on immigration say they welcome his plans, even though they will certainly cost a lot of money.

“It seems to me the Republican conference sees we just had a seismic, historic election so there is a new mandate to get things right with immigration,” said Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., in an interview with The Daily Signal. “It was one of [Trump’s] big issues, and one of my big issues that I ran on. So yes, it is worth the money. Look at France and Germany. If you don’t secure borders, you lose the entire country.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who met with Trump on Thursday, was asked by Fox News’ Bret Baier if he supports building a wall but committed only to “physical barriers.”

“I’m in favor of securing the border,” Ryan said. “And I do believe you need to have physical barriers on the border. I will defer to the experts on the border as to what is the right way to actually secure the border.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is less committal on whether he’d support paying for a border wall.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, McConnell did not directly answer questions about if he supports Trump’s wall proposal.

“I’m not going to go back and relitigate events of the past,” he said. “We have a new president. I would like to see him get off on a positive start. I think we should look forward and not backward and kind of rehash and relitigate the various debates we had internally and with the Democrats over the past year.”

Pressed again, McConnell added: “Border security is important. I think even our Democratic friends realize we haven’t done a very good job of that. Achieving border security is something that I think ought to be high on the list.”

But despite Republican control of the House and Senate, Trump’s border security plans needing congressional approval will likely be opposed by Democrats. In the Senate, Democrats still have the power of the filibuster to block legislation.

“If enforcement is his primary push, Democrats will be opposed to that unless legalization is part of the conversation,” Brown said. “That has been the quid pro quo on immigration for years.”

More Trump Proposals

Along with his more prominent proposals, Trump has also called for punishing so-called sanctuary cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Trump could withhold federal funding from those cities, but would need support from Congress to do so.

The president-elect has not limited his plans to illegal immigration.

He said he would reduce legal immigration levels, a step requiring the approval of Congress.

And Trump said he would suspend immigration from countries that are “compromised by terrorism,” although he has not clarified what countries he’d consider. (For more from the author of “Is the Wall Possible? What Trump Can Do on Immigration” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

WHEN A PICTURE IS WORTH A MILLION WORDS: Faces of White House Staffers Priceless as President Trump Arrives

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

So sad:

On Wednesday, however, the White House staff, along with the rest of America, listened as Obama discussed the election results in a televised address… And their faces said it all.

161110-white-house

After President Trump’s inauguration, I would like to ask that any former member of Valerie Jarrett’s Secret Service detail (why she warranted such a force is worthy of its own investigation) contact me. I have a case of beer I would like to send each and every one of you. (For more from the author of “WHEN A PICTURE IS WORTH A MILLION WORDS: Faces of White House Staffers Priceless as President Trump Arrives” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

China State Media Warns Trump Against Isolationism, Calls for Status Quo

/0 Comments/in , /by

Chinese state media has warned the U.S. president-elect against isolationism and interventionism, calling instead for the United States to actively work with China to maintain the international status quo.

President-elect Donald Trump threatened to tear up trade deals and pursue a more unilateral foreign policy under his “America First” principle during a tempestuous election campaign.

But China and other foreign governments are uncertain how much of Trump’s rhetoric will be translated into policy because he has at times made contradictory statements and provided few details of how he would deal with the world.

Trump often targeted China in the campaign, blaming Beijing for U.S. job losses and vowing to impose 45 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. The Republican also promised to call China a currency manipulator on his first day in office.

U.S. isolationist policies had “accelerated the country’s economic crisis” during the Great Depression, warned a commentary by China’s official Xinhua News Agency, though it added that “election talk is just election talk”. (Read more from “China State Media Warns Trump Against Isolationism, Calls for Status Quo” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

A Quick, Heartfelt Thank You Note to My Democrat Colleagues

/0 Comments/in , /by

The headline at Ann Althouse’s place says it all: “The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level.”

She points to a a despondent Jim Newell at Slate (I read it, so you don’t have to) who offers us a long overdue obituary for the mummified husk of the far left Democrat Party.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ESTABLISHMENT IS FINISHED
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level… The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished…

…I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullsh**…

…The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar…

…the few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn’t show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton’s emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College… Don’t listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.

This prompted me to write a quick thank you note to those who may have voted Democrat in 2008 and 2012.

Dear Democrats,

Hillary Clinton was indeed a sucky candidate.

But Barack Obama was exposed as precisely the charlatan we predicted as early as 2007. See, for example, the illustrated tale I wrote entitled “Thirty Degrees Below Zero.”

Now it is clear:

The rise of President Trump is the true legacy of Mr. Obama and his successful campaigns to destroy the health care system, flood the country with illegal aliens, tarnish the sanctity of the vote, upend the rule of law with a thoroughly politicized Department of “Justice”, target his political opponents using the IRS, fuel the rise of a nuclear Iran, seed the Middle East with the most vicious brand of Islamist throwbacks seen in a thousand years, encourage Russian and Chinese aggression against our military, invite Muslim Brotherhood terrorists into the White House, crush the will to work by flooding able-bodied Americans with welfare benefits, initiate a veritable war on cops by cheering racialist terror groups like Black Lives Matter, suppress economic growth with millions of pages of new regulations… all while doubling the national debt!

Congratulations!

Thank you for returning the entire apparatus of government to those who actually care about America.

Sincerely, Doug

I’ll quote America’s most petty president ever on this matter, who — while meeting with the opposition party for the first time after his inauguration — said “elections have consequences” and “I won.”

Mr. Trump is now fully justified in echoing those comments to a Democrat Party that has been repudiated across the land.

As a wise man once said, the greatest pleasure in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women. (For more from the author of “A Quick, Heartfelt Thank You Note to My Democrat Colleagues” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Let’s Make This Prolife Win Stick by Pretending That We Lost

/0 Comments/in , /by

Even as pro-life voters celebrate what seems to be a clear electoral win at every level of government, we need to remember how quickly victories can be squandered, or politics’ worm can turn. In fact it behooves us at this very moment when we’re raising our hopes for change to learn from our enemies who snatched victory from defeat.

90 years ago today, a great idealist committed (in his own way) to justice for the vulnerable saw his dreams for change collapse before his eyes. He had struggled for years against an increasingly intolerant regime that perverted his country’s constitution, took innocent lives, and tried to crush the freedoms that citizens took for granted. He had worked inside the system, followed its laws, taken part in elections and run a newspaper. He had worked his way up the ranks of a major political party, only to see that party crushed in a single day. Now the regime of injustice that scoffed at human life appeared to be all powerful. There was no realistic prospect of peaceful change, and a revolution seemed utterly out of the question.

What We Can Learn from Antonio Gramsci

On November 9, 1926, Antonio Gramsci, Italian Marxist, went to prison. You might have thought that his story ended there — as just another one of Mussolini’s victims. The Fascist system had already begun beating down every labor union, church group, newspaper, or other institution that stood against its program of “Everything for the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.” But that day in November the Fascists had gone even further: They’d enacted a wave of emergency laws that banned political parties and subjected even members of Parliament, such as Gramsci, to instant arrest.

In prison, battered by illness, denied proper medical care, Gramsci worked out a whole new way for Marxism to fight back against its opponents. Instead of organizing workers into councils so they could fight for a violent revolution, or running political candidates in elections they typically lost, Gramsci suggested that followers of Marx work on multiple fronts inside the culture, and gradually rise through the ranks of power centers — from churches and universities to magazine and movie studios. They would quietly gather influence and connect like-minded people, and by gaining control over the “cultural means of production,” they would teach the millions to reject the values of capitalism and private property, until the Marxist dream seemed less like some distant utopia than the logical next step, which few would bother resisting.

It is worth thinking back on Gramsci. While his goals were very different from ours, and quite incompatible with them, it’s hard to deny that his methods were brilliantly effective. Nor are they (like revolutionary murder) intrinsically evil, such that we can’t learn from them. In fact, Gramsci’s techniques took a cause that seemed completely lost and brought it back from the dead. As scholar Samuel Gregg has noted, Gramsci’s thought

effectively transcended its Marxist origins. His outlook is now blankly taken for granted by millions of teachers, writers, even churchmen, who have no idea that they are committed to cultural Marxism. So while the socialist paradises constructed by Lenin, Stalin and like-minded people imploded over 25 years ago, the Gramscian mindset is alive and flourishing at your local university and in more than a few liberal churches and synagogues.

Aware of how transitory electoral victories can prove, the above is precisely what the pro-life movement must do. Here’s a three-point Gramscian plan for making America prolife again:

Kiss Big Brother Goodbye

Our churches and other institutions must reclaim the social safety net from the hands of a government still committed to intrinsic evils, like abortion and euthanasia. We should not fool ourselves that a Trump administration can “fix” this deeply-dyed bias of the federal government. At least not forever. There is no more room for Christian charities to take federal money. Period.

And this is just as well. The vision of human dignity at the heart of the prolife movement was never really in sync with “charities” that derived most of their income from forcible taxation, and essentially served as federal contractors. Nor do such programs really serve the needs of America’s vulnerable — focused as they are on streaming a bare survival income to poor people the better to purchase their votes in the next election.

Federal social programs will serve the values that dominate the federal government, which will likely remain those of the anti-life secular left. You could best sum up the worldview taught by the U.S. Supreme Court, and all those institutions that follow its solemn teaching as: “The greatest number of happy moments for the greatest number of voters.” For them, human life is neither dignified nor sacred, and it’s not really important that charity programs try to transform the lives of people — to help them become free and independent, responsible and self-reliant. The key, instead, is to spend just the right amount of money to keep the ghettos quiet. Christians must do better. And we already know how. We see in the network of pro-life pregnancy centers that our movement created in the teeth of state resistance a model for every other social outreach or charitable agency run by our churches or non-profits: Reject the state’s distorted, anti-life values, and purchase your freedom from them by raising your own money.

Recapture the Institutions

Pour our energy, time, and effort into a “long march through the institutions” of academia, media, journalism, and philanthropy. Too often, we write off these crucial “means of cultural production” as hopeless — precisely because Gramsci’s disciples did their job so patiently and effectively over the decades. But in the long run, Gramsci was right when he observed that it’s more important to form the minds of the next generation than it is to win the next election.

Politics is downstream of culture. Roe v. Wade was not decided based on sound Constitutional reasoning, or even the brilliant arguments of attorneys with wicked, anti-human views. The judges’ minds were made up by the broad cultural consensus that sex is mostly for pleasure, and the carefully-fostered illusion of a population crisis.

Who created that consensus, and fostered that illusion? The leaders and foot soldiers of cultural movements in all those institutions Gramsci had targeted. (For a documentary on how they succeeded inside the Catholic church, see the powerful documentary A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.) If we would undo his work, we must patiently retrace their footsteps. It won’t be easy. But it’s absolutely crucial. That’s what organizations like Movie To Movement exist to advance.

Have a Back-Up Plan in Case the Supreme Court Can’t Be Fixed

We must hold President Trump accountable for his often repeated promise to appoint honest, pro-life judges to our higher courts, and if he honors it, get ready to fight like wildcats to help his appointees get confirmed.

But we can’t stop there. The closeness of this election and the narrow balance on the Supreme Court show us how risky a “courts-only” strategy really is. We must have a back-up plan. That means exploring every possible legal and Constitutional strategy for resisting the decisions of a runaway Supreme Court — which has already far exceeded its authority, and transformed itself into a perpetual, Constitutional convention — each year producing a new set of principles to suit the preferences of its politics.

We must look to ourselves, our states, and the tools bequeathed to us by the founders in the Constitution to protect our freedoms and the rights of the most vulnerable in our society. The Constitution grants us two significant means to achieve this. The first is in the framework of Article 10 and the second, in Article 5. Nullification pursuant to Article 10 has been used by the states in recent years to reject a myriad of federal intrusions. In fact, 2009 saw a wave of 10th Amendment resolutions passed or introduced by state legislatures across the country specifically aimed at restoring power to the states. Similarly, an Article 5 convention of the states provides for the people and their state legislators, rather than a self-serving Congress, to judiciously restore order to the republic through carefully considered amendments to our Constitution. The first one we should promote, of course, would restore the sanctity of life.

If Gramsci could spread what he didn’t realize was poison from the depth of a prison cell, we can work through our churches, non-profits, businesses and families to spread what St. John Paul II called the “gospel of life.” We have God’s promise that nothing, not even martyrdom, can finally silence us. (For more from the author of “Let’s Make This Prolife Win Stick by Pretending That We Lost” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How Trump Closed the Deal With Evangelicals

/0 Comments/in , /by

“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Those words from the Psalmist, King David, rang especially true for many Americans on November 9th when they awoke to the news that the nation had rejected the continuation of the anti-family, anti-faith policies of Barack Obama by electing Donald Trump in perhaps the most stunning political upset of the modern age. In a year of surprises, the ultimate outsider delivered the biggest, tapping into the frustration that pollsters didn’t detect and liberal elites never took seriously.

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” vowed the president-elect, who not only overcame the opposition of the Democratic Party, but his own — soaring to victory in spite of a biased media, his own personal baggage, lopsided polls and a bevy of Hollywood stars. In disbelief, pundits watched as the electoral map turned a sea of red, colored by almost a decade of disillusionment with the president’s extremist agenda. Fueled by massive turnout, the highest in U.S. history, voters delivered a stinging repudiation — not just of Hillary Clinton — but her party’s ultra-liberal agenda and arguably the entire Obama era.

But the night wasn’t just a vindication of Donald Trump. It was also a validation once again of the evangelical movement, which once again overcame the media’s narrative of division to deliver one of the most significant political messages this country has ever seen. In nearly every election cycle for the last 40 years, the Left has tried to bury a movement they wish had never been born. And on the night of November 8th, they learned just how impossible that prospect will be. Evangelicals, many of whom (myself included) backed other candidates during the primary, quietly assessed the perilous state of the nation and unified behind Trump in greater number than they had behind the last three GOP nominees. To the astonishment of everyone, Trump outperformed John McCain, Mitt Romney and even George W. Bush — winning an overwhelming 81 percent of the evangelical vote.

If the media had questions about the influence of the religious right, they were answered early Wednesday morning by the greatest coalescence around a Republican nominee in two decades. It turns out the press had about as much success writing the obituary of the evangelical movement as it had predicting this election. Anyone who traveled the country these last few months saw how values voters were drawn to Donald Trump, not because of shared values, but because of shared concerns over the damage a Clinton Supreme Court would do to our freedoms. Recognizing that national security hung in the balance, they saw this as an opportunity, after eight years of President Obama’s repressive policies, to make freedom mean something again.

They also had the opportunity to hear, along with the rest of America, one of the best arguments against partial-birth abortion the country has ever heard in a presidential debate, in which Trump described — in detail — the barbaric procedure that rips a child out of the womb moments before birth. It may have been the most significant moment — not just of Trump’s campaign, but in the history of modern presidential politics. In four short sentences, the GOP nominee closed the deal with millions of pro-life voters, solidifying their support as the best chance to end America’s nearly 44 years of Court imposed abortion on demand. According to pollster George Barna, politically engaged evangelicals rank abortion as their top issue (30 percent) and Supreme Court nominations a close second (28 percent), the final debate delivered exactly the clarity they were hoping for.

In the end, though, what we witnessed wasn’t just the revenge of the deplorables, but the collapse of the Obama legacy. After the spectacular failures of Obamacare, the demoralization of our military, the explosion of lawlessness, tolerance of corruption and obsession with social engineering, Americans finally have the opportunity to rebuild the country they once knew. But the election is just the starting gun. Donald Trump may open the door to America’s solutions, but he was never meant to be the solution. The true transformation of a society starts in the hearts and minds of men. And under an administration with no interest in continuing the eight-year war on the First Amendment, we may finally see what the Church is capable of. In the meantime, one thing about this historic uprising is clear: Americans are looking for leaders of conviction. And as the results of the race for president show, they will accept no substitutes. (For more from the author of “How Trump Closed the Deal With Evangelicals” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.