GOP-Led Senate Passing Bills at Rate Not Seen in Decades

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The Senate is off to its best year since 1990 by at least one measure, with more than 30 of its bills having been signed into law by President Obama.

Eighteen months into Republican control of the Senate, the upper chamber has settled into a new normal. The partisan fights remain, and senators aren’t spending much time on the floor debating bills — but they are passing them, and at a surprising cli

All told, including the 31 Senate bills and 42 House-written bills, Congress approved 73 measures that Mr. Obama signed into law from January through the end of June. That’s nearly three times the number of bills approved in the first six months of 2015 and 20 more than in 2014, which was the last year Democrats had control of the Senate.

“The new Republican Congress, under the leadership of Sen. McConnell, operates under a dramatically different approach than the Democrats in the previous Congress,” Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said in a statement. “Sen. McConnell opened the Senate, and despite efforts by the Democrat leadership to block bipartisan legislation, we have returned to a more functioning Senate, and allowed senators to participate in the legislative process. While this isn’t the easy way, it allowed members to have more than dysfunction to show for their time in the Senate.”

Democrats say Congress doesn’t deserve the platitudes. (Read more from “GOP-Led Senate Passing Bills at Rate Not Seen in Decades” HERE)

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NFL Star Posts Graphic Image of Slitting Cop’s Throat

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An NFL player is apologizing after he posted an image on Instagram of a man in black slitting a police officer’s throat.

The following image was posted and later deleted by Cleveland Browns running back Isaiah Crowell, 23.

Under the Instagram image showing blood spilling from the officer’s neck, Crowell wrote, “Mood: They give polices [sic] all types of weapons and they continuously choose to kill us … #Weak.”

Crowell_Instagram

WCBS-TV noted that the man in black resembles ISIS terrorist Jihadi John who is known for appearing in online videos in which he is shown beheading American and British victims. The man in the Instagram photo is cloaked completely in black and wears an ANKH pendant around his neck.

According to Cleveland.com, Crowell posted the image after Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot and killed by police officers. (Read more from “NFL Star Posts Graphic Image of Slitting Cop’s Throat” HERE)

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Fox News Roger Ailes Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Multiple Women

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It appears Fox News chief Roger Ailes has a problem reaching Bill proportions – meaning Bill Clinton or Bill Cosby.

Following the filing of a lawsuit by former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson about a series of unwanted sexual propositions from her boss, her attorney says other women are coming out of the woodwork with similar stories dating back to the 1960s . . .

The new accounts from New York Mag include the following:

Kellie Boyle, 54, former Republican National Committee field adviser: “This was back in 1989. I was 29 and living in New Jersey. My husband worked at CNBC and he said, ‘Roger Ailes is coming in to be interviewed, would you like to meet him?’ I said yes! I’d worked in political communications for the Republican National Committee; so Roger Ailes was like a God. I’d read his book, ‘You Are the Message,’ and I used it for a lot of training I did for candidates. I introduced myself in the green room and he was very charming and said, ‘Would you like to visit my office downtown sometime?’ A week or two later I went in and mentioned to him I was going down to D.C. the following week to sign a major contract with the National Republican Congressional Committee. He said, ‘I’m going to be in D.C. too. Would you like to have dinner before you go in?’ So we had a nice dinner at a restaurant in Union Station. There was nothing untoward about it at all. He had a driver and a car, and after dinner he said, ‘Can I take you to your friend’s?’ So we get in the car and that’s when he said, ‘You know if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys.’ I was so taken aback. I said, ‘Gosh I didn’t know that. How would that work?’ I was trying to kill time because I didn’t know if he was going to attack me. I was just talking until I could get out of the car. He said, ‘That’s the way it works,’ and he started naming other women he’s had. He said that’s how all these men in media and politics work – everyone’s got their friend. I said, ‘Would I have to be friends with anybody else?’ And he said, ‘Well you might have to give a blowjob every once in a while.’ I told him I was going to have to think about this. He said, ‘No, if you don’t do it now, you know that means you won’t.’ The next morning I show up to get my assignment and was told the guy I was supposed to be meeting with was unavailable. Back in New Jersey I got a call from Roger Ailes. He said, ‘How’d your meeting go?’ I said, ‘Actually he wasn’t available and I’m hoping to hear back from him.’ He said, ‘Ah, well, I’m sure you will. Have you changed your mind yet?’ I said, ‘I’ll have to pass, Roger. I’m married and really committed to my husband. No offense.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll be in touch.’ And that was that. A couple weeks later, I called a friend who was very high up in the RNC and I asked him what happened. He said, ‘Word went out you weren’t to be hired.’

Marsha Callahan, 73, former model: “This was either ’68 or ’67. At the time he was producing ‘The Mike Douglas Show,’ and I had a call from my modeling agency about the show. I got a call directly from Roger asking me to come down and to make sure I wore a garter belt and stockings. This was right after pantyhose came into use, and I said, ‘Why would you want me to do that instead of pantyhose?’ He said, ‘If your legs look good in a garter belt, I’ll know you have great legs.’ So I go into his office and right away he says, ‘Sit on the sofa and lift your skirt up.’ I had to do these different poses. And then, I recall very clearly, he said he’d put me on the show but I needed to go to bed with him. I was a really shy girl, but I was a little cheeky so I said, ‘Oh yeah, you and who else?’ And he said, ‘Only me and a few of my select friends.’ I said, ‘Well, if you think I have star quality and you can make money off my looks, I don’t think it’d matter if I went to bed with you or not.’ And he said, ‘Oh, pretty girls like you are a dime a dozen.’ The interview ended quickly. I was called in to do the show and I remember passing Roger in the hallway. He pretended not to know who I was.”

(Read more from “Fox News Roger Ailes Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Multiple Women” HERE)

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Sanders Wins Liberal Influence Over Democratic Platform

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Bernie Sanders may have lost out on the Democratic nomination, but he won significant influence over the party’s official policy positions, getting a draft document that largely reflected his liberal views.

A marathon meeting in Orlando on Friday and Saturday marked the final deliberation of the Democratic Party’s platform before the convention later this month. A group of 187 delegates, including supporters of both Democratic candidates, crammed into a steamy hotel ballroom to pore over a draft document and offer amendments.

After a frequently combative negotiating session, all sides agreed the final product was the most liberal set of policies on record. Some of the positions in the non-binding document go beyond Clinton’s past policy statements. The platform, which serves as a guidepost for the party, will be voted on at the convention. (Read more from “Sanders Wins Liberal Influence Over Democratic Platform” HERE)

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Former Military Officials to Obama: We Could Lose the Arctic to Russia

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A group of former military officials and ambassadors have signed onto a statement warning the U.S. is “at risk of being eclipsed by other Arctic states for access and influence.”

The defense experts chastised North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members for not mentioning escalating Russian Arctic ambitions at a recent meeting in Warsaw, Poland on Russian aggression.

“While the U.S. has used its position (as Chair of the Arctic Council) to elevate Arctic issues, it has not built the presence required to maintain regional security and stability, an effort that will need years of consistent effort,” reads a statement signed by 15 former officials who are led by retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones that was obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Jones and his colleagues are worried that the U.S. is falling behind Russia in terms of its Arctic presence. Recently, the Kremlin unleashed its newest nuclear-powered icebreaker. Russia now has six such icebreakers trolling the North Pole, while the U.S. has none, down from two previously. In 2013, the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. needed six or more icebreakers to meet its Arctic needs.

Jones’ statement comes after the Obama administration further restricted drilling in Alaska’s Arctic waters. Meanwhile, Russia has been refurbishing old Soviet-era military bases in the region and drilling for oil and natural gas, despite low energy prices.

“Due to a convergence of foreign interests and the Arctic’s changing physical geography, the U.S. is at risk of being eclipsed by other Arctic states for access and influence,” wrote Jones and the others.

The warning comes as nothing new. Experts have been warning President Barack Obama about loss of influence in the Arctic for several years. In 2015, Department of Energy (DOE) advisers urged Obama to support developing Alaska’s offshore oil and gas reserves, or face losing out to the Kremlin and China.

“Internationally, other countries such as Russia are moving forward with increased Arctic economic development during this time of change,” the DOE’s National Petroleum Council reported in 2015.

“Russia is drilling new exploration wells in the Kara and Pechora Seas and is expanding its naval and transportation fleet,” council advisers wrote. “While China does not have Arctic territory, it is investing millions of dollars in Arctic research, infrastructure, and natural resource development.”

“To remain globally competitive and to be positioned to provide global leadership and influence in the Arctic, the United States should facilitate exploration in the offshore Alaskan Arctic now,” the council reported.

The Arctic is estimated to hold 15 percent of the world’s oil reserves and 30 percent of its gas reserves.

Now, with Russian ambitions once again on NATO’s radar, Jones and other experts are urging the alliance to take Arctic policy more seriously.

“Recent events in Europe reinforces the need for the U.S. and our allies to remain committed to a robust and cooperative framework in the Arctic, as resurgent powers will seek to take advantage of trans-Atlantic divisions to further their interests,” Jones and the others wrote. (For more from the author of “Former Military Officials to Obama: We Could Lose the Arctic to Russia” please click HERE)

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Americans Scoff at Obama’s Plan to Visit Dallas in Wake of Tragedy

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President Barack Obama’s decision to cut short his European trip to visit Dallas, where five police officers were killed Thursday night, failed to provide the positive reaction for which the president might have hoped.

“He’ll just continue to divide on racial grounds,” John S. Roberts wrote on Young Conservatives.

Many voices on Twitter agreed that Obama’s visit was too little too late.

Although Obama condemned the deadly Dallas ambush, more than one commentator said Obama is part of the problem, not the solution.

“I don’t believe there’s any sincerity behind the president’s words,” Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said Friday. “Just yesterday he was popping off at the mouth again — exploiting the situations in Louisiana and Minnesota — exploiting it on the basis of race. He has no foundation for that. There’s no data or research that suggests or proves anything he thinks in terms of disparity.”

“The spread of misinformation and constant instigation by prominent leaders, including our president, have contributed to the modern day hostility we are witnessing between the police and those they serve. As a result, today we are seeing one of the noblest professions condemned by those who could benefit the most,” said Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas. (For more from the author of “Americans Scoff at Obama’s Plan to Visit Dallas in Wake of Tragedy” please click HERE)

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Shocking Detail Revealed About Dallas Shooter’s History With Black Militant Group

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In the wake of the deadliest attack on law enforcement since 9/11, new details are starting to emerge about Micah Xavier Johnson’s past.

Since last Thursday’s sniper attack in Dallas that left five officers dead and seven wounded, it’s been discovered that Johnson was a sympathizer of some black militant groups and was friends with a man who preached radical “afrocentrism.” But The Daily Beast is reporting other surprising details.

When Johnson was sent home from Afghanistan, it was because he stole women’s panties and was eventually caught. He was discharged in the summer of 2014. Back at home, he sought to join radical black movement groups that believed in armed resistance against white people.

The organization he originally tried to join remains unknown, but in order to be accepted he had to submit an application. That process was handled through known affiliates. One of these militant groups was the Collective Black People’s Movement. Ken Moore, who is a member, was asked to run a background check on Johnson. When he found out about the Army and the reason Johnson was sent home, Moore labeled him as “unfit for recruitment.”

Because this type of blacklisting is reported to other black nationalist groups, Johnson was effectively banned from joining any of them. “Once you’re blacklisted by the alert that we put out, that’s a wrap,” Moore said.

On Thursday, Johnson took matters into his own hands and launched his attack on white officers during a “Black Lives Matter” protest.

During the final moments in the standoff in Dallas, Johnson wrote “R.B.” on the wall with his own blood. Investigators suspect this might have been a nod to the Black Riders Liberation Party, an extremist group that has openly called for the death of “oppressors.” The full acronym is “RBG” — which represents the colors of the Pan-African flag, red, black and green — but it seemed Johnson was never able to finish the last initial.

Lakesia Washington, the leader of the Black Riders, has repeatedly shouted for a “call to arms” among all black people. On Thursday afternoon, she posted on Facebook: “We intend to see that our racist oppressors also get a taste of death!”

When news broke that Johnson had killed five officers in Dallas later that night, celebration occurred within the group.

Washington posted a message in tribute. It read: ““R.I.P. Micah…X…Johnson !!!… RBG 4 LIFE!” (For more from the author of “Shocking Detail Revealed About Dallas Shooter’s History With Black Militant Group” please click HERE)

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INSIDER MEMO: Ex-Hill Staffer Takes on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell

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To: Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan
From: Rachel Bovard, former policy director, U.S. Senate Steering Committee
Subject: Conservatives are right, eliminate the lame duck

Dear Leader McConnell & Speaker Ryan,

Do you ever feel like you’re having the same conversation over and over again when it comes to Congressional spending? It’s because you are.

Here we are, again, talking about the need to pass a Continuing Resolution (CR).

Despite all the lip service paid to “regular order,” “passing individual spending bills” and “getting back to work,” you and Senator McConnell, R-Ky. (F, 44%) have not been able to send a single appropriations bill to the President’s desk.

With one week to go before a two-month election year recess, moving forward with appropriations bills is not only futile, it’s actually wasting time that could be spent on other Republican priorities – like protecting religious liberty, instituting regulatory reform, combating the zika virus or, I don’t know, repealing Obamacare?

As always, the issue comes down to one of timing and of length. How long should the CR be extended? To the end of the year? Or into the new one?

Conservatives like Congressmen Dave Brat, R-Va. (A, 100%) and Mark Meadows, R-N.C. (A, 93%) are focused on extending this year’s spending levels into the March or April of next year, saving the spending decisions for the new Congress, and the new president. Such an extension also protects the CR from becoming an end-of-the-year grab bag of parochial projects, various extensions of unauthorized programs and higher spending.

It also effectively eliminates the “lame duck” session of Congress – the period of time after the election, when a bunch of members who have been defeated or decided to retire – can come back and make all kinds of spending decisions over which they’ll never face any accountability, all the while encouraged by a president who is also on his way out the door.

However, the House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky. (F, 34%) prefers a CR that extends to December, and loves lame duck sessions. Lame ducks provide Rogers and his appropriator colleagues maximum leverage to extract concessions out of their membership, and the opportunity to squeeze conservatives who demand lower spending levels or other policy changes. You may recall this as the annual December dance in Congress – members want to go home, and so do the staff, and because of that, they’ll pretty much vote for anything and bully anyone who stands between them and Christmas dinner. (Remember, there’s a reason that Obamacare was passed on Christmas Eve.)

The conservatives are right on this issue. The CR should be passed into the middle of next year, or beyond. This isn’t simply a matter of avoiding further spending increases, it’s a matter of good governance. It’s removing the ability of Members of Congress (and the president) who are leaving the Congress from making significant decisions over the nation’s fiscal future – one in which they will no longer play a part.

You wouldn’t let your ex come in and manage your bank account, right?

Then why would you let a Member of Congress who has just lost an election come back and extract all he can from the taxpayers till?

Stop trying to pass pointless appropriations bills, and instead direct your committee chairs to start crafting a CR that goes well into the new year. Even better, have it lower spending.

Doing so will make you the first House Speaker in a very long while who doesn’t cave to special interests, to the desire of departing Members to line their pockets, and who finally stands up for the taxpayer by effectively eliminating the lame duck session of Congress.

(For more from the author of “INSIDER MEMO: Ex-Hill Staffer Takes on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell” please click HERE)

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Why Young Adults Both Want and Fear Marriage

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When we interviewed Carly, 31, in the summer of 2010, she had been in an on-again, off-again cohabiting relationship with the father of her child for about 12 years. Never married, she called marriage a “piece of paper.”

One year later, however, she had broken up with her longtime boyfriend and was engaged to a different man.

Why did she accept his marriage proposal?

Contradicting what she said a year before, Carly (not her real name) told us: “Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s just a piece of paper.’ But that piece of paper is … more binding than just really being together.”

She explained that her experience in a long-term cohabiting relationship had taught her that marriage was indeed different.

As we learned in our interviews with over 100 young adults in a mostly white working-class town in Ohio, most young people are neither adamantly opposed to marriage nor completely supportive: They are conflicted about marriage. They hope to get and stay married, providing for their own children the family stability that many of them did not have growing up.

One national study found that in 2001-2002, more than 80 percent of young adults said that marriage was important in their life plan. But many are also uncertain about how to achieve that aspiration and unsure about whether marriage retains the meaning they believe it should have.

Many of them witnessed the separation or divorce of their parents as children, or barely knew their dad or mom. Others saw their parents stay in marriages marked by abuse, drinking, drugs, or misery. Others admired their parents’ marriage but were shaken by the divorces of relatives or friends, or by hearsay about high divorce rates.

The legacy of the divorce culture is trauma and a crisis of trust. A study conducted in the mid-2000s found that of 122 working–and middle-class young people in cohabiting relationships, more than two-thirds expressed concerns about divorce that were related to their views about marriage. Many respondents said that they were reluctant to marry because they wanted to “do it right,” by which they meant marrying only once.

That legacy of divorce is reinforced by the cultural deregulation of sex and dating. As divorce-weary young people form their own romantic relationships, they hear from the culture that “sex is sex, regardless of who it’s with,” love should be “effortless,” and “you got one life to live, and you got to live it the way you want to live it.”

Those messages undermine their pursuit of a trusting and resilient lifelong relationship.

As a result, many young Americans are left on the outside looking in, admiring marriage but paralyzed with anxiety about becoming another divorce statistic or worried that their boyfriend or girlfriend is not trustworthy. Thus, more Americans are delaying marriage longer, and more (though still the minority) are forgoing marriage altogether.

In other words, the declining marriage rate is not so much a reflection that marriage is no longer desired, but that, in a culture of distrust and divorce, it is fragile.

The bad news is that young Americans have less confidence in marriage than their grandparents did and are carrying profound wounds. The good news is that, as one adult child of divorce said of his peers from fragmented families, “They lived it and they want a change.”

As another adult child of divorce told us, “I think my home life as a kid made me more driven to be like, ‘I’m not gonna have a broken home.’”

Many young people are afraid of marriage, but that does not mean they are giving up on it. If anything, they possess a hard-earned understanding about the suffering wrought by family fragmentation. They want a better life for their own children, and they deserve the support of everyone from cultural leaders to policymakers to business leaders as they seek that better way. (For more from the author of “Why Young Adults Both Want and Fear Marriage” please click HERE)

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Social Conservatives Declare Victory on Bathrooms, Marriage in GOP Platform

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After fending off attempts to change the Republican Party’s official position on LGBT issues and traditional marriage, a coalition of social conservatives cautiously celebrated an early victory Monday afternoon.

Before the Grand Old Party picks its presidential nominee formally, a select set of delegates on the platform committee will spend the week staking out Republican positions on everything from domestic to international issues definitively.

On the social issue front of the Republican platform, conservatives maintained a strict definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman. They limited the use of single-sex bathrooms in public buildings to those of the same biological sex. And they defeated efforts to steer the party in a direction more in line with LGBT advocacy groups.

“There are those who are committed to undermining the conservative ideals that this party has long stood for,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Center and a Louisiana delegate to the convention.

“They’re an extreme minority, they’re committed to their view, and I think they will persist,” he told The Daily Signal Monday. “But I don’t believe they will prevail.”

To become a part of the party’s platform, those initial advances still need to be ratified by a majority of the 2,472 Republican delegates that will crowd onto the floor of Quicken Loans Arena next week.

But social conservatives seemed confident Monday afternoon that they had defeated an effort financed by billionaire Republican Paul E. Singer, according to The New York Times. His group, American Unity Fund, along with Log Cabin Republicans, aimed to hammer new gay rights planks into the platform.

The effort ultimately failed in the subcommittee on the family.

“I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I had heard that somebody was spending $6 million to get LGBT stuff into the platform,” Kansas delegate Mary Culp told The Daily Signal. “I would say that the effort fizzled.”

President Barack Obama’s bathroom directive took center stage. In a sweeping May proclamation, the administration instructed local schools to extend Title IX protections, which prohibit sex-based discrimination, to transgender students. The directive suggested that schools that refuse to allow transgender students to use the single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender they identify with would potentially lose federal funds.

Addressing that policy in the platform is a political miscalculation, according to Anne Dickerson, a New York delegate who argued that the “discussion of bathrooms takes us down a rabbit hole quite a great distance.”

“I think this is a state issue,” she told her colleagues during a subcommittee hearing. “A lot of states, local municipalities, and schools who have transgender students have dealt with this issue rightfully at the local level.”

Though Dickerson declined to comment for this article, the New York delegate argued in committee that Republicans were blindly taking Democrats’ bait by elevating the issue in their platform.

Gregory Angelo, president of Log Cabin Republicans, echoed that sentiment, telling The Daily Signal he’s frustrated by Monday’s development.

“This is a foolish issue to nationalize and talk about within the Republican Party platform,” he said. “It literally drags the platform into the gutter when so many people who are on this committee seem hell-bent with some obsession with bathroom use.”

Social conservatives on the family subcommittee justified their positions by insisting that the White House forced their hand. It was necessary to insert bathroom language in the platform, they argue, to offer a rebuttal and give local school districts guidance on the issue.

“Cowards would say this is not politically expedient, let’s not talk about it, let’s just let the president’s radical agenda go unchallenged,” Perkins told The Daily Signal. “This is not the party of cowards.”

In an interview last week with The Daily Signal, former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said delegates on the platform committee should take up the issue to keep boys and girls in their respective bathrooms based on biology, not gender identity.

“The president had made a federal issue—and it’s amazing to be saying this—of bathrooms,” Cuccinelli said. “The president has done this, we didn’t. But if he’s going to pick the fight, we’re not going to back down.”

The fight over social issues comes as evangelical voters question where Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, stands on social issues.

Trump has been friendly toward former Olympian and current transgender advocate Caitlyn Jenner—who announced she will speak as a “transgender ambassador” at an event in Cleveland during the convention.

But recently the New York businessman announced his support of a North Carolina law that requires individuals to use public restrooms that correspond with their biological gender.

Social conservatives see the platform as a way to tether Trump to their brand of a pro-family platform. And so far, the Trump campaign has demonstrated little interest in challenging the party platform.

That’s good news for conservative groups such as the Susan B. Anthony List that were happy with the 2012 platform position on abortion, which looks unlikely to have significant changes.

“We’re going to remain vigilant, we want it [to] remain rock solid, and then we want to see Mr. Trump embrace this platform once it’s passed,” said Billy Valentine, the pro-life group’s director of government affairs, in an interview last week.

Though the party’s presumptive nominee disagrees with some GOP orthodoxies, coalition members say they’re confident that Republican doctrine on social issues will be conserved in the party platform. (For more from the author of “Social Conservatives Declare Victory on Bathrooms, Marriage in GOP Platform” please click HERE)

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