I’m on Welfare, and That’s How I Know It Needs to Be Abolished

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Inefficient. Wasteful. Dehumanizing. Inhumane. Conservatives and libertarians commonly attach all of these epithets to the American welfare system. Any reader of Charles Murray’s voluminous accounts of these programs will know, in exacting statistical detail, just how true these claims are of the welfare and entitlement state. But few have gone through the alphabet soup of programs themselves, and even fewer have written about the “personal” side of the welfare process.

I have applied for these programs. I have consulted lawyers, social workers, and other advocates to help me jump through so many hoops and fill out so many forms that I long ago lost count. I am a diagnosed schizophrenic and a college drop-out, but I have enough sense (and enough of an understanding of economics, particularly public choice theory) to appreciate the unalloyed, banal horror of those who fall through the cracks of American society, and the unnecessary barriers put in the way of self-advancement and personal initiative by the very measures designed to help them.

My thesis is simple: first, the welfare state as currently constituted systematically discriminates against the poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable; second, the programs themselves are deeply paternalistic and stifle rational, adult decision-making at every conceivable level of action; and third, that the entirety of the welfare state should be abolished along with labor market regulations (such as the minimum wage) and replaced with a negative income tax or universal basic income.

The first contention, even to conservative ears, is probably the most shocking: welfare spending doesn’t go to those who need it most? Let’s consider Social Security. In general, Social Security payments for non-retirees fall into two categories: Social Security Insurance (SSI), which is earmarked for individuals who have never held a job, and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is for people who have either worked and become disabled (that is, have “paid into” the system to some degree) or were disabled prior to reaching adulthood and have no reasonable expectation of becoming employed due to their disability. . .

The first and most obvious step to take would be to stop limiting their employment options. Minimum wage laws, which price individuals with low labor productivity out a job, should be abolished. Even the Americans with Disabilities Act, which raises the specter of lawsuits directed at businesses that “wrongfully” fire a disabled person, should be repealed. Any and all laws restraining free, uncoerced trade, from state occupational licensing laws to laws limiting where and when small businesses can be established, should be ended outright. We’re in a deep pit on our policies regarding the disabled and unemployed: it’s time to stop digging. (Read more from “I’m on Welfare, and That’s How I Know It Needs to Be Abolished” HERE)

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Here’s the Plot for the Next ‘Roseanne’ Reboot America Needs

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Days before last week’s premiere of “The Conners”—the reworked sitcom ABC developed after firing Roseanne Barr—The Daily Mail reported that two senior executives shared concerns over the network’s rash decision to dump the show’s matriarch. According to one insider, axing the creator and star of “Roseanne” due to the comedian’s race-singed tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett was a knee-jerk reaction by the show’s executives, Ben Sherwood and Channing Dungery.

While the team at ABC held their breaths to see how Tuesday’s launch would fare sans Roseanne, one fan had an idea: James Woods and Barr team up for “a crazy sitcom together.” Retweeting the suggestion, Woods said he’d “consider doing that,” and raked up almost 50,000 hearts from his nearly two million conservative-leaning fans. . .

While it does not appear that Barr commented on that proposal, she seemed to have responded to ABC’s decision to kill her off via an opioid overdose in the first episode of “The Conners.”

Barr is correct: She isn’t dead. She just faked her death after learning that her husband was having an affair with her sister. At least, that’s the backstory for the re-reboot of “Roseanne” America needs. . .

Now, it is likely ABC retains the rights to the name “Roseanne,” so Barr will have to transition quickly to Rosy, but what could be better than a new name to represent her new start in life! The contrast between Barr’s demeanor and “Rosy” will also be good for some laughs when, with her perfect comedic timing, Barr first spits it out to Woods during introductions, as he pulls her away from the m-word. (Read more from “Here’s the Plot for the Next ‘Roseanne’ Reboot America Needs” HERE)

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What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Jamal Khashoggi Affair

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The legacy media isn’t telling you the full truth about Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi exile who is feared dead after he was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. His disappearance has created a media firestorm, resulting in tensions between the United States and its traditional Middle East partners.

We’ve been told that Khashoggi — who was living in the U.S. for the past year — was a voice for reform and democracy in a Middle East that is in desperate need of such individuals. However, a closer look at Khashoggi’s past activities reveals a man with an extremely regressive, anti-Western worldview and a consistent pattern of supporting fringe Islamist movements in the region.

Of course, no one deserves to be harmed for his views. However, Khashoggi’s disappearance (and likely death, at this point) does not give the foreign and domestic media a green light to play fast and loose with the facts.

Khashoggi the “journalist”

Pretty much the entirety of the legacy media has attached a wildly misleading “journalist” label to Jamal Khashoggi. While he was once a journalist for several state-controlled Gulf media enterprises, Khashoggi has not been anything resembling a journalist for quite some time.

Prior to his disappearance, Khashoggi was an opinion writer for the Washington Post’s “Global Opinions” section. He was also working with Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood to create an organization called Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN).

Why does the “journalist” label continue to stick to Khashoggi?

We know that Saudi Arabia’s rivals, such as Turkey, Qatar, and Iran, seek to undermine the U.S.-Saudi alliance by any means necessary. And the optics are much worse for Riyadh if the Saudi monarchy is found to have executed a “journalist” rather than an Islamist activist.

Domestically, perhaps the media stubbornly insists on calling Khashoggi a “journalist” because it helps to advance the false media narrative that President Trump is waging a war on the free press. Notably, legacy reporters have been leveraging the Khashoggi situation to take shots at the president’s rhetoric.

Lee Smith over at The Federalist also points out that the “Obama echo chamber” of former Obama officials and their media lackeys have used the Khashoggi situation to score points against the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

Khashoggi the “reformer”

Jamal Khashoggi was never a reformer in the sense that he wanted to advance individual rights and overall freedoms in the Middle East. In fact, all of the evidence points to the reality that he was a regressive thinker and a dedicated Islamist who wanted to move Saudi Arabia to a more cleric-led society.

As an early ally to al Qaeda founders Osama Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, Khashoggi has been an Islamist for decades. While he may have disagreed with his old friend Bin Laden about how to impose an Islamic state on the world, the two shared the same endgame.

While Bin Laden preferred a much more aggressive strategy, Khashoggi appeared to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood model of governance advanced by groups like Hamas and the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt.

Both Hamas and the Morsi regime in Egypt were elected through the democratic process. Yet almost immediately after seizing power, the Brotherhood-aligned groups sought to impose extra-constitutional measures that would tighten their grip on power and ensure that there would never be another election.

Khashoggi’s “democracy” project is nothing more than a facade that would allow for the empowerment of Islamist actors. For the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, history shows us that their first victorious election campaign quickly becomes the last election.

Khashoggi the “man of peace”

Today’s Middle East reform movements are largely backed by individuals and leaders who have rejected calls for perpetual Islamist warfare. Those in the U.S.-allied reformer camp — such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, and UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed — have preferred to focus on bolstering patriotism, combatting Islamism, pursuing secularization and modernization, and encouraging foreign and domestic entrepreneurism and investments.

The “soft-spoken” Khashoggi, on the other hand, has sought to drag the Islamic world into endless conflict.

And as is typical for many Islamists, Jamal Khashoggi had a serious bloodlust when it came to violence against the state of Israel. He expressed these violent aims in a 2014 piece for the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Middle East Monitor, in which he wrote that he hoped one day Islamic nations would join the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas in its campaign to destroy Israel. In another piece he wrote that year, Khashoggi shamed Arab states for not supporting the jihadi terror group.

What’s next?

Of course, violence is never the answer to political disagreements, and that is a clear message to all of our Middle East partners. The Khashoggi affair, however, is no reason to destroy all of the progress that the Trump administration has made in supporting historic, measureable Middle East reform efforts. The White House must continue following the pro-reform message articulated in president’s Riyadh speech in May 2017. To abandon reform now would empower America’s adversaries, strengthen Islamist movements, and jeopardize our Middle East allies. (For more from the author of “What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Jamal Khashoggi Affair” please click HERE)

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How the GOP Has Taken Ownership of Obamacare

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Republicans have not only betrayed their promise to repeal Obamacare, they have made Obamacare popular. They have championed its three core elements while refusing to even make the case against all its vulnerabilities and are now running on preserving it. While we are all focused on the results of November 6, we must gird up for a longer battle that, if not waged and won, will ensure we never have health care freedom in America, because a consensus for government-run monopolies is close to fruition.

Republicans are making Obamacare great again

Republicans, with their pre-existing condition of political stupidity, have committed such malpractice that they’ve managed to own all the liabilities of Obamacare and the status quo dumpster-fire health care system, while also raising the ire of voters who want handouts, as if they are somehow going to repeal Obamacare. In doing so, they have turned “repeal and replace” into “cut and paste” and “root and branch” into “plant and fertilize.” By refusing to show how the Obamacare regulations, subsidies, and Medicaid expansion have created an unhealthy monopoly of insurers and health administrators, forced doctors into early retirement, and made insurance for all those not subsidized completely unaffordable, they have permanently ceded the playing field and created a consensus for all those provisions. And indeed, almost every Republican is running on preserving and expanding them.

This should shock anyone who ever voted for a Republican any time since 2010. What’s worse than Democrats winning is Republicans permanently adopting their views and ratcheting us further down the path to socialism.

We haven’t had a semblance of a free market in health care for decades, and that is why health care and medical insurance (which are not the same) are convoluted and so expensive. Obamacare just exacerbated every element that broke the system to begin with. Voters are justifiably unhappy with the status quo and are concerned about health care. Along with immigration, health care has consistently ranked as the top issue for this election.

Where is the GOP vision?

Where is the vision of health care that would eliminate the insurance cartel from its position between you and your doctor?

Where are all the victims of Obamacare talking about premiums tripling over a few years to $20,000-30,000 per year for a family? Where are all the ads from doctors lamenting the paperwork that pushed them out of business? Where are all the ads showing the health care cartel getting rich, destroying private practice, and buying up all the hospitals, insurers, and pharmacies under a handful of corporate masters, all enabled by the pot of money created by the Medicaid expansion? Why is nobody showing how the Medicaid expansion is fueling the opioid crisis?

The only thing never discussed in this health care debate is actual health care. While Republicans unfortunately never had a holistic vision on health care because it’s not a serious conservative party, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They did this successfully for three election cycles. And all the factors hurting doctors and patients that we all once talked about have gotten even worse over the past few years.

A recent survey of 8,774 physicians conducted by the Physicians Foundation found that morale in the profession is lower than ever. Here are the key findings:

Thanks to the monopoly created by Obamacare and the crushing red tape of owning your own practice, the number of physicians who identified as independent practice owners plummeted from 48.5 percent in 2012 to 31 percent in 2018.

62 percent are pessimistic about the future of medicine, 78 percent feel burned out, 46 percent are planning a career change, and 49 percent would not recommend the profession to their children.

Doctors cited Obama’s “electronic health records” regulation, insurance requirements, and loss of clinical autonomy as the three biggest challenges to their success – even ahead of the medical malpractice problem.

Doctors reported that 23 percent of their time is spent on paperwork.

Republicans could have been riding high on health care

Several weeks after the 2016 election victory, I laid out a strategy for repealing Obamacare the day of the inauguration, “root and branch.” Republicans could immediately have grabbed the bull by the horns with the most capital they had had in a generation and would have had two years to deal with the issue. Instead, they created the worst outcome of all – preserving Obamacare and all its vices under their leadership and owning its fallout while giving other voters the perception they will take away entitlements. As my buddy John Hayward brilliantly put it, “Republicans have always had a rare gift for paying the political price associated with revolutionary change without actually accomplishing anything revolutionary. They’re savaged for actions they were intimidated out of taking.”

It’s pretty clear that over the past few weeks, the smart-set consultants – the same consultants who are politically illiterate on immigration – got into a room and told all the candidates to run on the Democrat language, premise, focus, and philosophy of “protecting pre-existing conditions.” Every single Republican Senate candidate suddenly began running ads extolling the virtues of what essentially destroyed insurance in America.

Really? Why are we legitimizing and emphasizing the core premise behind Obamacare and not focusing on the fundamentals of health care? What’s the macro-message that comes across to voters?

This is how you make Democrat premises popular. Who needs Democrats when Republicans serve as better messengers for their misleading talking points than Democrats do with their off-putting belligerence? At this point, why not just run Christine O’Donnell ads of “I’m not a witch?”

Republicans win either by uprooting a Democrat premise or ignoring it and focusing the debate elsewhere, not by getting into a bidding war on their terms. And even if somehow they pull off a win on this messaging, what in fact have we won? If “owning the libs” means winning by owning their policies, count me out. (For more from the author of “How the GOP Has Taken Ownership of Obamacare” please click HERE)

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President Trump Has Full Constitutional Power to Stop the Border Invasion – Even Without Congress

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Just as President Reagan is remembered for ending the Cold War, President Trump can be remembered as the one who ended the war on our sovereignty. Will he rise to the occasion?

Here’s the stone-cold truth about our border: We could construct a border wall as high as the stratosphere, and it won’t help much if we continue our self-destructing policies of allowing bogus asylees to come through our front door and legitimizing the opinions of sanctuary judges who “make denizens of aliens.”

President Trump publicly warned the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala that if they don’t take steps to stop the latest caravan of bogus asylum invaders, he will cut off aid to the countries. While this is a good first step, it won’t deter the invasion unless we stop admitting the invaders and implementing catch-and-release under orders from illegitimate court rulings, as we did with the previous caravan and countless tens of thousands of others coming in with less pomp. And that would hold true even with a border wall. They just come to our points of entry, surrender themselves, get released into our communities, and never show up to their hearings until and unless they wind up committing crimes.

Moreover, the caravan is already in Guatemala and headed for Mexico. Thus, the Honduran diplomacy is moot at this point. And this is much bigger than one caravan. We must first dissect what is actually happening at our border.

This is nothing short of an invasion

Earlier this week, KTAR news in Phoenix, Arizona, sat down with ICE’s Phoenix field director, Henry Lucero. What he revealed should disturb all of us:

Only two percent of family units released from custody are ever deported. And there are a lot of families. In fiscal year 2017, roughly 13,000 came through the Yuma Sector. This year’s final numbers will likely show double that number. Freeze-frame right there. This is the magnet. Until this policy stops, the border invasion will not cease.

85 percent of the recent families are from Guatemala, and they ask for asylum while surrendering themselves to border agents. They are not even attempting to smuggle themselves in between the points of entry. Thus, a wall will not help if we continue to allow this because they just come to the points of entry. As Lucero said, “On the news in Guatemala they are saying that you can get a work permit if you’re in a family, if you’re coming with your child, and that you’re going to be released.”

Border agents interviewed by KTAR said that resources designed to protect our national security are now being used to aid and treat illegal aliens in distress. This, in a nutshell, is why the gang and drug crisis spiked to unprecedented levels beginning with the Central American migration in 2014. Officials said that 95 percent of those caught in Arizona go to the East Coast, which explains why places like Long Island are the hardest hit from the gang and drug crises.

Thus, it all boils down to bogus asylum and catch-and-release. Either Trump ends those, or everything else is just talk. While Trump is right to ask Congress to step in, we’ve noted before that our statute is already clear that these people do not qualify as asylees and that the unaccompanied teenagers do not qualify as refugees.

With this background in mind, it’s easy to understand why Lindsey Grahmanesty’s idea of trading amnesty for a border wall is so counterintuitive. We only have this border invasion because of the magnet of amnesty, and the magnet of amnesty allows them to come to the entry points, demand asylum, sue for rights, and never get deported. A wall only helps a country that has a strong spirit but a weak frontier; it doesn’t help a weak political system that willingly commits national suicide.

Anyone who tells you that the president doesn’t have the authority to exclude anyone for any reason doesn’t deserve to live in a sovereign nation. Sovereignty trumps everything. There is nothing in our statutes that forces the president to admit anyone he feels is a problem. In fact, as we’ve noted before, he has inherent executive powers from Article II, as well as delegated authority from Congress under existing law, to stop taking in immigrants at the border or through visas for as much time as he deems necessary.

Here’s a quick review.

Inherent executive authority

While Congress controls immigration once immigrants are legally admitted to our country and can also exclude anyone from admission, the president shares concurrent jurisdiction on exclusions. He can’t deport anyone he wants to without an authorizing statue, but he can exclude anyone up front. As the Supreme Court said in a landmark 1950 case, “The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty. The right to do so stems not alone from legislative power but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation.” This is why for the first 100 years of our country, immigration was entirely controlled by diplomatic correspondence through the State Department. The president was clearly using this authority when communicating with the leader of the country of origin of this caravan.

Trump can simply shut the door and demand that any legitimate asylum claims be processed through our 10 or so consulates in Mexico.

Finally, the president needs to threaten not just Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, but Mexico with diplomatic sanctions. As Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told me in email, “The president should be leaning on Mexico and the sending nations that their facilitation of this problem is immoral, shameful, and will adversely affect our bilateral relationship.”

“He should consider visa sanctions if they are not cooperative in arranging the swift return of those apprehended. He should suspend certain foreign aid until we gain their cooperation. There almost certainly are other forms of leverage that will get their attention.”

One such point of leverage would be NAFTA negotiations. The top issue should not be trade, but immigration. Mexico badly wants a renewal, and having it agree to process asylum claims in our consulates rather than sending them to our border would go a long way.

Along with threatening to cut off aid, he should fund a massive Spanish-language media campaign in these countries to make it clear they can never obtain legal status unless they apply through a consulate.

Delegated authority from Congress

INA 212(f) allows the president, whenever he finds that “the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” to “suspend” all forms of immigration “for such period as he shall deem necessary.” INA 215(a)(1) grants the president an almost equal level of authority to subject entry of all aliens entering or departing to “such reasonable rules, regulations, and orders, and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may prescribe.” If demanding that all immigrants enter legally or apply for asylum in a safe and controlled environment at a consulate rather than at a border controlled by some of the most dangerous people in the world is not a “reasonable rule,” I’m not sure what is.

In addition, given that this is not an ordinary case of immigration or a trickle of asylum seekers, but rather a mass influx, the attorney general can use 8 U.S.C. § 1103(a)(10) to deputize local law enforcement bodies at the border that wish to participate to engage in the police powers of federal immigration officers. This section of the law states that when there’s an “imminent mass influx of aliens arriving off the coast of the United States, or near a land border,” the attorney general may “authorize any State or local law enforcement officer” to perform such duties. This will help with the manpower and the national security component of the issue.

The bottom line is that we need to repel the invasion, not manage it. Why are border agents automatically handing over these people to ICE to be processed? Jessica Vaughan told me she is concerned this is depleting ICE’s resources to address interior enforcement when Customs and Border Protection should be leading at the border. “It’s time for CBP to step up and assume some more responsibility for addressing this crisis,” wrote Vaughan in an email. “So far, they have been just handing over the problem to ICE, USCIS, and the immigration courts, as if it’s not CBP’s problem. That has depleted and diverted the resources for those other critical agencies, which have other responsibilities in the interior. The president should direct CBP – the border protection agency — to assume responsibility for managing the swift processing of these cases, in cooperation with the other agencies of course.”

This is why Trump was elected. Period

This is Trump’s legacy at stake. This is his time in history. He can be the one to stop the border invasion. The minute he forces a national debate over whether we are a sovereign nation, he gains more leverage. The minute he threatens to veto the next budget bill unless it makes changes to sanctuary cities and asylum policies, the tables will be turned. And the minute he actually uses his inherent executive and delegated authority to shut this down temporarily without Congress, he has much more leverage to push long-term reforms as well as deterring Central Americans. (For more from the author of “President Trump Has Full Constitutional Power to Stop the Border Invasion – Even Without Congress” please click HERE)

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Congress Must Shed Reputation as Our Most Dysfunctional Institution

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To say that Congress is a “dysfunctional institution” is not exactly profound. As our federal legislature winds down yet another fractious and unproductive term, explanations for its decline are everywhere. Indeed, diagnosing the problems of Congress has become a veritable American cottage industry. Whether it is gridlock, partisanship, the decline of civility, the Republicans, the Democrats, lawmakers who keep their families out of Washington, the filibuster, committee system, earmarks, the lack of term limits, lobbyists, and big money, there is an explanation to suit every turn of mind and a supposed panacea to match it.

The reality, however, is that we have been trying to “reform” Congress for more than a century, yet we are as far from a properly functioning legislature as at any time in our history. Why is this? Contemporary reform efforts cannot adequately address the failures of this branch of government because they do not adequately tackle the core problem, which is the demise of Congress as a legislative institution.

The Constitution tells us that “all legislative power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” The Framers understood that there exists a legislative, or lawmaking power, fundamentally distinct from executive power and judicial power. Laws govern society by informing citizens what they can do, what they must do, and what they are permitted, but not required to do. It is precisely this power that Congress has abdicated over the past century. Sometimes, it simply does not pass legislation. This is especially true during periods of divided government and over contentious issues like immigration reform. But even when Congress is able to pass legislation, it consistently fails to make key decisions regarding the rules of action.

As an example, the Communications Act of 1934 instructed the newly created Federal Communications Commission to issue broadcast licenses as the “public interest, convenience, or necessity” required. But because Congress failed to define that, the agency made those judgments. Similarly, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required employers and educational institutions to avoid imposing an “undue hardship” on disabled individuals by providing “reasonable accommodations.” But what constitutes a “reasonable accommodation” or an “undue hardship”? Often, employers and educational institutions do not know until they are sued and a judge tells them what they must do to comply with the law. (Read more from “Congress Must Shed Reputation as Our Most Dysfunctional Institution” HERE)

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How I Know the United States Is on the Brink of Another Civil War

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In the course of my journalistic career, which has spanned several decades and countless interesting assignments, I’ve won many awards and often been touted as “the most important writer of this time, or any time.” I usually shrug off such platitudes, even if they’re true. However, not in all my days have I ever seen anything as terrible as what’s gripping the United States of America today.

I began my work covering a civil war in Africa—or maybe it was Asia. But I never thought I’d end it (not that my career is actually ending) covering a civil war in my home country. Yet here I sit, high atop Mount Winchester with only my beleaguered manservant Roger for company, and civil war is what I see on my TV.

The fight over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh has turned America into the bloodiest battleground in the history of the world. Perhaps most or all of the blood spilled has been metaphorical, even rhetorical, but it’s still as sticky as a locker room after a hockey fight. . .

Make no mistake, this is a terrifying conflict. What began as an argument over whether a federal judge may have sexually assaulted a young woman at a teenage party in the 1980s will soon turn into an armed battle where millions of people will die. Millions more will starve to death. Countless thousands will be imprisoned in cattle pens and die from infections of their grievous wounds. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Look at Twitter. People are mean to one another there. . .

All signs point toward civil war, just like the last time. Fancy boys dance jigs to banjo music, albeit mostly in Brooklyn. Families stockpile oats. The country finds itself deeply divided over the issue of whether one somewhat seedy political operative has the judicial temperament to serve on the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the president, a homely underdog from humble beginnings, is trying but failing to preserve the Union with his soaring oratory. (Read more from “How I Know the United States Is on the Brink of Another Civil War” HERE)

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If Trump Champions ‘Criminal Justice Reform,’ He Betrays Crime Victims

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In 1997, Devin Lombardi’s 16-year-old brother, Erik Ingebretsen, was savagely and ruthlessly murdered in Colusa, California, by his childhood friend, Nathan Ramazzini. Through the unimaginable pain of the ordeal and the endless time it took to finally secure justice, Devin and her family at least took solace in the fact that they wouldn’t have to think about Ramazzini again. Justice is supposed to be final. That all changed with the “bipartisan criminal justice reform” movement. With no regard for public safety, law enforcement, or victims, California passed, among a slew of pro-criminal bills, a law reopening sentencing for juvenile murderers like Ramazinni, and Devin will now have to face him at a new hearing on October 23.

You might think this is some fringe agenda confined to left-wing California, but this is, in fact, just a modest part of the “de-incarceration at all costs” agenda being supported in every state by politicians and outside groups of both political parties. And codifying these same provisions that California recently passed on the national level is a top priority of Senate Republicans if they maintain the Senate. They might even pass the sentencing reduction bill or the back-end jailbreak bill in the lame-duck session. Section 208 of the sentencing bill offers a rehearing for juveniles serving more than 20 years in federal prison. By definition, if they are in a federal prison (as opposed to state) for more than 20 years, they are likely MS-13 murderers.

To add Orwellian insult to this injury, Chuck Grassley and other top GOP leaders plan to work with the very Democrat members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who mercilessly vitiated due process with Bret Kavanagh to pass bills letting out juvenile murderers who were convicted with due process and evidence. So much for Democrats being concerned about justice for juvenile crimes.

With much anxiety headed into the re-sentencing hearing, Lombardi reached out to me because almost nobody else in the political system gives a damn about victims. The same Democrats on the committee who said we need to care about the feelings of an alleged victim from 36 years ago with no evidence refuse to exhibit a shred of compassion for victims of crimes that were definitely committed and the perpetrators convicted. Yet rather than calling out their hypocrisy on criminal justice, Republicans plan to reward Senators Durbin, Hirono, Booker, and Harris by passing their bill to unleash hell on victims of violent crime. Both parties just don’t care about victims of real violent crime.

In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB9 as part of a series of pro-criminal laws to reopen sentencing for those convicted of life in prison without parole before they were 18. One of the biggest lies of the “prison reform” movement, particularly among pseudo-conservative apologists, is that this is just for the phantom “low-level, nonviolent offender.” They milked the case of Alice Johnson for all it was worth as a poster child for over-incarceration, while they ignored the hundreds of people that likely died from her top-level cocaine trafficking, the biggest case in Tennessee at the time. They ignore the fact that she had numerous opportunities to avoid the mandatories and cooperate with prosecutors. They ignore the fact that most of these drug traffickers commit other violent crimes.

This tactic of putting out home videos from people who are already elderly and sitting in prison is not limited to drug trafficking. Nathan Ramazzini and the political movement behind him are now doing the same thing even for murderers. As I warned before, Nathan Ramazzini is already out with a PR campaign to say he’s a changed man. This industry is bigger than any of us have realized, and Kim Kardashian West has now gotten Trump to empower it. This will set off a revolution to focus exclusively on criminals in a vacuum without considering the victims, deterrent, rising crime rates, or the spectacular failures of jailbreak.

And what does this do for victims? I can’t imagine the pain, but Devin Lombardi explained to me her feelings ahead of the October 23 hearing, which will likely last a full week:

When we are forced to go through these resentencing hearings and parole board hearings, when we’ve been living under the safety of never having to, we are sucked right back into our trauma. We suffer flashbacks, anxiety, depression, and debilitating triggers that affect how we function every day. I wasn’t prepared as a wife and now mother to be thrown back into the anguish I experienced back in 1997. It’s been a very rough time for my whole family, and we are all suffering because of it. None of us deserve this. We’ve suffered enough.

Devin was just 13 years old at the time of Erik’s murder and was his only sibling. Her parents suffer from depression over the murder and don’t have the energy to deal with seeking justice, so Devin is on her own. There were others involved in the murder, but they were released a long time ago because she lacked the capacity to fight so many battles. “I’m fighting alone an uphill battle; I don’t have the strength or mental capacity to fight the other offenders.”

As hard as it is to cope with the murder of a brother, it’s almost a full-time job to seek justice. Devin is a special education teacher with a two-year-old daughter, but has to find the time to fight this lonely battle so that her daughter can be safe from Nathan and those like him. Because she is not a politically correct victim, she doesn’t have endless funds, lawyers, Hollywood figures, and the media championing her cause. They are all on the other side.

So who is standing with law and order? (For more from the author of “If Trump Champions ‘Criminal Justice Reform,’ He Betrays Crime Victims” please click HERE)

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If You Really Want ‘the Rule of Law,’ Get Rid of Sanctuary Cities and Their Illegal Drugs

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“Republicans believe in the rule of law, not the rule of the mob.”

This comment from President Trump at a weekend rally in Kansas should be the rallying cry not only for this election but for a policy agenda every day after the election.

A recent bust of a criminal alien drug trafficking network in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an obdurate sanctuary city, should demonstrate once and for all that the border invasion and sanctuary cities are the main cause of the opioid crisis. In a sane world, it would serve as the impetus for Trump to promise a veto of the next budget bill, in early December, that doesn’t defund sanctuary cities. Heck, a sane party would bring Congress back from its endless recess to spark another Kavanaugh-level fight over sanctuary cities, sovereignty, drugs, gangs, and the rule of law. Not a bad formula to win back suburban voters.

Illegal aliens and sanctuaries are separating Americans from their families in the grave

New England has been hit hard by the drug crisis. The entirety of the post-2013 increase in fatalities has come from illicit street drugs. Where do they come from? Last week’s joint ICE/DEA bust of a criminal alien network in Lawrence, Massachusetts, involving over 200 law enforcement officers, provides us with a lot of insight. ICE detained or issued indictments for 50 illegal or criminal aliens who were operating in plain sight of authorities in and around Lawrence and charged them with gun, drug, and immigration violations. Several of them were also identified as sex offenders. They had enough fentanyl to kill half the population of the Bay State. That’s an awful lot of people who would be permanently separated from their families in the grave thanks to the singular focus in both parties on coddling “families” who cross the border and bring in drugs. Included in the bust were individuals whom local authorities failed to detain and hand over to ICE after prior arrests.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies and a resident of Massachusetts, told me that she is not surprised by this bust. “The city of Lawrence has given them safe haven with its egregious sanctuary policies,” said Vaughan, who is in touch regularly with local law enforcement. “State and local officials in Massachusetts, right up to the governor, have been in public denial about the role of deportable criminal aliens in this festering problem and failed to take action that would make business difficult for the traffickers – they even allow them to obtain driver’s licenses and welfare benefits.”

This front page of the Boston Herald last Saturday is worth 1,000 words:

This in a nutshell is how sanctuary cities are fueling the drug crisis. It’s one thing to come to this country illegally and get across the border undetected. But it’s much harder to remain undetected in perpetuity and successfully operate a profitable drug network. That is, unless you operate in a sanctuary city, where they do everything possible to avoid detaining illegal aliens caught on drug charges. If local authorities were properly fighting the drug crisis, upon catching the first street distributor, it would lead them to the broader network. But that would involve arresting and turning over illegal aliens to ICE.

Earlier this year, Nick Rogers, a detective for the Denver police, explained to the House Judiciary Committee how effective interior enforcement disrupts drug networks in short order:

They were mostly young, 18 to 25-year-old, illegal aliens from mostly Mexico, but as the years went by, some started coming from Honduras and Nicaragua. They were all in possession of several ounces of heroin and a fake ID from Mexico (Sinaloa was most common). Some of these arrests led to what was known as “the office”: A location, usually a higher-end apartment, which was used only to stash the heroin and money. Many of these “offices” produced tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in cash waiting to be sent back to Mexico. Each office also produced an average of one pound of heroin located there.

None of this has been taking place in Lawrence. Look at this list of indictments from the U.S. attorney’s office and you will see that this is entirely an immigrant problem. Many of the suspects already had interactions with police but were never turned over to ICE for deportation. Many of those involved in the drug ring hailed from the illegal alien hot-spot countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. The largest and most deadly component of the drug crisis is all an immigration problem and is completely redressable through punishment and deterrent of sanctuary cities.

The drug crisis is all an immigration problem, not a health care problem

As I’ve warned over and over again, the feds and state governments have misdiagnosed the drug crisis as a prescription problem in order to protect sanctuaries and illicit drugs peddled by Mexican and Dominican drug cartels. In New Hampshire alone, prescription opioids dropped by 33 percent from 2013 through 2017, at the exact time that illicit drug overdoses spiked. This is why just 14 percent of those who sought treatment for addiction in New Hampshire last year did so for prescription opiate addiction.

Likewise, Massachusetts has one of the lowest prescribing rates in the nation, yet is one of the top overdose states. This is no mystery, because almost all of those who overdosed this year had fentanyl and other illicit drugs in their systems.

This has nothing to do with health care and has everything to do with immigration and national security. The Boston Globe, in 2017, admitted that “Mexican cartels are delivering vast quantities of the inexpensive and powerful synthetic drug fentanyl to New England” through “a pipeline that often begins in China, winds through Mexico, and flows into distribution cities such as Lawrence and Springfield.”

This is also why cocaine and meth, which are not even opioids, are the most trending drugs in overdose increases. All of these drugs come from drug cartels. Just last week, a DACA recipient was arrested for trafficking meth.

This is why Trump called out Lawrence’s leaders for their role in drugging up both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which are served by the network of the drug cartels in this sanctuary city. The media made fun of Trump’s assertion as if it were some conspiracy theory, yet all this fentanyl that is now laced into the heroin and other drugs is being distributed under the eyes of Lawrence’s leadership.

Absent this effort by the feds, this network would have never been apprehended. This sentiment was echoed in a statement by Todd Michael Lyons, acting field director of the Boston ICE office:

This subgroup of criminal illegal aliens has effectively embedded themselves in the community and have hidden in plain sight for too long with impunity. If state and local leaders along with elected officials want to combat the opioid problem in the Commonwealth, they need to be serious about rooting out the foreign nexus of the problem. ERO is dedicated to removing the foreign criminal element that is directly contributing to the overwhelming number of overdoses in this state and others. No sanctuary should be given to a criminal alien who has actively taken part in hurting the youth of New England.

Congress can and must act and can actually win the election on this issue

While the efforts by the Trump administration are laudable, we still need Republicans in Congress to run on this issue and then actually fulfill their campaign promises. As Jessica Vaughan warns:

As helpful and necessary as these operations are, we still need Congress to do its job and provide the resources for better border security, update our laws so gang members and drug traffickers can be thrown out more easily, and impose some consequences for sanctuaries. House Republicans have written bills to do all of this, and the president would sign it in a New York minute, but a few powerful individuals who are more interested in passing expanded guest worker programs keep getting in the way.

Congress can end this tomorrow by finally placing these priorities in the budget bill. I detailed 25 ideas to fight back on criminal aliens, including ending the identity theft mill through the SSA and the IRS, which allows these networks to operate. Moreover, as Vaughan notes, it’s hard for even law-abiding districts to apprehend and turn over illegal aliens because the lower courts are creating new rights every day for MS-13 and drug cartels. The Ninth Circuit just made it impossible to detain many suspected criminal aliens.

Imagine if congressional Republicans engaged in a Kavanaugh-level fight over the rule of law vs. the mob law of sanctuaries, drugs, and gangs – all issues that concern suburban voters. Then we might actually be talking about a red wave. And imagine if they actually fulfilled the promise immediately after the election. We can only dream. (For more from the author of “If You Really Want ‘the Rule of Law,’ Get Rid of Sanctuary Cities and Their Illegal Drugs” please click HERE)

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Democrats Have Become a Dangerous Threat to Our Institutions

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When modern Democrats talk about preseving “norms,” traditions,” or even the “Constitution,” they’re really talking about preserving their preferred policies. We know this because “liberals” have shown themselves not only willing to destroy the legitimacy of institutions like the presidency, the Senate ,and Supreme Court to protect those policies, they’re willing to break down basic norms of civility, as well.

Take the example of Hillary Clinton. In the very first sentence in her new scaremongering essay, which makes the case that America’s “democratic institutions and traditions are under siege,” she attacks our democratic institutions and traditions. “It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States,” the piece begins.

The intimation, of course, widely shared by the mainstream left, is that Trump isn’t a legitimate president even though he won the election in the exact same way every other president in U.S. history has ever won election. According to our long-held democratic institutions and traditions, you become president through the Electoral College, not the non-existent popular vote.

So when Clinton, or writers at Vox, or The Atlantic, or Politico, or new liberal favorite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say it’s “well past time we eliminate the Electoral College, a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic,” you’re either tragically ignorant about our system or cynically delegitimizing it. Or maybe it’s both.

The Electoral College isn’t ornamental; it exists to undercut the tyranny of direct democracy and ensure the entire nation is represented in national elections. When you attack it, you’re not condemning Trump, you are, in a very palpable way, attacking a core idea that girds much of our governance. (Read more from “Democrats Have Become a Dangerous Threat to Our Institutions” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.