Illegal Voting by the Numbers

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How many votes in the past presidential election were cast illegally or fraudulently? Some say none to few. Others, such as President Trump, say a couple of million. The mainstream press insist there is “no evidence” for systemic problems in the electoral process. Yet evidence does exist, only that evidence is disputed or ignored.

Here is the story so far. President Trump lost the popular election by more than two million votes, apparently due largely to the massive number of blue votes concentrated in California and New York. Yet shortly after the election, he said, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He later estimated the fraudulent margin to be some 3 to 5 million.

He also said, “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!”

Mr Trump’s claims launched waves of horrified apoplexy in the press (who at this early point know no other reaction). The New York Times was reduced to using the L-word, i.e. “liar.” The Washington Post said Trump’s charge “is not supported by any verifiable facts.” Even politicians in his own party, such as Senator John McCain, said, “I obviously have seen no evidence of illegal voting.”

Various rhetorical tricks then played out in the mainstream press to give the impression illegal voting was rare in the extreme, or even non-existent. An academic study which estimated there were some 800,000 illegal votes from non-citizens was excoriated. Much evidence in plain site was just plain ignored. Yet, so far, there has been no systematic attempt to estimate the illicit vote count, and such an estimate is required before dismissing or accepting Mr. Trump’s claims. The best that can now be said is nobody knows the right answer.

Sloppy “Fact” Checking

One writer at the Washington Post “combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud.” And since this reporter could only find four reported instances, he said, “There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.”

But since the point is question is fraud that has (thus far) gone undetected, arguing that since newspaper accounts of fraud don’t exist that therefore actual fraud doesn’t exist is not unlike arguing that since Pravda didn’t print reports of arrests of political prisoners in Moscow under Stalin, that therefore the arrests didn’t happen.

The controversial site FactCheck.org produced, at times, a petulant report, calling Trump’s claims “bogus.” FactCheck.org relied in part on the paper “The Truth About Voter Fraud” published by the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice. It is a remarkable document that takes great pains to suggest that fraud almost never occurs by emphasizing instances where fraud was searched for but was not found. For instance, this bullet point: “In Washington in 2005, an individual asked county offices to investigate the citizenship status of 1,668 registered voters based on their ‘foreign-sounding names.’ There are no reports of which we are aware that any individual on the submitted list was actually a noncitizen.” This is clever because it also brings with it the slight whiff of racism, for which there is no defense.

The Brennan report argues repeatedly that those who break the law to come to the USA would not likely break the law a second time to vote because the “payoff,” i.e. their one additional vote, is so small. But that same logic (as is well known) applies to the legal citizen voter deciding whether to head to the polls knowing his one vote also counts for almost nothing in a general election.

Pew and Actual Fraud

FactCheck.org admits Mr. Trump quotes accurately from the Pew Report “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs and Upgrade“, before downplaying the report because it doesn’t specifically mention fraud. Instead, Pew says things like “Approximately 24 million — one of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters,” and “Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” While none of these are direct indicators of fraud, all are in the direction of fraud.

FactCheck.org does bring up an instance of fraud:

After the 1982 election, in Chicago, 62 people, most of them precinct captains, were indicted by a grand jury for stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes, including a scheme in which they would identify registered voters not voting on Election Day and forge ballots in their name.

Like certain other metropolitan areas, Chicago is, as all know, a Democratic machine town with a long history of electoral shenanigans. In the linked example, the Chicago Tribune reported that a Democratic precinct worker was caught taking a straight-Democrat ballot and running it through a vote-counting machine 198 times. In that same article, “U.S. Atty. Dan Webb repeated contentions previously made by federal investigators that of the 1 million votes cast in Chicago in the Nov. 2, 1982, general election, about 100,000, or 10 percent, were fraudulent.”

Also: Webb “estimated that 80,000 illegal aliens are registered to vote here” and that by that time some had already been convicted for fraudulent voting. Several election officials were also convicted and others awaited trial.

FactCheck.org then pooh-poohs these facts by reminding the reader that “Trump urged his supporters to ‘watch your polling booths…,’” thus suggesting cheating could not have occurred under these watchful eyes, and by citing “experts” who say “the kind of voter fraud Trump is talking about — voter impersonation — is extremely rare.” Rare is might be, but did it happen in 2016?

Major Malfunctions

FactCheck.org forgot (somehow) to mention headlines like this: “Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election.” The main discovery: “Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.”

How many irregular votes were counted is unknown because of obscure recount rules in Michigan, but it is clearly non-zero. Even with these problems, a recent state audit said there “is no evidence of voter fraud surrounding the presidential election in Detroit.” It was admitted, however, that “87 of the 490 [Wayne County] precinct voting machines malfunctioned”, and that the poll workers were generally old and “tired.”

FactCheck.org also missed a case in Los Angeles where the County Registrar Dean Logan was presented with “more than 80 ballots for Tuesday’s [presidential] election filled out with names and the same address.” Logan has a history with difficult elections, such as in Washington State in 2000:

The Seattle Times documented 129 felons illegally voting in that election; National Review reported nearly 350 provisional ballots were counted without being verified; and The Wall Street Journal noted some 55,000 optical-scan ballots were “enhanced” so the voters’ supposed “intent” could be determined.

There are many other (easy-to-discover yet oddly ignored) instances like these, which proves one thing: that fraudulent or improper votes have been cast in past presidential elections, and that therefore it is rational to conclude fraudulent or improper votes have been cast in this most recent presidential election. The question then becomes how many votes are illicit.

Kinds of Bad Votes

Before investigating a contentious academic study of electoral fraud from non-citizen voting, it helps to list the main sources of fraudulent or improper votes in Presidential elections:

Legal non-citizens; i.e. those who are here legally who are ineligible to vote but do anyway
Law-breaking non-citizens; i.e. those who have broken laws to come here and are not in the formal immigration pipeline and who vote illegally
The dead, including legal and illegal (see below)
The fictional; i.e. names which are entirely made up
The multiple; i.e. citizens who vote more than once
Felons; i.e. citizens barred from voting

The dead requires clarification. Some citizens vote early and legally and then die before the official election date. Searches afterwards might turn some of these folks up as “dead voters.” The culprit is early voting and not fraud or ill intent. Of course, names of the deceased can also be, and have been, used by the unscrupulous.

Direction manipulation, by ballot box stuffing and, if it were possible, by hacking, would largely fit under the fictional category. The Chicago example of running the same ballot through the counting machine, and the example of malfunctioning machines fit here.

In order to come to total illicit votes, estimates are needed from each source.

The Dead and Felons

The dead whose names have been used improperly do not appear to account for a large number of bad votes. Many dead people are registered, as Pew reported, but their names have not been discovered to have been systematically misused. Still, there is substance (and here) to the many Chicago jokes like this: “My father voted Republican all his life. Since he died he votes Democrat.” No one therefore knows the best estimate of dead voters, but the Pew study does give an upper bound.

Laws vary by state whether felons can vote, with most states saying convicted felons are ineligible in some way. One estimate is that just over 6 million citizens are thus restricted. Ballotpedia cites a 2008 study which discovered “33,000 convicted felons who should not be eligible to vote” in Florida; another reports the “Wisconsin Government Accountability Board announced in September 2009 that it had identified up to 195 felons who may have illegally voted in the November 2008 presidential election.”

The total improper number of votes from felons is anybody’s guess, however. That 6 million is another upper bound, with the actual total surely far less than this.

Multiple and Fictional Votes

Pew again gives a clue about multiple voting by citizens; i.e., that 2.75 million people have multiple registrations. And then Alan Schulkin, Commissioner of the Board of Elections in New York City, was filmed by Project Veritas admitting people are “bused around” to vote multiple times, predominately in Democrat-heavy neighborhoods. In 2014, North Carolina identified “hundreds of cases of potential voter fraud,” many of which were likely multiple voters.

Fictional and incorrect names can be “on paper,” as when fraudulent registrations are entered, or virtual, as with ballot stuffing and hacking. For an on-paper example, recall the infamous Acorn voter registration drives in which the group turned in “‘massive numbers’ of duplicate registration cards,” cards for fictional characters and children and others with forged signatures. How many of these faked registrations turned into real votes nobody appears to know.

Ballotpedia quotes from a National Review article in which “undercover agents with New York City Department of Investigations ‘showed up at 63 polling places [in the fall of 2013] and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials … in 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote.’” Other examples exist.

Ballot Stuffing and Hacking

The Chicago example suffices for a ballot-stuffing example, though many say newer voting machines make the practice difficult. Yet computerized machines open the possibility of hacking. The Detroit example with more votes than voters also falls into this category, regardless whether the intent was malicious or due to faulty equipment.

Hacking is more mysterious. A security researcher demonstrated to Forbes the ease which some machines can be tampered with. Others agree. There were claims from some that machines in Texas changed votes from Trump to Hillary, though some of these curious changes could be put down to voter error. But the same mysterious switches from Trump to Hillary were reported in Pennsylvania and other places, too.

“I went back, pressed Trump again. Three times I did this, so then I called one of the women that were working the polls over. And she said you must be doing it wrong. She did it three times and it defaulted to Hillary every time,” Bobbie Lee Hawranko told KDKA.
The key line to the story: “Officials recalibrated the machines and said the issue has been resolved.” Here is a video of an instance of switching.

And, as all know, there were multiple reports that Russia hacked the election, but here it is generally meant that “entities” in Russia provided the emails from the DNC and John Podesta, which is a different kind of thing.

As above, the conclusion is that nobody knows the size of the error or fraud from these categories, except to say that it is not zero. The direction of reports of vote switching is, of course, interesting.

Non-Citizen Voting

In 2014, Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha, and David Earnest published “Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?” in the journal Electoral Studies. Their study relied on data provided by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which is an on-going Internet survey.

The CCES includes a question asking whether the respondent is a US citizen, and others asking whether the respondent voted and for whom. Some respondents who said they were non-citizens also said they voted, which of course is illegal. In the 2008 election, Richman and Earnest calculated that “more than 80 percent” of non-citizens who illegally vote did so for Obama. So pronounced was the Democrat tilt, “we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”

If extrapolated to 2016, these findings support Mr. Trump’s claim. But Richman’s paper was not well received by Democrats and the mainstream press. How accurate are Richman’s findings?

Not so accurate, say Stephen Ansolabehere, Samantha Luks, and Brian Schaffner, who penned the rebuttal paper “The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys” in Electoral Studies. The gist of this article is that if there is a known error rate in answering the question on citizenship, then, given the observed data, it is possible all the people who responded they were non-citizen voters were in error, and that, in fact, no non-citizens voted.

Yet there is no known error rate, only a guess, a guess which is disputed in turn by Richman (also here). Ansolabehere and the others also fail to consider what errors in answering other questions might mean. And both Richman and Ansolabehere fail to consider the biggest source of uncertainty, which is lying.

Some non-citizens vote because they honestly believe they are allowed to, but others vote knowing of the illegality. Both categories of votes are, however, illegal. A key point of dispute in the CCES is that some people who answered they were citizens in 2010 later said in 2012 that they were non-citizens (and vice versa). This supports the measurement error theory of Ansolabehere. But it also supports the theory that some might have been lying in 2010 and later changed their mind. Even stronger, there were a very large number of folks who said they were non-citizens consistently, and Ansolabehere’s approach would be to toss all these out, a move for which he does not have a solid justification.

How many who were non-citizens who claimed to be citizens, i.e. how many lied, is not known by anybody. This was an Internet survey and people were tracked through time. It is unclear how much trust respondents had in the privacy of their data; plus, the motivation to lie about voting illegally is obvious enough.

Estimating Non-Citizen Votes

Many in the press, and even Ansolabehere, intimate Richman did not consider the effects of measurement error (of mistakenly answering the citizenship question), but this is simply false. In the original paper, Richman gathered as much evidence as they could to support their claim of non-citizen voting. Most of this evidence was indirect, as in comparing demographic and other characteristics of non-citizen voters and non-citizen non-voters. But, really, this is all that can be done short of tracking down the original respondents and investigating (not questioning) them individually.

Supposing Richman is correct, his estimate of some 834,000 votes cast illegally in 2016, and most of these for Hillary, is too precise. That number has substantial uncertainty, even accepting Richman’s analysis. And then we have to add the uncertainty due to the survey itself: how were people gathered, what biases it has, how many lied, and so forth. And even if we could do all that, the result is not observational proof of the number of illegal non-citizen votes. It will be just the number (or a range, really) from some statistical model, which would be disputed until Kingdom come. Richman himself agrees more would be needed.

Lastly, another difficulty is that the CCES data does not distinguish between legal non-citizens and those who broke the law to come here. Since the CCES was an Internet survey, and thus would require access to some kind of (expensive) device, it may be that it is biased toward legal non-citizens. Folks who break the law to come here to work washing dishes or picking crops aren’t, one surmises, as likely to participate in surveys. How likely this latter group is to vote (illegally and encouraged or bused by men like Schulkin mentioned) is unknown.

Final Numbers

It is disappointing, but the answer at this date is that there is no answer, no precise answer. There is more than sufficient evidence to confirm that some illegal votes were counted, however. Much of this evidence is circumstantial, but it is also substantial. (For more from the author of “Illegal Voting by the Numbers” please click HERE)

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A Few Facts About SCOTUS Pick Neil Gorsuch’s Religion

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Judge Neil Gorsuch has been nominated to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. Here are a few facts about his religious history and commitments, including positions important to religious conservatives.

1) Neil Gorsuch attended a Catholic school, the exclusive Georgetown Preparatory School, while his mother Anne served as head of the EPA under President Reagan. The school is run by the Jesuit order. He was student body president his senior year and graduated in 1985. The school makes a point of noting that it was founded the same year as the Supreme Court was established.

He studied at Oxford under the Catholic philosopher John Finnis. Finnis is one of the world’s leading Natural Law thinkers. One of Finnis’s other students, Princeton professor Robert P. George, wrote on his Facebook page that “Judge Gorsuch, whom I know well, is a faithful constitutionalist and extraordinarily well-qualified. President Trump could not have done better. Kudos to him.” Before the nomination, George had written, “He would be a superb Supreme Court justice. He is intellectually extremely gifted and is deeply committed to the (actual) Constitution and the rule of law. He will not manufacture ‘rights’ or read things into the Constitution that aren’t there or read things out of the Constitution that are.”

2) He’ll be the only Protestant on the court. He now attends St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder City, Colorado, where his daughters served as acolytes. The church describes itself as “an inclusive, Christ-centered community reaching out to all who are seeking a deeper spirituality and relationship with God and one another.” It has a woman pastor.

3) He opposes the legalization of euthanasia, as he wrote in his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Princeton University Press published the book in 2009. Two of the nation’s leading Catholic bioethicists, Princeton’s Robert P. George and Georgetown’s John Keown, praised it.

However, as the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission noted, “during his confirmation hearing [for the Tenth Circuit] he said he would follow the law rather than personal convictions, and that in his writings he has largely defended existing precedent in these areas.” As one constitutional scholar described Gorsuch’s views:

[He] believes that “any State’s decision to legalize assisted suicide would likely bring with it both benefits and some attendant costs, and, accordingly, the legalization question presents a difficult moral and legal choice.” … In his book, Gorsuch elaborates on these ideas, proposing as a guiding principle the intrinsic value of human life and arguing that “to act intentionally against life is to suggest that its value rests only on its transient instrumental usefulness for other ends.” He suggests a standard that would leave room for patient autonomy while not allowing intentional killing.

4) Gorsuch is taken to be an opponent of abortion, though he’s never written a court decision on the matter. He wrote in his book that “All human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” Also, “To act intentionally against life is to suggest that its value rests only on its transient instrumental usefulness for other ends.” And also:

It is simply not acceptable when we are deciding who is and is not treated as fully human…. It is incompatible with the promise of equal justice under law that any of us should feel at liberty to sit in judgement to decide who is and who is not entitled to the benefits of that promise.

In a footnote to the book, he argued that “Abortion would be ruled out by the inviolability-of-life principle I intend to set forth.” He noted that this depended on another belief. It would be true “if, and only if, a fetus is considered a human life. The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, however, unequivocally held that a fetus is not a ‘person’ for purposes of constitutional law.” Observers believe he would find that the fetus is a person.

His one judicial encounter with the issue came in Planned Parenthood of Utah v. Herbert. “Last October,” writes constitutional expert Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Gorsuch “dissented strenuously” when the court left standing a order keeping funds going to Planned Parenthood and over-rode the governor’s directive. “Gorsuch faulted the panel for failing to accord the appropriate degree of deference to the district court’s factual findings and for making its own bizarre inferences about the governor’s reasons for acting.”

A negative testimony to his position is NARAL’s reaction. The formerly named National Abortion Rights Action League tweeted, “We will fight hard, we will fight back, and we will #RESIST Neil Gorsuch & Trump’s extreme #antichoice agenda! #StopGorsuch”.

5) He’s an advocate of religious freedom and tolerance. He wrote in his book that “The law … doesn’t just apply to protect popular religious beliefs: it does perhaps its most important work in protecting unpopular religious beliefs, vindicating this nation’s long-held aspiration to serve as a refuge of religious tolerance.”

Gorsuch has “an especially strong record” on this subject, writes Whelan. In 2013, Gorsuch supported Hobby Lobby against the Obamacare mandate to provide conception, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court. Two years later, he supported the Little Sisters of the Poor, an organization of Catholic nuns, against similar requirements.

He “has also written or joined opinions — again, largely vindicated by the Supreme Court — that have criticized doctrines that limit religious expression in public spaces,” writes another legal scholar, Eric Citron, on the SCOTUSblog.

The common thread in these cases is one that matters very deeply to conservatives: a sense that the government can permit public displays of religion – and can accommodate deeply held religious views – without either violating the religion clauses of the Constitution or destroying the effectiveness of government programs that occasionally run into religious objections. In his 2009 concurrence in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum, Scalia articulated very similar views.

6) Gorsuch is intellectually independent. He’s willing “to rethink constitutional principles from the ground up,” says Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center, quoted by Politico. “Like Justice Scalia, he sometimes reaches results that favor liberals when he thinks the history or text of the Constitution or the law require it, especially in areas like criminal law or the rights of religious minorities, but unlike Scalia he’s less willing to defer to regulations and might be more willing to second-guess Trump’s regulatory decision.”

7) He loves his wife Louise and two daughters, Emma and Belinda. He dedicated his book to them with the words “Finally, and borrowing in part from P.G. Wodehouse, I thank my wife, Louise, and my daughters, Emma and Belinda, without whose constant love and attention this book would’ve been finished in half the time — but without whom life wouldn’t been half as fully lived.” (For more from the author of “A Few Facts About SCOTUS Pick Neil Gorsuch’s Religion” please click HERE)

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SMOKING GUN: Google Is Suppressing Center-Right News Sites

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The big story this evening is the fact that President Trump has fired the acting Attorney General, a far Left Obama holdover.

Her dismissal was well-deserved, given the fact that she ordered the Justice Department to ignore the Commander-In-Chief’s entirely legal order, one similar to bans enacted by Presidents Obama and Carter.

But I was fascinated to see the Google News coverage of the event.

Check out the top story this evening:

170130-google-news

So we see which sites Google has chosen to promote.

Are these selections fair and reasonable?

I’m sure you’re shocked, but it would appear not. Let’s look at global Alexa traffic rankings (and, yes, I know they’re not spot-on, but they’re definitely useful proxies for actual traffic).

170130-google-news-bias

Suffice it to say that Google appears to be suppressing center-right news sources and feeding the echo chamber More Of The Same™.

Say, how’d that work out for them this election cycle?

Protip: I suggest bypassing the censors at Google and using BadBlue Real-Time News. You’ll get independent, unbiased and honest coverage from around the planet, updated every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day. (For more from the author of “SMOKING GUN: Google Is Suppressing Center-Right News Sites” please click HERE)

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Chief Justice Roy Moore’s Lonely Fight against Judicial Tyranny

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[Editor’s note: if you want to help Roy Moore in his fight against judicial tyranny, radical gay activists, and agents of the Southern Poverty Law Center, please go HERE]

U.S. federal courts have aggressively attacked state sovereignty over the past several decades. Whether it was this week’s decision on Texas’s simple voter ID law, numerous recent orders trumping local laws with “transgender” rights, 2015’s radical homosexual marriage opinion, or even the more distant Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, States’ rights are in a full and prolonged retreat.

Why? No elected leaders seem interested in taking a real stand to push back against judicial tyranny. No one, that is, save Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore.

Many remember Justice Moore as the “Ten Commandments Judge” who defied a federal judge’s order in 2003 to remove a massive granite replica of the commandments from the rotunda of Alabama’s judicial building. Elected Chief Justice by the citizens of Alabama two years before, Moore argued that the federal order was unlawful, infringing on his State’s sovereign rights. He also maintained that “to acknowledge God cannot be a violation of the Canons of Ethics. Without God there can be no ethics.” But Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary – composed mostly of lawyers – didn’t buy it and promptly removed the chief justice from office.

Fast forward to 2012. Roy Moore ran for Chief Justice once again and, much to the surprise of the media and political elites, first defeated the incumbent Republican in the primary and then went on to win the general election against a Democrat who had outspent him 6 to 1. The Establishment was mortified.

It wasn’t too long before Chief Justice Moore was embroiled in controversy again. This time, the catalyst was the US Supreme Court’s outrageous Obergefell decision which purportedly forced every State in the union to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals. Justice Moore felt this horrendously reasoned decision – literally based on feelings rather than any legal precedent – threatened the democratic fabric of the nation (prior to federal court action on marriage, most States had resoundingly rejected attacks on the institution of marriage. By the time of the Obergefell decision, only 11 States had voluntarily passed laws legalizing homosexual marriage).

Honoring his oaths to the US Constitution and Constitution of the State of Alabama, West Point graduate Roy Moore believed he was duty-bound to resist a decision that Justice Antonin Scalia disparaged as being equivalent to “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie” and “lacking even a thin veneer of law.”

Perhaps in the most inflammatory language the US Supreme Court has ever seen from one of its own justices, Scalia also attacked the lawless decision for robbing “the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Chief Justice Moore agreed. Although he did not call for revolution, he did issue an order as the chief administrative officer of the Alabama courts to judicial officers responsible for marriage licenses explaining that the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision had not trumped state law. On the first page of this administrative order, Justice Moore quoted from prior decisions of the United States and Alabama Supreme Courts regarding marriage:

In 1885 the Supreme Court of the United States described marriage as “the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.” Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U.S. 15, 45. The Alabama Supreme Court similarly stated that “‘[T]he relation of marriage is founded on the will of God, and the nature of man; and it is the foundation of all moral improvement, and all true happiness.'” Goodrich v. Goodrich, 44 Ala. 670, 675 (1870).

Justice Moore then cited recent federal appellate and district cases which recognized Obergefell did not directly invalidate state marriage laws in all 50 states. Given this precedence, and since Alabama was not a party to Obergefell, Chief Justice Moore ordered that “Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act.”

The left was incensed. David Cohen, president of the infamous hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center (the same group whose follower attempted to slaughter Christians in an attack on the Family Research Council’s DC headquarters), made a complaint to Alabama’s Judicial Inquiry Commission. The Commission then tried to convince the State’s attorney general to draw up charges against Chief Justice Moore, but he refused. Unbelievably, the Commission then hired the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ex-director to draft charges against the Chief Justice. In a subsequent four-hour show trial, the lawyer-dominated “jury” then convicted Chief Justice Moore of violating the Canons of Judicial Ethics because of his response to the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. He was suspended without pay until the end of his term of office.

Chief Justice Moore appealed this de facto termination of his judgeship. In support of his appeal, the United States Justice Foundation has filed briefing attacking the justice’s unlawful removal from office (USJF also came to the Chief Justice’s aid in an earlier 2015 case where he sued by a group of homosexuals). USJF noted in its brief that “no one can deny the revolutionary nature of the Obergefell decision” and that its lawlessness was revealed by the fact none of the five US Supreme Court justices who supported it “even bothered to respond to a single point expressed by any one of the four dissenters.”

Attacking the decision as “the product of a naked vote of the political will of a bare majority,” USJF went on to observe that marriage has always been viewed by the courts “as exclusively within the jurisdictions of the states.” The lack of legal justification for the decision was transparent in Justice Kennedy’s repeated statements that “new insights and societal understandings” supported striking down state laws on marriage. USJF noted that these statements proved that Justice Kennedy

knew that there was no original or textual basis for his decision in the U.S. Constitution; that he was not interpreting, but rather imposing his will on the U.S. Constitution; that in doing so he was elevating the power of the majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices above the text of the Constitution; that he was usurping the People’s right to govern themselves by setting out permanent rules in a written constitution; that he was usurping the People’s right to amend their Constitution pursuant to the provisions of Article V; … that he was instituting an era of the rule of man over the rule of law; … and that he was usurping the role of states — as well as the legislative function — to impose on them a new law of domestic relations.

In other words, this was no run-of-the-mill-decision that legal minds could reasonably disagree on. It was a tyrannical, unconstitutional grab for power likely unprecedented in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Given Chief Justice Moore’s courageous resistance to this lawlessness, he should have been championed – rather than terminated – as Alabama’s top judge.

With your help, USJF will continue to fight this battle on behalf of Roy Moore and will join in other fights critical to returning our institutions to the Rule of Law. Please partner with USJF by donating HERE. Your gifts are tax deductible.

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Feds Investigating Obama Administration for Illegally Hacking Georgia’s Election System

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Federal officials have launched an investigation into why the Department of Homeland Security hacked into the Georgia state governmental network, including its election system, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

John Roth, inspector general for DHS, wants to know why the agency broke protocol on its way to 10 unprecedented attacks on the system overseen by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp — who is also one of the most vocal critics about the Obama administration’s attempt to designate local and state election machinery as part of federal “critical infrastructure.”

A Jan. 17 letter from Roth notified Kemp his office was officially “investigating a series of ten alleged scanning events of the Georgia Secretary of State’s network that may have originated from DHS-affiliated IP addresses.” A firewall in Georgia’s system thwarted each attempt.

Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Kemp have clashed over a federal government designation of election systems as “critical infrastructure.” Kemp called it “political power play to federalize elections.”

The “scans” are attacks to test security weaknesses in a network. It’s called the electronic equivalent of “rattling doorknobs” to see if they’re unlocked — or on a darker side, to send a message to a recipient. (Read more from “Feds Investigating Obama Administration for Illegally Hacking Georgia’s Election System” HERE)

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FINALLY! Sen. Rand Paul Offers Worthy Obamacare Alternative GOP Can Get Behind

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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. (A, 92%) has been nothing if not vocal about his belief that a new set of health care reforms should be voted on at the same time as a repeal of Obamacare. This week, Sen. Paul has revealed his proposal to replace Obamacare, by introducing S. 222, the Obamacare Replacement Act.

His bill is obviously designed to work in tandem with the partial repeal that was passed by Congress last year, in that it sweeps away the parts of Obamacare that the other bill leaves behind, particularly the regulations. While the bill being passed via the budget reconciliation process repeals only the taxation and spending portions of Obamacare, if Paul’s plan were advanced at the same time, the two bills would add to up to a fairly complete repeal of Obama’s health care takeover.

More so than other GOP proposals for life after Obamacare, Paul’s plan focuses much of its effort on removing barriers to competition in the health insurance market that existed well before 2010. First and foremost, it puts individuals on an equal footing with employers with respect to tax treatment for health insurance costs. He does this by allowing the full tax deductibility of health insurance premiums. He allows the deductions to apply not only to income taxes, but also to payroll taxes, meaning that even lower-income individuals benefit.

In addition, a tax credit of up to $5,000 per individual is allowed for contributions to a health savings account. This allows employers to make the choice whether to continue directly purchasing insurance to offer to employees or simply to contribute an equivalent sum to an employee’s health savings account.

HSAs are then greatly expanded to allow individuals to use their funds for many products and services that are currently not allowed, including health insurance itself as well as over-the-counter medications, physical fitness programs, and nutritional supplements.

Another major drawback of the individual insurance market has been that larger companies are able purchase health insurance in bulk and thus reduce the cost per plan. Paul’s plan creates the framework for individuals and small businesses to be able to easily band together into a larger purchasing pool. While Obamacare attempted to do this for small businesses with its SHOP program, the law increased premiums and regulated the market so much across the board that it hasn’t worked well. This new framework leaves wide open space for innovation in health insurance pools.

One consistent talking point for health care reformers on the Right has been allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines. Specifics of how to accomplish in a way that doesn’t violate federalism have generally been in short supply, but Paul’s plan appears to do a pretty good job of squaring that circle. It allows insurers from one state to offer their products in other states while acknowledging certain constraints imposed by secondary states.

Allowing cross-state sales further boosts insurance pools by increasing the ability to pool together by trade or organizational ties, rather than just by geography. Unions and other professional associations have had some ability to do this through association health plans for years, but Paul’s plan greatly loosens the restrictions on these plans.

Of all the new problems created by Obamacare, the Medicaid expansion is the most difficult to deal with politically. Although Medicaid generally provides poor quality coverage and Medicaid enrollees are rejected by a huge (and increasing) percentage of physicians, millions of Americans have now been brought into the program via Obamacare. Paul’s plan addresses the Medicaid issue in a way that would benefit both states and the covered individuals regardless of whether or not the expansion is fully repealed in the accompanying reconciliation bill.

He does this by granting states the ability to change how they deliver coverage under Medicaid. Previously, states have had to request a waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services to get permission to experiment with better ways to administer their Medicaid programs. Paul’s bill eliminates the need to request the waivers, allowing states to follow in the steps of states like Florida, where reforms carried out under waivers have been very successful in improving the quality of care that Medicaid provides.

Overall, Sen. Paul’s plan focuses reform where it ought to be — breaking down barriers in the marketplace and allowing innovation and competition to increase access to affordable health care. From a free market perspective, it stands head and shoulders above any other plan yet offered to reform health care in the wake of Obamacare’s repeal. (For more from the author of “FINALLY! Sen. Rand Paul Offers Worthy Obamacare Alternative GOP Can Get Behind” please click HERE)

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What You’re Not Hearing about the Mini Police States in Public Schools

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School has changed a lot over the last few decades. Once a place of learning, run by teachers and principals, where children were free to play outside during recess and walk home unescorted, public schools now increasingly resemble little prisons. Metal detectors guard the entrances, supervision never relaxes, and armed policemen are a regular presence. In many cases, these intimidating figures are taking the place of the disciplinary roles traditionally fulfilled by parents and teachers.

Reason Magazine reports the now common practice of using police to enforce standards of behavior in schools. Instead of verbal chiding, being made to sit in a corner, or other forms of discipline, children are now more likely to be subject to expulsion or even arrest for petty offenses that would have once merited no more than a stern talking to.

The article includes stories of police handcuffing a student for grabbing his milk allotment out of turn and charging a 17-year-old involved in a consensual relationship with a classmate with sexual assault and child pornography charges that could land him in prison for 40 years. While these cases are no doubt outliers, they indicate a larger institutional problem of inappropriate police intervention in schools.

There are several reasons for this. Part of the problem is the restrictive state laws that govern what teachers can and cannot do or say to students. Fear of litigious parents means that many teachers will do anything they can to avoid actual disciplinary measures, and the police provide a convenient form of outsourcing.

Another issue is the fact that children are crammed together in an increasingly high-pressure education environment based on zip code, with few options for those who are unable to keep up with the lessons or who simply feel out of place among classmates who are not really their peers. A lack of choice, of feeling trapped, leads to acting out and bad behavior, which teachers feel unable to control. Part of the problem is certainly also the parents who wish to use school as a substitute for actually raising their kids and teaching them how to behave.

But perhaps the biggest reason why police have invaded schools is fear. Today, schools are regarded as mass shootings waiting to happen. Numerous high profile incidents of school violence have instilled terror into the population, so much so that they are willing to take any measures, including criminalizing much harmless behavior, to feel a little bit safer. But what no one seems to have realized is that, if schools are so dangerous to begin with, it’s madness to force children to spend so much of their young lives confined within their walls.

Compulsory education laws, combined with a lack of school choice, make children prisoners in a place where, we are told, they are about as likely to take a bullet in the head as learn algebra. Why would we inflict that on people? Surely it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

If schools are violent, let’s get kids out of them, instead of surrounding them with law enforcement authorities trained to arrest and imprison, rather than aid and educate. This is not to mention the fact that police resources could be much better spent elsewhere, rather than having highly trained officers waste time persecuting children over cafeteria line etiquette or arresting teenagers in love.

Why should parents be forced to subject their children to such treatment? Why should kids whose only purpose at that stage of life is to learn and have fun be intimidated and threatened with criminal charges? Anyone should be able to opt out of such a system, or at the very least, transfer to school with less draconian methods of enforcement.

Anyone who has spent time around children can observe their wonder at life, the joy they feel at learning about the world around them, the hope and promise of life stretching out before them. It’s heartbreaking to me to see all that enthusiasm snuffed out as they are told, “Watch your step, or you’ll end up in a cold, grey cell.” There will be time to be beaten down by the power of the state later in life. Can’t we permit them just a few years of exploration and enjoyment before placing a boot on their small necks?

If schools are going to be nothing more than little prisons, complete with armed guards, I say, set the children free. (For more from the author of “What You’re Not Hearing about the Mini Police States in Public Schools” please click HERE)

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Change We Can Believe In: Trump’s Executive Orders for American Sovereignty Are Game-Changers

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It’s Christmas come early for conservatives. Actually, for all Americans who care about homeland security.

Today represents a turning point in which President Donald Trump has used Obama’s pen and phone for the first game-changing series of executive actions.

The core job of the federal government is not to get involved in health insurance or “stimulate” the economy. The most important job is to protect our national sovereignty and the security of all the states. That begins with border security and crafting an immigration policy that puts American interests first. While some of our statutes need updating, many of the existing immigration laws are actually written properly, albeit have been ignored by Obama and past presidents. This is where Trump’s executive actions come into place.

The immigration laws were written as such that they gave the president broad latitude to clamp down on immigration and ratchet up enforcement, but not to loosen immigration and open up the borders. And rightfully so. A nation must retain the ability to shut down immigration swiftly in order to protect American sovereignty and security. On the other hand, any expansion must be done judiciously with the full input of the American people as reflected through a robust debate in Congress. Some liberal critics might suggest that conservatives are being hypocritical by promoting robust executive action from Trump after criticizing Obama’s use of his executive pen for years. The difference is that Trump is actually following the statutes passed by Congress while Obama violated the letter and spirit of the laws.

Suspending refugee program and cutting off visas from dangerous countries

The insane nightmare of importing the entire Middle East is long over. At least for now.

Here are the details from a preliminary draft:

Trump plans to shut off the issuance of all new immigrant and non-immigrant visas for 30 days from the following six volatile countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. After 30 days, the secretary of state and secretary of homeland security must submit a report to completely revamp the vetting process going forward.

Countries will have to submit within 60 days any information that the administration determines necessary, pursuant to the findings of this report, in order to adjudicate a visa application and ensure they are properly vetted. Any country that fails to submit this information will not be able to send foreign nationals to our country. All the while, the ban can be extended and expanded at any time.

In addition, the entire refugee resettlement program is suspended for four months pending a complete investigation of the program and a plan to restructure it and prioritize those who are truly in danger because of religious persecution. After 120 days, the program may resume but only for those countries from which Secretaries Kelly and Tillerson determine do not pose a threat. The program from Syria is completely suspended until the president personally gives the green light.

Furthermore, the order suspends the Visa Waiver Interview Program, and therefore requires that anyone wishing to renew their non-immigrant visa first undergo an in-person interview with U.S. officials in the consulate of their home country.

This common sense order can’t come at a better time. Obama has brought in 46,500 refugees, not including other visa categories, from these six countries just since the beginning of 2016. Obama’s bureaucrats are still running the State Department (and unless Tillerson is pressured to clean them out, they will continue to do so), and have brought in almost 1,000 refugees since Inauguration Day alone!

While liberals will cry foul about taking such action from the White House, we must remind them that the Immigration and Nationality Act (§ 212(f)) gives the president plenary power to “by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants.” This power is universal, enforceable at the will of the president, and applies any time for any circumstance.

Border fence

Trump also announced that he is directing DHS to begin the process of constructing the border fence, a signature promise of his campaign. Although this endeavor will eventually need more appropriations, which will likely be forthcoming in April, Trump absolutely has the statutory authority to begin construction. Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 — as amended by the REAL ID Act of 2005, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 — requires DHS to construct “not less than 700 miles” of fencing along the border. The locations, nature of the fence, time-frame, and any length beyond 700 miles are left up to the discretion of the president. In addition, the DHS secretary may waive all legal requirements that impede any construction.

As CRS observes:

Indeed, nothing in current statute would appear to bar DHS from potentially installing hundreds of miles of additional fencing or other barriers along the border, at least so long as the action was determined appropriate to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry.

[You can read more here for why a border fence is a force multiplier that will actually stop 95% of border crossings and is amazingly cost effective.]

Restoring interior enforcement

As part of today’s executive orders, Trump announced that they would cut off law enforcement grants to sanctuary cities. As I’ve noted before, this is one of the few areas where states have no right to push back and cutting off funding is part of existing law.

Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of the orders was the restoration of the Secure Communities Program. Obama unilaterally abolished it as part of the DAPA amnesty and the elimination of this program is responsible for the surge in criminal aliens. Secure Communities was one of the most effective law enforcement programs in the field. It facilitated coordination between local law enforcement to share information through the universal fingerprint database on illegal aliens held in their prisons.

There is no reason anyone here illegally in the first place should remain in the country if they are in prison for any reason. Overall, ICE detainers declined 73% from the peak in March 2011 before the first round of Obama amnesties was fully implemented. Restoring Secure Communities will go a long way in getting rid over well over a million criminal aliens, a goal that any intellectually honest liberal should share.

Work to be done: End Obama’s illegal DACA amnesty

Obviously, there is a limit to what a president can do in one day. Certainly the list of accomplishments from today are enough to register as a great start. However, there is one action Trump must take immediately: the repeal of Obama’s DACA amnesty.

As we noted earlier this week, the Trump administration is giving indications that they don’t plan to rescind DACA. The prevailing talking point is that they want to focus on criminal aliens and dangerous refugees. And to their credit, they have certainly gone a long way towards addressing those issues today. However, the issue with Obama’s amnesty is that 1) it’s patently unconstitutional and 2) it’s not merely an issue of deportation but one of providing illegal aliens with Social Security cards and refundable tax credits. Trump’s own DHS is now issuing hundreds of unconstitutional DACA papers every day. That can and must end now simply by shutting off the spigot. We don’t have to deal with the deportation issue now. And while we’re at it, let’s stop calling them “Dreamers” and focus on American Dreamers, to paraphrase Trump.

Overall, Trump has gone a long way in embarking on some of the most important immigration changes in decades, and has fulfilled many of the homeland security ideas on our checklist, something that should have happened after 9/11.

Today is a blueprint for how to move forward. We need to continue focusing on the issues that matter, always remaining relentlessly on offense promoting our affirmative ideas on multiple fronts to overwhelm the other side rather than reacting to the latest nonsense in the media. Conservatives should be proud that the pressure and culture of accountability they built throughout this election bore fruit in such spectacular fashion.

As for Trump, if he sticks to policy, eases off on Twitter, and picks up his pen, he will go a long way to truly making America great again. (For more from the author of “Change We Can Believe In: Trump’s Executive Orders for American Sovereignty Are Game-Changers” please click HERE)

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‘Stephanie’ Crowder Punks Wendy Davis at the Women’s March and It’s Absolutely Brilliant!

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Steven Crowder has outdone himself. In what could be his most controversial and hilarious video yet, the Louder with Crowder host infiltrated the national Women’s March held over the weekend … dressed in drag.

That’s right, Crowder and his producer NotGayJared went undercover as transgendered men. Or is it transgendered-women? Trans-women-men? These pronouns are confusing. What’s not confusing is the far-Left, radical agenda Crowder filmed march attendees espousing.

What is “p*ssy economics”?

Watch to find out:

Crowder even punked feminist-icon, leader of the pink revolution Wendy Davis, and got an exclusive interview with her. As she explained her ideas, it turns out the liberal Democratic policies advocated by Davis are all built on negative female stereotypes.

Hypocrisy much? (For more from the author of “‘Stephanie’ Crowder Punks Wendy Davis at the Women’s March and It’s Absolutely Brilliant!” please click HERE)

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Nasty Women Writing a Horrifying History of Our Times

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I remember an important lesson my parents began teaching me as a young lady. It’s a lesson that has been lost to the liberal tyranny of the crass, and the proof was the Women’s March in Washington D.C. last Saturday.

It’s a simple lesson on its face, but very significant, with far-reaching effects. It was this: As a woman, you teach a man how to treat you.

(That is not meant in any way to disparage men, or to imply that they are too dense to figure things out for themselves.)

What they wanted me to understand was that I had to decide what sort of woman I would be, and that my own behavior would largely determine how I was treated by men. Dad also wanted me to know that if any boorish man treated me badly, and I tolerated it, then I was teaching him it was okay to be a pig, and at that point, I was my own worst enemy.

The point is, by and large, men want to do right by women, so it’s incumbent upon the ladies to inspire them. Men aspire to honor and nobility, and most will respond accordingly when a woman encourages that behavior. I still believe men are inclined to take their cue from the ladies. Unfortunately, a man who is prone to lesser standards won’t need much encouragement at all to sink even further, and when women themselves behave badly, and tolerate bad behavior from a man, then mud begets mud and more mud.

The Crass Women’s March

That brings me to the gargantuan display of crassness that came out of the Women’s March. The profanity and vulgarity exhibited there was disgusting and embarrassing. We’ve all read about or heard Madonna’s foul-mouthed rant, and the same for Ashley Judd’s filthy speech praising nastiness among women as some new badge of honor.

If all that wasn’t enough, the signage carried by non-celebrity women was every bit as crude as what Madonna and Judd spewed from the podium. Grown women walked around dressed in vagina costumes. They wore hats sporting cat ears — a reference to the crass synonym for female genitalia. They carried signs that read, “P**** Grabs Back!” and “The Future is Nasty!” I saw one photo of a mother pushing her two little daughters in a stroller and pinned to the stroller was a sign reading, “Stay Nasty!” (Yes, I do understand the reference to Trump calling Hillary a nasty woman.)

I saw one woman holding a sign on which was painted the full female reproductive system with the slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists!” What that could possibly mean, I can’t fathom.

The photo that tore my heart was one of a little girl about 3 years old holding onto a big sign in front of her that read, “F*** Your Fascist Bulls***”. Her mother was standing behind her smiling. What kind of woman does that to her daughter??

It seems clear that nasty is the new liberal “feminist” mantra. These women have responded to the degrading talk of a man they despise by being every bit as degrading, except it’s worse because they’re doing it to themselves. And they foolishly believe it makes them powerful or something. It doesn’t. It makes them gross and vulgar.

They’ve decided that nasty is a compliment, and they’re determined to prove just how nasty they can be. On that note, they sure succeeded. They’ve made it perfectly clear that as women, they are merely parts to be objectified. They — not Donald Trump — they have reduced women to nothing but their sexual parts. They have taught every man watching that their womanhood is not a thing of dignity or beauty, but something nasty that revolves entirely around sex. A woman is not a person to be taken as a whole and cherished and protected, but sexual pieces to be dehumanized and profaned.

Their example won’t be forgotten. Nasty women will inspire nasty treatment. Guys will feel free to refer to the female anatomy in crude “locker room” terms, cause hey! The women are doing it themselves!

We expect the men to be decent and honorable when the women are so indecent and vile? How does that work?

Their Killer Motive, The Unimaginable Consequences

Underscoring all the nastiness, of course, was the premier motive of the whole march: Abortion on Demand and Without Apology! We shall kill the“unwanted” if we jolly well want to, and don’t you dare try to take away our “rights!”

This is the tone liberal women in America have set. Genitals on display; crassness, vulgarity, and nastiness, loud and proud; and an absolute, irrevocable license to kill. These are the maxims of women who decry the intolerable offense of a man who once simply took them at their word. (They still love Bill Clinton and Roman Polanski though. Never mind their rapist, lecherous tendencies.)

To sum it up: Venerable Fulton Sheen was right when he told us: “To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the history being written by the profane conduct from the Women’s March is too horrifying to contemplate. I ask you: what are we going to do about it? (For more from the author of “Nasty Women Writing a Horrifying History of Our Times” please click HERE)

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