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Gun Groups to Virginia’s Governor & Attorney General: Here’s Why You Should Expect a Revolution If You Try to Take Our Guns

December 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion, Weekly /by Philip Van Cleave and Erich Pratt

Virginia Attorney General (“AG”) Mark Herring was asked to issue a formal legal opinion regarding Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions being adopted by counties, cities, and towns across Virginia. AG Herring’s official advisory opinion (“Herring AO”) was issued on December 20, 2019. In it, AG Herring argues that Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions (i) have “no legal effect,” (ii) local government officials “must comply with gun violence prevention measures that the General Assembly may enact,” and (iii) “neither local governments nor local constitutional officers have the authority to declare state statutes unconstitutional or decline to follow them on that basis.” Each of these contentions is untrue.

Based on the Herring AO, and various statements reported in the press, it is apparent that AG Herring and Governor Ralph Northam believe that Virginia localities have a duty to actively assist the Commonwealth in the enforcement of any law enacted by the General Assembly. These officials appear to believe that such blind obedience is required irrespective of whether a law violates the U.S. Constitution, the Virginia Constitution, or is manifestly destructive of the pre-existing rights of the People of Virginia. This radical view is demonstrably false, and ignores the significance of the fact that local officials are required by law to take an oath to support the federal and state constitutions above the laws enacted by the General Assembly.

Moreover, neither Attorney General Herring nor Governor Northam can credibly demand that local governments must implement every Act of the General Assembly, because that view directly contradicts the positions they have taken in the past. Indeed, on three recent occasions, AG Herring and Governor Northam have taken exactly the opposite legal position, with respect to: (i) the defense of the Virginia Marriage Amendment to the Virginia Constitution; (ii) the General Assembly’s refusal to assist the federal government with the arrest and detention of civilians as authorized by the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012; and (iii) the right of localities in Virginia to become sanctuary cities with respect to the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Finally, the assertion that lesser magistrates owe slavish obedience to abusive higher authorities was never the view of the Founding Fathers, particularly those from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Had the English barons embraced this view, there might never have been a confrontation with King John at Runnymede, leading to the protections provided by Magna Carta. Had our nation’s founders embraced this view, Virginia might still be a colony of England. Truly, this view is contrary to the most basic principles which underlay our form of government, is anti-Biblical, and is profoundly abusive of the pre-existing and inalienable rights of the People of Virginia.

On December 2, 2019, Delegate Jerrauld C. “Jay” Jones (D-89) requested that Attorney General Mark Herring (D) issue a formal opinion under Code of Virginia § 2.2-505, addressing Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions. At the time of his request, such resolutions had been passed by “more than twenty localities across the Commonwealth.” Since then, the movement has spread across the Commonwealth with remarkable speed, and as of the date of this letter, 114 counties, cities, and towns have adopted Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions, with more still expected to add to this list. Sheriffs have joined in this effort as well.

On December 5, 2019, Delegate Lee J. Carter (D-50) pre-filed HB 67, seeking to remove law enforcement personnel from office who decline to enforce firearms laws, regardless of their constitutionality.

Virginia General Assembly to enact into law a cornucopia of the nation’s most extreme anti-gun bills. The Governor’s threat to enact radical gun control must be taken seriously, as complete one-party control of the General Assembly will occur on January 8, 2020, and the offices of the Governor, Lieutenant Governor (Justin Fairfax (D)), and Attorney General all will be filled by persons of the same political party, and sharing the same anti-gun sentiments.

In response to Delegate Jones’ request, AG Herring’s office issued a media statement on December 6, 2019, stating that the Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions appear to be “just symbolic.” In another newspaper article, on December 9, 2019, AG Herring was quoted as saying that “Second Amendment sanctuary” resolutions will have “no legal effect whatsoever.” On December 11, 2019, it was reported that Governor Northam stated that localities “can continue to have their meetings. They can continue to make sanctuary counties,” but they will not stop the Governor from pursuing anti-gun legislation. Now, AG Herring has issued his Advisory Opinion, formalizing that view.

The legal claims in AG Herring’s AO are invalid, and on the contrary, there are established precedents for non-cooperation efforts such as Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions. In fact, both AG Herring and Governor Northam participated in establishing and reinforcing those precedents.

I. Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions Have Significant “Legal Effect.”

It is certainly true, as the Herring AO notes, that Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions generally assert only the “intent” of Virginia’s counties, rather than making concrete directives to address a future situation which is not yet known. And, as the AO points out, it is certainly true that the “measures that the General Assembly may enact,” and the scope of resistance to those measures, is “entirely speculative.” But those facts hardly lead to the Attorney General’s conclusion that Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions have “no legal effect.”

On the contrary, events in the Commonwealth are still at the stage whereby law-abiding Virginians are sincerely petitioning their state government officials not to enact unauthorized, unconstitutional laws. The Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions, passed in November and December of 2019, are not unlike the petitions of an earlier time, when both the citizens of Virginia and their elected officials implored their Royal Governor, King George, and Parliament to hear their petitions and grant them relief. In this sense, the Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions should be considered an exercise of the ancient right to petition government for redress of grievances. They can be understood as a supplication to the Commonwealth’s rulers not to abuse their power nor do the great evil that is being considered.

At the same time, however, these petitions and supplications are not being expressed as mere preferences, but as Constitutional necessities. The vast majority of Virginia localities have made it clear that any attempt by the General Assembly to forcibly disarm Virginians, to register their weapons (in preparation for their eventual later forcible seizure), or otherwise to turn law-abiding Virginians into felons, would be ultra vires acts, void, and thus not law at all. See Federalist No. 78.

These concerted actions by the Commonwealth’s counties, cities, and towns are highly unusual and of great significance. Sadly, the Attorney General’s letter wholly ignores the fact that the Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions are crafted as an appeal to the government. The resolutions do not indicate any desire to provoke a fight (legal or otherwise) with the ruling government in Richmond. Rather, the resolutions indicate a most sincere desire to avoid conflict with the General Assembly, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the Attorney General. However, Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions announce that, should the government in Richmond act lawlessly, then local officials and the People they represent will not cooperate and may take steps to actively resist.

Indeed, the degree to which these localities may find it necessary to withhold compliance, or even actively to resist legislation, is entirely in the hands of the General Assembly and the Governor. The Attorney General was profoundly wrong in his attempt to minimize and demean this historic effort, asserting it as being of no “legal effect.”

II. No Constitutional or Statutory Provision Requires Compliance with an Unconstitutional State Law.

The Herring AO conflates several constitutional principles to arrive at the desired result. First, the AO notes that the General Assembly has the power to create (and uncreate) counties, and to designate the scope of their powers. From that, the AO reaches the far broader conclusion that “all local authority is subject to the control of the General Assembly.” (emphasis added). That is a non sequitur. On the contrary, there are certain constitutional requirements, such as the form of county government, with which the General Assembly cannot dispense. Article VII, Sections 4 and 5 establish county boards and county sheriffs as elected constitutional offices, and thus beholden to the People — not to Richmond. Indeed, Article I, Section 2 notes that “power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people, that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.” In other words, through the enactment of Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions, county boards, and sheriffs, are acting “subject to the control” of the People as expressed in the Constitution, not the General Assembly. Likewise, Article I, Section 7 explains that “all power of … the execution of laws, by any authority, without consent of the representatives of the people, is injurious to their rights, and ought not to be exercised.” It is to protect the People’s rights that Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions have been adopted by county boards, acting to protect the People who consented to be governed under a Constitution which contains limits on the powers of the General Assembly and the Governor.

Second, the Herring AO conflates the text of Virginia Code Section 1-248, that “the Constitution and laws of the United States and of the Commonwealth shall be supreme,” with the concept of “supremacy of state law over local ordinances and policies” and the idea that “local authority is subordinate to state law.” The Herring AO asserts that “when a statute and an ordinance conflict, the statute must prevail.” But what happens when a statute and the Constitution conflict? Indeed, Virginia Code Section 1-248 contemplates supremacy in a situation where a statute is in harmony with constitutional provisions. Here, where the General Assembly is considering passing a litany of unconstitutional gun control laws, state law would come into conflict with the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions. In such a case, county boards owe no obeisance to an unconstitutional state statute, but rather to the higher law of the Virginia and United States Constitutions, and to the People — the authorities from which these officials derive their power. The offending laws are a nullity — void — as if they were never enacted.

Finally, the Herring AO asserts that all laws enacted by the General Assembly must be complied with “unless and until those laws are repealed by the legislature or invalidated by the judiciary.” Thus, the Herring AO adopts the Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy: that the courts are the only branch of government which has a duty to interpret and apply the Constitution. If that were true, there would be no reason for all office holders to swear an oath to the Constitution — just a duty to obey the view of the courts. Indeed, this has never been the law of the land, in Virginia or the United States. Rather, as St. George Tucker observed, even after a constitution has been ratified by the people, the people retain “the censorial power [which] may be immediately exercised upon their representative or agent who forgets his responsibility….” St. George Tucker, View of the Constitution of the United States 48 (Liberty Fund: 1999). It simply is not, nor has it ever been, the case that a constitution means whatever a current majority of judges decide it should mean. As Blackstone put it, “the law, and the opinion of the judge are not always convertible terms, or one and the same thing; since it sometimes may happen that the judge may mistake the law.” W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England at 71 (Univ. of Chi. facsimile ed. 1765).

III. AG Herring and Governor Northam Have Established the Principle that It Is the Duty of All Elected Officials to Defend the U.S. and Virginia Constitutions.

Paradoxically, one of the most recent Virginia precedents for elected officials declining to enforce provisions of state law was established by AG Herring himself, immediately after being inaugurated as Attorney General in 2014. Indeed, AG Herring not only refused to enforce a statute, he refused to enforce the Constitution of Virginia itself. AG Herring then went even further, attacking and helping undermine state constitutional provisions and statutes that he believed to be unconstitutional, based on his personal view that the U.S. Constitution superceded the Virginia Constitution, even though his opinion was wholly unsupported by any decision of the U.S. Supreme Court as of that time. If AG Herring truly believed the claim in his AO, that state officials must defend and enforce the law until a court declares it invalid, he would not have acted in this way.

On November 7, 2006, the People of the Commonwealth of Virginia ratified their State Constitution by adopting the “Virginia Marriage Amendment” with over 57 percent of the vote. In order to become part of the Virginia Constitution, as Article I, Section 15, it was necessary that the Amendment was passed by two different sessions of the General Assembly, separated by a general election. The amendment declared, inter alia, that “[o]nly a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.”

On July 18, 2013, the Virginia Marriage Amendment was challenged in a case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (Norfolk Div.) known as Bostic v. Rainey, 970 F.Supp.2d 456 (E.D. Va. 2014). The case was defended by then-Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli (R). After a hotly contested election which required a recount, AG Herring was sworn into office, succeeding Ken Cuccinelli, on January 11, 2014.

On January 23, 2014, on no authority but his own, AG Herring filed a “Notice of Change of Position” with the district court, based on his personal decision to refuse to defend the Constitutional Amendment voted by the People of Virginia. AG Herring declared that, irrespective of the action of the People in amending their Constitution, that as “an exercise of” his “independent judgment,” he had concluded that when a provision of the Virginia Constitution or Statute “violates the federal constitution, he is not duty bound to defend it.” (Emphasis added.)

In an interview with NPR, reported January 23, 2014, AG Herring asserted: “As attorney general, I cannot and will not defend laws that violate Virginians’ rights.” (Emphasis added.) He added that “his job is to defend laws that are constitutional. This one, he said, isn’t.” As AG Herring put it in a January 23, 2014 opinion article in USAToday:

An attorney general who concludes that a law is unconstitutional is duty bound not to defend it. There are those who argue that attorneys general should operate on automatic pilot, defending laws regardless of their constitutional merit. An uncritical allegiance to that notion is not only wrong, it allows the critic in this instance to mask his opposition to marriage equality. [Emphasis added.]

In support of his assertion of the authority not to enforce a law thought to be unconstitutional, AG Herring relied on a position taken by Justice Scalia, stating that “the President’s powers to resist legislative encroachment by Congress include the power to ‘disregard them when they are unconstitutional.’ Freytag v. Commissioner, 501 U.S. 868, 906 (1991) (Scalia, J. concurring in part).” AG Herring also relied on an amicus curiae brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in Astroline Communications Co. v. Shurberg (Mar. 6, 1990), by then-Acting Solicitor General John A. Roberts (now Chief Justice of the United States), refusing to defend a federal statute in court and expressing, as AG Herring put it, “the view of the United States that the [federal] statute in question was unconstitutional.” Notice at 4.

In conclusion, AG Herring’s actions, supported by Governor Northam, with regard to the Virginia Marriage Amendment, establish the following precedents for Virginia:

First, an elected official who reaches the “independent judgment” that a state statute is in violation of the U.S. Constitution is at liberty to decline to enforce that statute.

This principle is at the very core of the Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions.

Second, an elected official has the power to take affirmative steps to block enforcement of an unconstitutional statute.

By these actions and the precedents they establish, AG Herring and Governor Northam have completely undermined their recently expressed opinions that Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions are not authorized.

On New Year’s Eve in 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (“NDAA”). Sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA allow the military the power to undertake an indefinite detention of anyone the federal government declares to be an enemy, including civilians not under the authority of the Department of Defense. These powers apply even if the person is a U.S. citizen, allowing him to be held without charges, without access to counsel, and without trial.

Immediately after the public became aware of the NDAA law, there were efforts across the country to resist this unlawful suspension of the right of habeas corpus and other constitutional violations. Opposition arose to this unjust, immoral, and unconstitutional law came from across the political spectrum, even among Democrats who, even though perhaps trusting President Obama with such powers, understood that a future administration could use it against its political opponents.

Thus, with broad bipartisan support, and only one dissenting vote in the Senate and seven dissenting votes in the House, Virginia enacted HB 1160 in 2012, prohibiting Virginia from assisting the federal government in the unlawful detention of U.S. citizens pursuant to the NDAA. With a narrow exception designed to exclude information sharing through joint task forces, the law stated:

no agency of the Commonwealth [including any] political subdivision of the Commonwealth … [or] employee of either acting in his official capacity, or member of the Virginia National Guard or Virginia Defense Force, when such a member is serving in the Virginia National Guard or the Virginia Defense Force on official state duty, shall knowingly aid an agency of the armed forces of the United States in the detention of any citizen pursuant to 50 U.S.C. § 1541 as provided by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (P.L. 11281, § 1021) if such aid would knowingly place any state agency, political subdivision, employee of such state agency or political subdivision, or aforementioned member of the Virginia National Guard or the Virginia Defense Force in violation of the United States Constitution, the Constitution of Virginia, any provision of the Code of Virginia, any act of the General Assembly, or any regulation of the Virginia Administrative Code. [Emphasis added.]

Notable among the legislators voting for HB 1160 were both Attorney General Herring and Governor Northam, on February 28, 2012 and again on April 18, 2012.

Thus, through HB 1160, the Virginia General Assembly established the principle that:

A subordinate level of government has the authority and, indeed, the responsibility, to refuse to cooperate with a higher level of government when the higher government enacts a law which violates the Constitution of the United States.

This same principle of Non-Cooperation applies when local governments are faced with unconstitutional statutes enacted by the General Assembly.

On March 9, 2018, the General Assembly passed a bill introduced by then-Delegate, now-Congressman, Ben Cline, HB 1257, which would have added a one sentence provision to the Code of Virginia:

No locality shall adopt any ordinance, procedure, or policy that restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

On April 9, 2018, Governor Northam vetoed this bill. A story published on April 9, 2018 in the Washington Post stated that Delegate Cline had explained that his bill would only “ban localities from interfering [with] federal immigration actions, not press them into service.” However, Governor Northam explained that preventing localities from declaring themselves immigration sanctuaries would send “a chilling message to the communities across Virginia that could have negative impacts on public safety.” Governor Northam called the measure “unnecessary and divisive.” The House attempted to override the Governor’s veto, but it failed on a vote of 51-48.

On February 23, 2019, the General Assembly passed a bill introduced by Senator Dick Black, SB 1156, which had the same wording as the HB 1257. This bill too was vetoed by Governor Northam, who explained to the Richmond Times Dispatch on March 19, 2019, “The safety of our communities requires that all people, whether they are documented or not, feel comfortable, supported and protected by our public safety agencies….” This story mentioned that, in 2017, Governor Northam had opposed legislation (HB 2000, introduced by Delegate Charles D. Poindexter) to restrict localities from becoming sanctuary localities, and the Governor told voters that he had voted against such a measure in order to break a tie while presiding over the Senate as lieutenant governor.

Thus, three times in three consecutive years (2017, 2018, and 2019), Governor Northam used his office to support the right of Virginia’s localities to declare themselves sanctuary cities and counties, refusing to help with the enforcement of federal immigration laws, based on mere policy differences with those federal laws. These consistent and clear actions establish yet another powerful Virginia precedent supporting the right of localities to decline to enforce a state law that violates the express federal and state constitutional protections for firearms.

IV. The Virginia Founding Fathers Established the Principle that Certain Statutes were Unlawful and thus Void.

Among the authorities cited by AG Herring in his Notice of Change of Position, when he refused to defend the Virginia Constitution’s marriage amendment, were statements by certain of the Founding Fathers. Thus, it is useful to examine how the Founding Fathers viewed the enactment of laws which exceeded a government’s power.

When the Federalist Party used its power in Congress to enact the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, it was Virginia’s own Thomas Jefferson who anonymously drafted the Kentucky Resolves, also known as the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (approximately October 4, 1798) which were adopted by the Kentucky legislature. The Jefferson draft begins:

Resolved that the several states composing the US. of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style & title of a Constitution for the US. and of Amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own selfgovernment; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, it’s acts are unauthoritative, void, & of no force. [Emphasis added.]

Virginia’s James Madison drafted a similar resolution, adopted by the Virginia General Assembly on December 24, 1798. The Virginia Resolution claimed that the states may “interpose” when the federal government acts unconstitutionally:

in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties, appertaining to them. [Emphasis added.]

Thus, from the time of this nation’s infancy, Virginians clearly envisioned the principle of resistance to abuses of power not unlike that which is taking place with the enactment of Virginia’s Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions. When a higher government overreaches, it is the duty of the lesser governments to interpose themselves, to protect the People from the abusive power to give meaning to the protections of the U.S. and Virginia Constitutions.

Our Founding Fathers knew well the dangers of the unauthorized accumulation of, and abuse of, power. As students of history, they knew it had not been uncommon for those holding high civil office to abuse the power with which they were entrusted. When serious abuse occurs, the role of the People and those holding lower civil office is not simply to suffer that abuse without remedy. This principle, which is long established in Virginia, and recently affirmed with the assistance of AG Herring and Governor Northam, is now being relied upon and asserted by counties and cities with respect to proposed unconstitutional gun laws.

Resistance to illegal and unauthorized government acts is not new — it is an ancient doctrine, historically known as “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate.” Under this doctrine, when a superior or higher civil authority makes an unjust, immoral, or unconstitutional law or decree, the lesser or lower ranking civil authority has both the right and the duty to refuse obedience to that superior authority. The act of the lesser or lower authority is deemed an act of “interposition” — using the term chosen by Madison — choosing to stand between the higher authority and the People, thereby protecting the People under its charge. If necessary, the lower authority may even actively resist the superior authority, since the higher authority is acting illegitimately and unconstitutionally, and without legal authority.

This doctrine is, in fact, foundational to our form of government. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence is a document of interposition, between the American colonists and a tyrannical King George III. Its signatories — the People’s representatives — pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” believing that they most likely would be tried and executed for treason against the crown.

This ancient doctrine is reflected in the words of Roman Emperor Trajan to a subordinate: “Use this sword against my enemies, if I give righteous commands; but if I give unrighteous commands, use it against me.” This doctrine equips the American People with a way to address the abuse of power by higher civil authorities (here, potentially, the Commonwealth of Virginia) — in a measured and peaceful manner — by making an appeal to and through lower civil authorities (here, the governing bodies and sheriffs of the localities of Virginia).

The application of the principles set out above to Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions is clear. The U.S. Constitution and the Virginia Constitution are the statements of the will of the People themselves, and the compacts from which the Virginia legislature draws its authority. Should the Virginia General Assembly, along with the Virginia Governor or Attorney General, enact and attempt to enforce a law which is prohibited by Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution, and the pre-existing, inalienable rights of the People, then such law is of no legitimacy — and void. In response, local government officials who have sworn an Oath to uphold the federal and state constitutions unquestionably have the inherent power — and the duty — to refuse to enforce such unconstitutional laws, and even to protect the People against enforcement.

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The Deep State Resistance Terrorized Innocent Americans; Pardoned Ex-Soldier Fuels Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Talk

December 23, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion, Weekly /by News Editor

By Daily Caller. Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected to Make America Great Again, the self-declared #Resistance has terrorized him and many innocent Americans. . .

Today’s Resistance more closely resembles the 18th century French Revolution type – a ruthless mob orchestrated by elites which toppled the government and terrorized countless French citizens for a decade. Their hatred was so deep they even beheaded the statues at Notre Dame Cathedral and the Palais Des Papes in Avignon, home to the 14th century popes and the seat of Western Christianity.

Then, as now, the Resistance’s rallying cries were based on false claims and similar smear campaigns. In Paris, Queen Marie Antoinette was rumored to have said if the poor had no bread, “let them eat cake.” Yet that was an anti-royal trope in France for over a century and there’s no evidence she said it.

In our times, the equivalent rabble-rousing slander is that the Trump Campaign “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Though fortunately the guillotine is no longer fashionable, the Resistance still wages terror. Judicially. Financially. Psychologically. . .

Tragically, President Trump along with 50-plus associates have been subjected to a three-year reign of terror from our own government, press and public over a politically motivated hoax. (Read more from “The Deep State Resistance Terrorized Innocent Americans” HERE)

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Pardoned Ex-Soldier Fuels Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Talk About U.S. Military

By Business Insider. It’s been nearly a month since Clint Lorance, the 35-year-old former US Army first lieutenant who was convicted of war crimes and later pardoned by President Donald Trump, emerged from military prison at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas to the greetings of his family. . .

Throughout his presidency, Trump and his ardent supporters have fueled the so-called “deep state” theory — a term lifted from coup-prone Turkish politics about the military who’ve overthrown elected leaders — and pointed to the steady stream of unflattering leaks from unnamed law enforcement and intelligence officials as unmistakable proof.

For the first time, Trump recently expanded the theory to include the Defense Department.

“Just this week, I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida campaign rally in November. “And you know what I’m talking about.” . . .

In the interview, Lorance agreed with Trump’s sentiment and said he believed that “senior bureaucrats in the Pentagon who believe they do not answer to the electorate” were also members of the so-called deep state conspiracy. (Read more from “Pardoned Ex-Soldier Fuels Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Talk About U.S. Military” HERE)

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The Next Democrat President Must Be Impeached

December 9, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion, Weekly /by Mark Levin

I am of the opinion that the next Democrat president must be impeached.

That’s the only way to stop this.

If the Republicans control the House, they must impeach the next Democrat President to ensure this sort of thing is never repeated.

The next Democrat President must be impeached? What are grounds? It doesn’t matter.

With Trump, they were talking impeachment when he was a candidate. They were talking impeachment the day he got elected. I told you, this is all sham. It’s a scam. It’s a ruse.

The only way to stop them is to turn the political and impeachment guns on them.

The next Democrat president must be impeached.

The Republican Congress can take a page from Nadler, from Waters, from Engel, from Schiff and all the rest.

They should issue scores and scores of subpoenas. Scores of subpoenas, for financial information, for bank records, for tax information; all kinds of communications with, around and about the president; issue subpoenas for the president’s White House Counsel, Chief of Staff, National Security Adviser, and other people who are closest to the president so he ceases to function.

You want to burden this Democrat president as much as possible. You want to undermine him as much as possible.

And you can wave around the Pelosi doctrine, the Schiff doctrine, the Nadler doctrine, and all the rest of them. Use their rules and take him down.

Do the Republicans have the guts to do so? I doubt it, but they must.

It is the only way to fix the Constitutional order when it comes to impeachment, because the Democrats are creating this precedent.

Now let them eat it.

Joe Biden would be the perfect Democrat president to be impeached.

Start subpoenaing all of his records; all of his phone calls with Ukraine, all of his phone calls with Red China.

You bring Hunter Biden in for 30 hours of secret testimony, like they brought Don Jr. in.

You create a special counsel, the way they created a special counsel against President Trump.

You demand Joe Biden testify in person and, when he refuses, you claim he has something to hide.

Imagine using their tools and their rhetoric against their guy. Or gal, it could be Elizabeth Warren, another liar. She’s another one with interesting finances. Well, we want to get to the bottom of it.

The next Democrat president must be impeached.

And Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and Nadler and the others; CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC and the others; they have all laid the foundation.

And the only way to stop this is to destroy their foundation with their guy or their lady.

While Conservatives Sleep, Refugee Contractors Push to Resettle Refugees in Every County

December 5, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

Conservative media, political operations, and grassroots organizations on the Right might be paralyzed 100 percent by impeachment proceedings, but left-wing groups have not diverted an ounce of resources from their fundamental transformation agenda. In fact, as conservatives focus on an issue whose outcome is already known and about which there is nothing they can do, they are ceding an eminently winnable fight on refugee resettlement to the only men on the field: Open Borders Inc. The outcome of this one-sided fight will determine nothing less than the future of all our communities and neighborhoods. It is both the most local and most national issue of prominence that grassroots conservatives can actually influence.

In September, President Trump moved to rectify one of the most egregious manifestations of social transformation without representation by allowing the people to decide the future of their neighborhoods and refugee resettlement. While reducing the refugee intake number, the president also enacted the most enduring long-term reform that would spawn grassroots involvement in the future of society by requiring refugee resettlement agencies within government that work with “private” contractors to obtain permission from local officials and the state governor before resettling refugees in a given county. Now it’s time for conservatives to actually get on the field to fight before the Left wins the game.

Aristide Zolberg, one of the leading immigration historians of recent memory, asked the question in his scholarly book, “A Nation by Design,” how amid anti-open-borders sentiment in the country, the open-borders Left always wound up “moving [the policy] in the opposite direction.” Citing other commentators, he noted that “while public support for a reduction in legal immigration was broad, it was not well-organized. … In contrast, a liberal coalition of well-organized organized groups, including ethnic organizations, churches, and employer associations, articulated strong opposition to proposals for restricting legal immigration.”

This is exactly what is playing out with local advocacy for refugee resettlement following Trump’s requirement that local officials sign off. In some ways, Trump’s order was so beneficial for the pro-sovereignty side that it is resting on its laurels, not realizing that the Left is already 100 percent activated, while the Right is sedated on the political morphine of Trump’s presidency and all of the drama in Washington surrounding his personality, not his policies.

Trump’s order requires affirmative support from local officials as well as the state’s governor in order to activate resettlement rather than formal opposition in order to stop the default outcome of resettlement. Thus, the Left is activated to lobby for its side, while the Right doesn’t even know resettlement, particularly under this administration, is still a possibility.

Nobody has covered this unfolding story better than Ann Corcoran, a citizen journalist and refugee law and policy expert who has covered this issue like a laser beam at her blog for over a decade. As Corcoran notes, in the ultimate conflict of interest, refugee resettlement contractors’ entire budgets grow commensurate with the number of refugees they resettle. The more localities they get to sign off on resettlement, the more money they get. That is why they are fighting and sending out step-by-step guides to astroturf every local official in all 3,000+ counties to get them to send their affirmative letters of support to the State Department.

The one-sided battle is having its effect. Even though most citizens oppose refugee resettlement, most Republican politicians on this issue are, at best, amenable to one-sided pressure, and at worst, downright in the pockets of Open Borders Inc. As Corcoran observes, several Republican governors have already voiced support for statewide resettlement, including Utah’s Governor Gary Hubert. While conservatives have ceded so much of America to the Left, the refugee groups have not ceded a single red county, and indeed, thanks to many apathetic and corrupted GOP politicians, resettlement has thrived in the reddest areas of the nation. The fiscal and cultural costs have been enormous.

The Left is winning in North Dakota while conservatives clamor for their hot takes on impeachment. Gov. Doug Burgum, an alleged Republican, already said he would agree to resettlement if any local jurisdiction is willing to go along with it. What happened? As Corcoran reported, Cass County officials agreed to resettlement. Thankfully, residents of Bismarck turned out in force to their local county meeting, and resettlement has been blocked for now. But everywhere American citizens sleep, the refugee resettlement parasites plot and scheme.

There’s no reason why patriots can’t contact their governors or local officials and express the opposite opinion – that they don’t want to pay for the social transformation of their own communities. But that would require some people on our side to peel themselves away from the dead-end impeachment proceedings for a few minutes.

December 25 is the deadline the State Department has set for determining the exact formula for localities to accept or reject refugees. Last week, more than 85 mayors sent a letter to the secretary of state on behalf of the Conference of Mayors opposing the president’s executive order requiring local opt-in to refugee resettlement. Why would they possibly do this? See if your mayor is on this list and find out why they don’t want local input on what affects their communities more than almost any issue. The reality is that every time the people weigh in on immigration, they oppose the elites. But if elite politicians get to quietly make decisions, including even local Republican elected officials, they will go along with the pressure of the cultural elites, unless conservatives become active on the ground.

The ultimate question anyone who works in conservative politics must ask is: Are we looking for hot takes and talking points, or are we looking for actual policy results on the issues that matter most to the future of our communities? The Left has already answered that question. (For more from the author of “While Conservatives Sleep, Refugee Contractors Push to Resettle Refugees in Every County” please click HERE)

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This Thanksgiving, Remember Who Grants the Blessings We Take for Granted

November 27, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

Perhaps we need a little more Thanksgiving and little less Black Friday to cure what is ailing our culture. Perhaps the best way to return God’s gift to our generations of unprecedented wealth and convenience is to focus on the “day of public humiliation and prayer,” as George Washington conceived the first national Thanksgiving, rather than the day of national indulgence.

As a nation, we may have turned away from God, but God sure has not turned away from us. Despite the infinite social and political problems in this country, God continues to bless us with an extraordinary level of bounty and prosperity that would shock our founding leaders, who believed their relative abundance showed a need for a national thanksgiving.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge noted in his annual Thanksgiving message, “An abundant prosperity has overspread the land.” He exhorted the nation to use the abundance to please the giver of that bounty and to lift our spiritual state to equal our physical one. “We shall do well to accept all these favors and bounties with a becoming humility, and dedicate them to the service of the righteous cause of the Giver of all good and perfect gifts,” wrote the quiet and humble 30th president. “As the nation has prospered let all the people show that they are worthy to prosper by rededicating America to the service of God and man.”

As we stand here today, nearly a century later, nobody would wish to live in that era, which Coolidge later referred to as one of “comfort” where “wealth is almost incalculable.” Most people didn’t even have the full bathroom amenities of hot piped water, a bathtub, shower, or a flush toilet in their homes, yet they were happy with their state of being. Why? Because as Coolidge observed in his 1928 Thanksgiving proclamation, the spiritual wealth of the nation grew commensurate with its physical wealth:

Our fields have been abundantly productive; our industries have flourished; our commerce has increased; wages have been lucrative, and comfort and contentment have followed the undisturbed pursuit of honest toil. As we have prospered in material things, so have we also grown and expanded in things spiritual. Through divine inspiration we have enlarged our charities and our missions; we have been imbued with high ideals which have operated for the benefit of the world and the promotion of the brotherhood of man through peace and good will.

Today, the opposite is true. As our spiritual wealth and healthy family life decline precipitously, God continues to bless us with unparalleled material wealth as a nation that makes the advances of the 1920s seem like a period of destitution and scarcity. Thus, any excuse we have for our troubles can certainly not be blamed on God’s open hand. We have every reason to succeed now as a nation, at least from a physical standpoint.

Even years before the era of Black Friday, where the most unfathomable high-tech comforts of life would become available at a cheap cost in a dizzying array of choices, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin taught us American abundance in a local Houston supermarket. On September 16, 1989, Boris Yeltsin made a high-profile visit to Houston’s Johnson Space Center. However, it wasn’t the amazing space technology that impressed him about America and crushed his will to continue pursuing communism in his home country. It was an unscheduled visit to Randall’s supermarket that shocked him, according to his autobiography.

Yeltsin, then a high-ranking Soviet official, reportedly “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement” and told those around him that if Russian supermarkets looked like this, “there would be a revolution.” He later wrote of his experience: “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.”

What Yeltsin saw in just one local supermarket was a much a greater abundance than what was celebrated in the first Thanksgiving in 1621 – by a factor of a million.

The asymmetry between America and the rest of the world in terms of choices and abundance in food, cars, and other products is still evident today. In fact, even our homeless vagrant population in San Francisco has iPhones that they use to effectively barter goods, according to a recent report by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald.

We have so much food in this country that we don’t know what to do with it. According to the USDA, farm output grew by 170 percent between 1948 and 2015, “even as the amount of labor and land (two major inputs) used in farming declined by about 75 percent and 24 percent, respectively.” Earlier this year, America’s dairy surplus reached a record high with 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. Last year, the USDA reported a 2.5 billion-pound surplus of meat.

More recently, we have witnessed the oil and natural gas miracle of America, as we become the global energy superpower. Contrary to the socialist principle of scarcity, God is constantly renewing the world, such that the more oil and gas we produce, the more we find. The U.S. has an estimated 310 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, more than Saudi Arabia, and the numbers keep growing every year. Those estimates have jumped over 30 percent in just a decade, even though we have already extracted over 30 billion barrels during that period.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that American crude oil production had hit an all-time record of 12.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in November. That is an astounding 43 percent increase in production in just three years. Our oil exports have grown 30-fold over the past five years.

We are also the global leader in natural gas production. The EIA predicts that U.S. liquified natural gas exports will increase 72 percent this year over last year’s impressive showing. In petroleum production combined with “other liquids” production, total U.S. production is projected to hit 20.73 million bpd during the fourth quarter of this year, according to the EIA. That is 67 percent and 83 percent more than Saudi Arabia and Russia respectively. Just seven years ago, those countries were producing more than us. Through 2040, the U.S. is expected to account for 75 percent of the global growth in oil production and 40 percent of the growth in natural gas.

Indeed, God’s blessings are growing faster than we can harvest them. However, His blessings are also growing faster than our spirits can use them for the good. The age-old story of spurning God when we are fat and happy was portended in the Bible – “Jeshurun[a] grew fat and kicked; filled with food, they became heavy and sleek. They abandoned the God who made them and rejected the Rock their Savior” (Deuteronomy 32:15).

That is the true lesson of Thanksgiving. It’s easy to turn to God in a time of need. After all, there are no atheists in a foxhole. What man struggles with most, however, is keeping God in his life during a time of bounty and prosperity. As the sagacious President Coolidge said in his 1923 Thanksgiving proclamation, “We have been a most blessed people. We ought to be a most thankful people.” Yet the number of people who don’t believe in God or don’t attend church has skyrocketed over the past decade. As such, many people don’t even know who to thank.

That we are so pampered with luxury and convenience has turned our society away from family and godly values and has reared an entire generation on unvarnished narcissism and selfishness. Moreover, as we remain personally wealthy and indulgent, we remain apathetic to the injustices around us in our broken political and legal system, like the citizens of Rome in the generations preceding its fall. We have let our guard down because we forgot we need a guard and we forgot that God is the ultimate granter of those comforts we take for granted.

Consequently, everything wrong with our society, culture, and government is not because of God’s punishment but because His immense blessings of divine providence, filtered through our corrupted souls, have turned into divine judgement. God has given us everything we could possibly want, but because our spirituality as a society has been attenuated, His very blessings from His just ways have been used for crooked and profligate purposes. As it says in Hosea 14:9, “Who is wise? Let them realize these things. Who is discerning? Let them understand. The ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, but the rebellious stumble in them.”

As we thank God for our unfathomable level of physical abundance, we must remember that while only He can deliver material prosperity, only we can salvage our spiritual prosperity by returning His favors and turning back to Him and His ways. Thus, while we, as a civilization, thank God for His unparalleled blessings, we should oblige ourselves to be worthy of those blessings, lest his endless patience run out. As the wise President Coolidge once said, “If at any time our rewards have seemed meager, we should find our justification for Thanksgiving by carefully comparing what we have with what we deserve.” (For more from the author of “This Thanksgiving, Remember Who Grants the Blessings We Take for Granted” please click HERE)

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Anti-Prison Anarchy Is Spreading: It’s Way Beyond ‘Soft on Crime’

November 19, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

Stathos Hugunnie was wanted in connection with two stabbings in a housing project in Long Island City one day in April 1997. When police showed up, Hugunnie fired eight shots, striking NYPD officer Peter Bueti three times in the chest, which would have killed him if not for his protective vest. After being released from prison two years ago, he was picked up again on drugs and firearms charges. Yet he was released on just $5,000 bond. This, folks, is the real criminal justice dysfunction that needs “reform,” but victims and law enforcement don’t have the same lobbying power criminals do.

Although New York’s new law abolishing cash bail won’t be enacted until January 1, judges are already getting a head start by either applying it now or setting bail at a very low rate, even for repeat violent felons. Hugunnie was charged with attempted murder, assault, criminal weapons possession, and criminal use of a firearm for the 1997 incident. Back then, criminals were actually locked up, so he served 20 years in prison.

According to the New York Post, “On Nov. 7 at 6 a.m., detectives from Queens North carried out a search warrant and found the would-be cop killer in another apartment in the Queensbridge Houses, loaded down with multiple firearms, ammunition, and grams of both heroin and crack cocaine.”

Liberals always say they want to combat gun violence, but they love to let out the most violent gun felons of all on the streets. Consequently, someone like this, who almost killed a cop and was then caught illegally possessing firearms, was let back out on just $5,000 bond. “This is the type of person New Yorkers are going to be encountering on our streets in increasing numbers: vicious criminals who are being spit back out by our criminal justice system,” said Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch, as quoted by the Post. “We must fix our broken parole system before perps like Hugunnie create more victims.”

This is the sort of “criminal justice reform” the public wants, but the political class, including so-called conservatives, think even the current weakened system is not weak enough on criminals. Two weeks ago, the American Conservative Union, the same organization that hosts the supposed annual conservative conference of record, held a jailbreak conference where 100 percent of the focus was on the needs of the criminal and not on all the victims needlessly harmed by repeat offenders let out of prison. . .

Who needs Soros electing anti-prison prosecutors in San Francisco and northern Virginia, when “conservatives” seem to agree? We see how harmful the Soros prosecutors have been in their quest to decriminalize public order laws, a big project of AOC’s “squad.” How much more so the release of drug traffickers and gang-bangers?

Many so-called conservatives are motivated, in part, by the assumption that they will somehow pick up new voters from the felons who are released. Jared Kushner reportedly told a group of donors as much at a GOP summer fundraiser in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It’s akin to their suicidal and circular logic that if Republicans out-left the Democrats on amnesty for illegal aliens, they will somehow pick up more votes. A recent jailbreak story from New York demonstrates the laughableness of this view.

José “Catano” Jorge was originally held without bond after he was charged with killing someone by distributing fentanyl-laced heroin in NYC. Last week, though, he was released without any bond pursuant to the new bail law, and according to the NY Post, he announced in Spanish as he left the courthouse, “Cuomo for president!” According to the New York Daily News, when Jorge’s lawyer tried to hush him up, Jorge said, “It’s in my heart, man. It’s in my heart, bro.”

Yes, indeed, there are a lot of vices incorrigibly embedded in the hearts of violent career criminals. Voting Republican is not one of them. This is the army of violent punks that “conservative” criminal justice deform will unleash on our streets.

Ironically, people who actually understand crime, even Democrats, comprehend the consequences of jailbreak more than supposed conservative organizations. A pair of law-and-order Democrat prosecutors in northern Virginia who were defeated by Soros candidates in primaries were recently profiled by the Daily Caller Foundation about their concern with this growing anti-prison movement and their shock that even Republican politicos don’t seem to care or understand what’s happening.

“The weird thing is, as a result of Soros pouring money into low-turnout primaries, center-left voters are unquestionably more closely aligned to the Republican candidates than they are to these radical challengers,” said Jonathan Fahey, the independent who was defeated by Soros accolyte Steve Descano in the Fairfax County DA race. “If the citizens were informed they’d never vote for this.”

The longtime incumbent Democrat prosecutor who was defeated by Descano, Ray Morrogh, endorsed the independent Fahey, but voters upset with Trump simply voted party line up and down the ballot.

Descano “is completely unqualified for the office of commonwealth attorney,” Morrogh said in a video. “The only case he tried, he disgraced himself when the judge reversed the conviction because [he] lied in closing argument. This man is not fit to hold office in Fairfax County.”

Unfortunately, citizens are not being informed of what is quietly happening on all aspects of criminal justice because all of the monied GOP interests agree with the false Soros premise about race and incarceration. Thus, rather than running endless soft-on-crime ads against the Left, which would appeal even to center-left voters disenchanted with Trump’s personality but who still want stable and safe suburbs, the host of CPAC joins with the Soros agenda. We now have a radicalized Democrat Party and a compromised Republican Party. Where does that leave the average citizen? (For more from the author of “Anti-Prison Anarchy Is Spreading: It’s Way Beyond ‘Soft on Crime’” please click HERE)

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Bottom Line: Do Illegal Aliens Matter More Than American Citizens?

November 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

Now that the Supreme Court will likely “give permission” for the president to obey immigration law and not Obama’s illegal amnesty, both parties will now clamor to enact the amnesty in a lawful manner. But there is no sense of urgency in Congress to enact immigration legislation to reinforce current laws and protect Americans from the ill effects of illegal immigration.

From reading the current media narratives, one would come away with the impression that nobody exists other than illegal alien “dreamers,” most of whom are valedictorians and the highest order of creation. As is the case with all issues, liberals isolate straw-man talking points and ignore the broader context. They present a false dichotomy: Do you empathize with those who were brought here “by no fault of their own” and are nothing but amazing assets to America? Gee, who doesn’t?

But whose fault is it? It’s not the fault of American taxpayers. It’s the fault of the immigrants’ parents and their countries of origin, particularly the country of Mexico, which has used every tool to instigate endless violations of our border integrity for decades. The forgotten people in this discussion are the American communities that are suffering from rampant crime, cartel violence, social and language problems in schools, drained health care and welfare systems, and drugs and gang activity in many parts of the country.

Let’s not kid ourselves: It’s not the 80-year-old illegal aliens who are committing most of the crimes. Common sense dictates that it will be the younger ones who are more problematic – the demographic endearingly referred to as “dreamers” by the political elites.

According to the USCIS, 53,792 DACA recipients have been arrested while in the U.S. Arrest records show some were apprehended for assault, rape, drug charges, and even murder — and yet were still given status. Thousands were arrested for drug trafficking and drunk driving, which are habitual crimes endangering our streets, yet remained in our country thanks to lawless lower courts. Shockingly, a whopping 66 percent of self-reported criminals on DACA applications were initially approved, and 33,709 or 94 percent were granted renewals.

A number of DACA recipients have turned out to be drug smugglers and MS-13 members, and UACs/“dreamers” as a whole are supplying the surge of drugs and MS-13. One disturbing fact about the USCIS data is that those who applied under the age of 14 were never even fingerprinted. Now, one might say there is no need to look at the criminal record of people that young, but this means there is no basic way of verifying their identity.

Then there is the other half of DACA. These are all of the people who came here after 2014 from Central America as a result of DACA and the driving philosophy behind it – that anyone who comes here as a child will simply escape enforcement.

It’s a simple fact that DACA caused the great surge of young teens from Central America – many of whom joined MS-13 and furthered the gang and drug problems in this country.

The Miami Herald reported at the height of the surge that “children are also being sent by families who believe they could qualify for immigration reform—if Congress ever acts on it—or for President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA.”

On June 13, 2014, the Washington Post, which now recognizes the problems with UACs but still obsessively supports DACA, admitted that the surge of tens of thousands of Central Americans was “driven in large part by the perception they will be allowed to stay under Obama administration’s immigration policies.”

On June 4, 2014, the New York Times reported that the “shift in the way the United State treats [illegal alien] minors,” aka amnesty and catch-and-release, “prompted” and “inspired” parents to either “hire so-called coyotes … to bring them north” or to “make the trip with toddlers in tow, something rarely seen before in this region.”

It’s a simple fact that illegal immigration is all driven by incentives, and immigrants come here to the degree that we encourage them. This is why the border crossings surged precisely during the periods of executive amnesty under Obama and judicial amnesty under Trump, while they ebbed when Trump began enforcing the law. Ironically, with border numbers down again, they are still up in one state: Arizona. Why Arizona? That is the one state where the DHS has not implemented the “return to Mexico” policy.

It’s time we finally implement the laws on the books to protect Americans from the fiscal, social, security, and identity theft problems from illegal aliens before implementing yet another amnesty. It’s time to finally fulfill the promise of current law on sanctuary cities and deportations. It’s time to finally combat identity theft. It’s time to finally implement the border security promise codified into law – to “achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States.”

But there is no impetus from almost anyone in Washington to embark on an aggressive fight to punish sanctuary cities, like Montgomery County, that release illegal alien child molesters.

Ultimately, the question is who matters more in American politics: the citizen or the illegal alien? For the political elites – from the business world and media to the political and legal cabals – it’s a no-brainer. Indeed, the “Americans last” mindset of amnesty advocates and their utter disregard for the social problems created by their advocacy is the crux of what makes Washington a swamp. We are strangers in our own land. (For more from the author of “Bottom Line: Do Illegal Aliens Matter More Than American Citizens?” please click HERE)

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Horrific ‘Knockout’ Murder Shows Need for Mandatory Sentencing Targeting ‘Pack’ Crimes

November 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

It’s one of the worst nightmares of any family. You are walking either alone or with your kids and are surrounded by a belligerent mob of “teens,” or young adults, often in packs as large as 15-20. They are not even looking for money; they are looking for blood. At its core, this is the most important job of government: to protect people’s freedom of movement so they are never confronted with such danger. Yet this is what is happening all too often because citizens are disarmed while criminals, particularly violent juveniles and young adults, are not deterred. The latest horrific pack knockout murder took place in increasingly violent Minneapolis.

A 75-year-old man was exiting a bus at a metro stop last Wednesday when 23-year-old Leroy Davonte Davis-Miles, who was together with a bunch of belligerent companions, punched the man. The victim hit his head hard on the pavement and remained in critical condition until he died Tuesday.

Minneapolis, with its plummeting prison population and proliferation of jailbreak policies, has seen a spike in violence, particularly on local public transportation. The Twin Cities are likely to break the record for annual homicides this year.

However, there is something particularly horrific about this knockout trend. These are often young males with massive rap sheets who cycle in and out of jail and never face serious consequences. But people die from these sudden attacks. In September, a man was surrounded by a pack of teens at the Frederick County, Maryland, fair and was knocked out, resulting in his sudden death in front of his family members. The perpetrators were only charged as juveniles, a fact that disgusted the local sheriff, Chuck Jenkins, who discussed the knockout trend on my podcast several weeks ago.

Often, these people serve little or no time, even though these attacks can lead to serious injury or death. Furthermore, the cowardly perpetrators will often have only one person initiate the attack, but they are surrounded by 5-15 friends who ensure that the victim has no way of defending himself. Those who play this support role never face any consequences whatsoever.

It’s time for lawmakers in the various states to begin pushing for anti-knockout legislation. It’s time to deter predatory pack attacks and take them as seriously as the evil they bring on our neighborhoods. Conservatives should push legislation in state legislatures to create mandatory minimum sentences for predatory attacks and mandate that juveniles engaged in these attacks be charged as adults. Furthermore, there needs to be some punishment for those who join in the packs that engage in violence. It’s time to take the game out of the knockout game.

Unfortunately, there is a reason why there is no effort in the states to deter these crimes. The new focus is all on de-incarceration. This relentless focus on criminal justice deform in places like Minneapolis has transformed the once peaceful “Minnesota nice” atmosphere of the Twin Cities into violence and anarchy. Violence is increasing now every month, threatening to reverse the two-decade trend of reduced crime. Homicides are up 32 percent over last year, and violent crime in general is up 13 percent. Property crimes are up 15 percent. These numbers reflect disturbing trends we are seeing in many cities across the country. The obvious culprit is the jailbreak mentality up and down the criminal justice system, which now views incarceration as the problem, rather than crime itself. In the case of Leroy Davonte Davis-Miles, he had numerous arrests for violent offenses and for drugs and theft over the past few years, according to Hennepin County court records. Yet he barely served a day in prison.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the Minnesota incarceration rate dropped 6.4 percent just from 2017 to 2018. However, that is not enough for the Left. The ACLU is pushing ideas it believes will cut the prison population in half. The safety of the communities is simply not a factor in its agenda. (For more from the author of “Horrific ‘Knockout’ Murder Shows Need for Mandatory Sentencing Targeting ‘Pack’ Crimes” please click HERE)

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Could U.S. Courts Make Animals into Humans?

November 8, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

It’s the slippery slope question that proponents of judicial supremacism can never answer. If an unelected judge stands above the other branches of government over societal or philosophical questions affecting the whole of the people – and can redefine even God’s laws, basic biology, and common sense – then there is quite literally nothing the judicial branch of government cannot do. So, is there any limit whatsoever to judicial power?

Meet “Sandra,” a 33-year-old orangutan from Argentina that is in the news this week because it was transferred to a Florida facility. But there is some unique history behind this orangutan, to say the least. In 2014, animal rights groups in Argentina filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the animal to have her freed from the Buenos Aires zoo whose accommodations violated human rights. Judge Elena Liberatori ordered her released in 2015, suggesting that she “spend the rest of her life in a more dignified situation.”

“With that ruling I wanted to tell society something new, that animals are sentient beings and that the first right they have is our obligation to respect them,” Liberatori told the Associated Press.

Now Sandra has found a home at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, which is billed as a “sanctuary” for apes where they can live free in a sprawling 100-acre reserve that fits their natural habitat.

With Sandra in the news, it got me thinking, what is to stop a judge from doing that in America? If U.S. judges are accorded authority to contort human biology, natural law, our history, our founding, case law, and ancient principles of sovereignty to make denizens of aliens, victims of criminals, and men of women, then why can’t they offer human rights to animals?

If a court can rule that 7.8 billion people have the right to sue to enter our country and then demand mental health treatment for their kids and all sorts of free medical care, then what is to stop them from creating mandatory asylum for animals in zoos around the world? The Center for Great Apes is a voluntary sanctuary, but what’s to stop the courts from mandating it on society? Then, what’s to stop them from mandating sex change operations for the orangutans, using Medicaid?

We’ve essentially reached that point in this country. This has been a crazy week in the courts. A federal judge demanded that the Trump administration pay for mental health services for illegal alien children whose parents were prosecuted for breaking the law like any American criminal. Another judge mandated the right to enter the country and access health care on the taxpayer’s dime. And yet another judge said the states have a right to federal health care block grant funds and that we must allow states to force doctors into performing abortions and castration procedures.

There is not a single social, political, or philosophical question – whether it violates natural law or not – that courts have not taken for themselves.

The question Republican politicians and administration officials are not asking is: what is the limit of their power? Simply responding to these power grabs by suggesting we just appeal to a higher court is problematic for three reasons:

The higher courts, yes, even after Trump’s torrent of judicial appointments, often side with the Left. What do you do when they also rule an alien is a citizen, a man is a woman, and perhaps that a beast is a man? Is that “the law of the land”?

It feeds the erroneous premise than somehow the judiciary gets to patrol the other branches plus retains the status as sole enforcer of its own boundaries of power. This is simply tyrannical and flies in the face of the defining characteristic of a constitutional republic with three branches — in which the judiciary is the least As Madison said, “If the constitutional boundary of either be brought into question, I do not see that any one of these independent departments has more right than another to declare their sentiments on that point.” At some point, it’s incumbent upon the other branches to defend their own prerogatives the same way the judiciary jealously guards (and expands) its powers.

Even if and when the Supreme Court overturns the lower courts, we’ve seen time and again how the lower courts just come back in a slightly different case and rule against both the long-standing and recent principle of the Supreme Court’s opinion. We’ve seen this consistently with immigration law after Trump v. Hawaii and with conscience rights after Hobby Lobby. We can’t keep playing this game. What are we going to do if a California judge orders Delta Force to deploy to Syria and bring a million Kurds to our shores? Are we to believe they have such power and that Trump has no recourse other than to appeal to the Ninth Circuit?

The tragic twist is that the first fight over judicial supremacism vs. decompartmentalism among the three branches was over the courts making beasts of humans. In Dred Scott, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that black people were property, just like animals.

Stephen Douglas expressed the view that the courts can decide such questions and that those decisions are binding on other branches to accept that view. Lincoln, on the other hand, believed that every branch must interpret the Constitution according to its right construction. Indeed, this is why, as president, he gave passports and citizen documents (which are executive powers) to black people even as the courts continued to view them as chattel. He wound up making Roger Taney eat crow and be reminded of his impotence and that of his branch of government when he became president. Taney was compelled to administer the presidential oath of office to Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1861, and was forced to listen to Lincoln’s inaugural address, in which he rejected the notion that “the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions.”

Back then, slavery was pretty much the only issue on which the question of judicial supremacism mattered. The courts in general were in sync with natural law, and everyone understood that the Constitution didn’t create a right to immigrate or to taxpayer-funded castration while infringing upon the inalienable rights of self-defense and conscience. Today, there is no fixed constitutional belief in anything. As such, if we genuflect to judicial supremacism, we are consigning ourselves to a judicial model of North Korea. And whereas the Dred Scott legacy of judicial supremacism began with according unelected judges the power to make animals of humans, those powers will now capture everything under the sun, including the ability to make humans out of animals.

As Lincoln warned during the fifth debate with Stephen Douglas in Galesburg, Illinois, October 7, 1858, the acceptance of Dred Scott “commits him to the next decision, whenever it comes, as being as obligatory as this one, since he does not investigate it, and won’t inquire whether this opinion is right or wrong.” Lincoln portentously said that Douglas “teaches men this doctrine, and in so doing prepares the public mind to take the next decision when it comes, without any inquiry.

As we see today, there is no limit to “the next decision,” nor is there any floor to the depravity of judicial omnipotence. Their wish is our command. (For more from the author of “Could U.S. Courts Make Animals into Humans?” please click HERE)

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5 Actions Trump Can Take NOW to Reclaim Our Border from the Mexican Cartels

November 7, 2019/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinion /by Daniel Horowitz

Try to think of any other foreign entity – a country, terrorist group, or criminal group – that devastates our country as much as the Mexican cartels. They control our border – both sides of it – and have operatives in every state fueling the entire drug crisis, gangs, crime, and an endless flow of illegal immigrants who cause a massive fiscal drain and cultural transformation of our communities. Why have we gone to war with everyone but them? Will that change in light of the murder of Americans by the cartels?

It’s good that there is finally some media and policy focus on the Mexican cartels. Sadly, it came at the cost of an American family living in a Mormon community in Mexico. Three mothers of the LeBaron family were driving in three separate SUVs in two locations eight miles from each other in the Sonora province, just 50 miles from the international border with New Mexico, on Monday. Cartel gunmen opened fire on the three vehicles and then torched them, killing and burning the three mothers, as well as six children, including twin babies. Six other children were wounded, and there are reports some of them were initially kidnapped but managed to escape.

The president called for action against the cartels and implied he’d be willing to help Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) militarily against the cartels, a gesture that was rebuffed by the leftist president of Mexico. However, Trump can focus the fight on the cartels closer to home – at the border itself and in the interior of our country, where the cartels and their contractors are operating with impunity.

Here’s the reality of the cartels at the border that nobody realizes: They have created an entire business model on the premise that our government will not treat them as a hostile enemy. Were that to change, as powerful as the cartels seem today, they’d be crushed quite easily. Thus, Trump’s strategy should not hinge upon cooperation of AMLO and the Mexican military. We must seize control of our own destiny and at least protect our own country from the cartels.

To that end, here are five ideas the Trump administration should pursue:

1) Reorient the mission of Border Patrol and the military: The 9/11 commission staff reporton terrorism and travel warned that “no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal” and that even in 2004, it was “not considered a cornerstone of national security policy.” Sadly, that is still true today. Whether it’s the potential threat of Islamic terror, cartel terrorism that plagues our cities with drugs, gangs, and violence, or the espionage threat from the increasing presence of Chinese migrants, our State Department, Defense Department, and Department of Homeland Security still do not view our border as relative to our national security. That must change.

At present, CBP treats the border like a domestic law enforcement issue. This is why cartels can cross our border with impunity. As I’ve reported before, Border Patrol agents will not grab armed smugglers who have crossed our border and are an inch across the border in a belligerent posture as agents appear on the scene. They do not retaliate when shot at with automatic fire. The military is even worse. It is hamstrung from doing anything, and the cartels, knowing this fact, cross right in front of our troops.

The time has come for the military to be used at our border the way we use it to defend other borders. Our Founders envisioned a military for our own border, not for Afghanistan. Not enforcing immigration law or dealing with detainees, but holding the line right at the perimeter and striking hostile actions, whether through smuggling, drone espionage, or armed conflict. There is no reason the cartels should be operating scouts in Arizona’s mountains as deep as 70 miles into our territory. If we can’t secure our own soil, we are on our way to becoming like Mexico.

2) Shut off all immigration requests between ports of entry: We can’t have a global babysitting service operating in the middle of a war zone, especially when the cartels monetize that service for their operation. While the Trump administration is moving in this direction, there are still many people seeking status at the border. Trump must announce that until the cartels are neutralized, he is using his power under 212(f) of the INA to suspend all forms of immigration requests outside ports of entry. This will clear the field to fully counter the cartels, while also stripping them of their strategic distractions, source of revenue and drug smuggling, and ability to bring in a steady flow of contract gang members under the guise of “asylum” and “unaccompanied alien children” programs.

3) Designate the cartels as terrorists: The cartels need to be treated like al Qaeda with regard to apprehension within America, travel restrictions, prosecutions, and intelligence. Anything associated with them must be treated as an enemy. Part of why the war on drugs failed is because a war on an object doesn’t work. It’s not the drugs that are the problem, it’s the people. We need to stop this ambivalent treatment of the cartels. Trump can enact this tomorrow.

4) Declare war on sanctuary cities: It’s one thing to get drugs into the country one time; it’s quite another to operate a lucrative network in perpetuity without detection. Organized crime like drug trafficking and illegal immigration, which are interdependent, cannot succeed without political protection. There is clearly political protection at many levels, but one of the biggest is sanctuary cities. The Senate has not voted on a single sanctuary bill this year, and Democrats don’t feel the heat, even though 71 percent of liberal Tucson voters rejected sanctuary policies.

The real issue with the cartels is their ability to get their drugs and aliens reliably into the United States, then to market and realize a huge return in profit for their products. If they can’t get it to market, they can’t sell it, and they make no money. Sure, it is their reliable infrastructure that gets it across the border, which can be deterred by a military mindset at the border. But it is the people embedded inside the U.S. they trust to get it to market (and the money back), and it is shutting down that infrastructure that will stop this quicker and cleaner than anything else. Forget the war on the drugs, declare war on their infrastructure and keep the drugs from getting to market. There will always be drugs and addiction, but there is no reason they should be this ubiquitous and cheap if we actually enforced our laws.

5) Document cartel crimes and incidents: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report is woefully outdated. It doesn’t capture the reality of 21st-century crimes, as cartel expert Jaeson Jones warned on my podcast last month. Jones helped command operations against the cartels as a captain in the Texas Department of Public Safety. He observed, “Our experience in Texas showed that you need data to drive the politicians to act. The outdated crime reporting needs to be updated to quantify cartel-related crimes. You’d be shocked at how many crimes that are reported as some domestic act are really external problems driven by the cartels.”

Indeed, El Mencho, the head of the Cartel Jalisco New Generacion (CJNG), is the most wanted man in the city of Chicago. According to the DEA’s 2018 threat assessment, the gangs contracting with Sinaloa and CJNG “are also responsible for a substantial portion of the city’s violent crime.” If our data actually quantified how much of the violence is driven by the cartels, it would dictate a change in policies.

The Trump administration can begin the fight against the cartels from our own turf. We have nobody to call on to bail out our own homeland. We are our only defenders. (For more from the author of “5 Actions Trump Can Take Now to Reclaim Our Border from the Mexican Cartels” please click HERE)

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