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Where Is the Special Prosecutor for Hillary and Barack?

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Every time I think we have plumbed the depths of stupidity among congressional Republicans, someone comes along to prove that we are so far from the bottom that we can’t even see it.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), supposedly an up-and-coming conservative “star” in the U.S. Senate, proudly announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee had voted to give itself “blanket authority to issue subpoenas” regarding the investigation into Russian election meddling. This means the Democrats have been granted unrestricted license to go after President Trump despite what is obviously a partisan witch hunt.

How could Republicans be so stupid? We have just barely survived eight years of unrestrained criminality by Obama, two successive attorneys general –Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch– who turned the Justice Department into an extremist partisan attack machine that stood the rule of law on its head. We also endured the shenanigans of serial criminal co-conspirator, Hillary Clinton, who gave Russia a 20 percent stake in U.S. weapons-grade uranium production and auctioned off her influence as secretary of state to the highest bidder.

Unlike the Trump/Russia fantasy, these are not mere allegations. There is proof of their criminality, real proof. Not just hearsay, not just anonymous sources “leaking” documents that no one has seen, and stories whose sources they won’t publicly disclose.

Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations, Chris Farrell, recently posted a YouTube video that describes the unprecedented depth of this documented criminality by the Obama administration as reported on by the website Circa.

A recently declassified top secret court document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proves it. This is the court that decides what federal agencies can and cannot do in carrying out surveillance activities against foreigners when U.S. citizens are involved. The court lays out the issue:

On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 [of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ] using U.S. person identifiers.

In plain English, this refers to the Obama administration’s illegal preoccupation with surveillance of U.S. citizens. The court goes on:

Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702. The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.

In other words, the Obama administration had been illegally identifying Americans and hiding the extent of its surveillance against them. At the Oct. 26 hearing, the court found that “the problem was widespread during all periods under review,” adding these activities present “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The Circa article asserts, “the admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.”

Farrell states that the Obama administration “has abused and misused the National Security Agency in a way no one ever even pondered before. This is the sort of stuff that would make Richard Nixon blush. It is beyond the pale. It’s like nothing else we’ve ever seen.”

Rand Paul was quoted in the Circa article, saying, “If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power. This will dwarf all other stories… There are hundreds and hundreds of people.”

The ACLU weighed in, but blamed it all on the intelligence agencies without mentioning the Obama administration’s abuses. As noted by Circa, “newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy.” Typical of the Left, the ACLU uses these egregious abuses as an opportunity to discredit the NSA and others. But the ACLU should know it is never the bureaucrats who do this alone. They invariably are taking orders from their political bosses, in this case then President Obama.

We should have seen this coming. (Of course some of us did but the political class had its blinders on). Obama was overstepping his authority before he was even elected. In 2008, then presidential candidate Obama interfered with President Bush’s foreign policy by trying to talk Iraqis out of an agreement with Bush to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. As we now know, it was Obama’s reckless premature pullout from Iraq that returned the nation to anarchy – forcing us now to expend even more blood and treasure to help the Iraqis recapture it from ISIS. And what about Obama’s whispered promise to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that “after my election I have more flexibility.” Flexibility for what? To surrender even more of our missile defense capability?

What about that uranium deal?

Trump has repeatedly accused Hillary of giving “20 percent of America’s uranium supply to Russia.” Snopes and PolitiFact rate the assertion as false and mostly false. We know both of those organizations skew heavily left, especially Snopes, and go out of their way to protect the Clintons. So is it true or false?

It has been widely reported that the Clinton Foundation received $145 million after Hillary Clinton allowed Russia’s nuclear energy agency to purchase a controlling interest in Uranium One, a Canada-based company that mines uranium in states containing 20 percent of U.S. capacity. Snopes and company claim Hillary was not involved in the deal, that it was delegated to then-Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, and that the State Department is only one of nine agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that decides such matters.

Regardless of who actually sat at the CFIUS table, Clinton is ultimately responsible for such decisions, and do you really think Fernandez would have made such a momentous decision without her blessing? Moreover, would the other agencies dare to vote against Hillary’s agency? Highly doubtful.

Hillary apologists also try to disassociate the Clinton Foundation’s string of receipts from Russia as though the two were entirely unrelated. Did they give the Clintons $145 million just for yucks? The New York Times, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, lays it out.

So I ask: where is the special prosecutor for Obama, Holder, Lynch and Clinton?

And what about all the leaks? Have any of those weak-kneed members of Congress used their substantial authority to compel the FBI and/or intelligence agencies to investigate and uncover the leakers? Unlike the unsubstantiated allegations about Trump, these are federal crimes.

If unproven allegations of Trump/Russian collusion in the 2016 elections are worthy of a special prosecutor, are the litany of Hillary’s activities not? These are events that actually occurred, not undocumented accusations by partisan Democrats. Ditto with Obama. If the flimsy allegations against Trump are worthy of a special prosecutor, Obama and Hillary’s crimes merit a treason prosecution. But will we even see a special prosecutor for them?

So in tribute to the many GOP imbeciles in Congress, I am starting a hashtag, #STUPIDPARTY. I hope you will use it in tweets to our illustrious Members of Congress and give them holy hell for joining Democrats in their overt effort to destroy this president and bring down his administration.

If the GOP keeps this up, we may well see the Democrats’ hoped-for midterm wave election that sweeps Republicans from power. (For more from the author of “Where Is the Special Prosecutor for Hillary and Barack?” please click HERE)

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Obama Loyalist Brennan Drove FBI to Begin Investigating Trump Associates Last Summer

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What caused the Barack Obama administration to begin investigating the Donald Trump campaign last summer has come into clearer focus following a string of congressional hearings on Russian interference in the presidential election.

It was then-CIA director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama’s, who provided the information — what he termed the “basis” — for the FBI to start the counterintelligence investigation last summer. Mr. Brennan served on the former president’s 2008 presidential campaign and in his White House.

Mr. Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee on May 23 that the intelligence community was picking up tidbits on Trump associates making contacts with Russians. Mr. Brennan did not name either the Russians or the Trump people. He indicated he did not know what was said.

But he said he believed the contacts were numerous enough to alert the FBI, which began its probe into Trump associates that same July, according to previous congressional testimony from then-FBI director James B. Comey.

The FBI probe of contacts came the same month the intelligence community fingered Russian agents as orchestrating hacks into Democratic Party computers and providing stolen emails to WikiLeaks. (Read more from “Obama Loyalist Brennan Drove FBI to Begin Investigating Trump Associates Last Summer” HERE)

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Federal Communication Commission Takes Steps to Undo Obama-Era Net Neutrality

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The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 Thursday to start a process of undoing internet rules, commonly known as net neutrality, promulgated by the Obama-era FCC.

Undoing the 2015 Open Internet Order would “encourage more investment in broadband [and] more innovation,” James Gattuso, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an interview.

The order did two things. First, Gattuso said, it “declared all providers of broadband service to be common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which allows extensive regulation of “telecommunications services.”

This means that “the FCC got virtually unlimited authority to regulate [internet providers],” Gattuso said. Using this self-created authority, the FCC then imposed net neutrality restrictions on broadband providers. These rules essentially ban any unequal treatment of data being sent on the web. Thus, blocking or slowing content is banned, as is “paid prioritization,” effectively prohibiting discounts and premium pricing.

Making it worse, the ambiguity of the rules mean that providers end up going to the FCC for permission each time their service changes. “Every time [broadband service providers] do something, they have to go to the FCC and ask, ‘Does this violate any of the rules?’” Gattuso said.

The 2015 rule, Gattuso said, also banned practices that “unreasonably” limit consumer choice, or the ability of content providers such as Google or Netflix to make their offerings available to consumers.

The vote Thursday will commence a public comment period, which will allow Americans to weigh in on the decision to undo the 2015 Open Internet Order rules.

Ajit Pai, the FCC’s chairman who President Donald Trump appointed in January, said he believes in the free market rather than government control of the internet. Pai also said he wants the FCC to have more of a “light touch” in regard to regulations.

Mike Needham, chief executive officer of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying affiliate of The Heritage Foundation, said in a statement that this deregulation move is welcome.

“Chairman Pai and his colleagues at the FCC have demonstrated leadership by jump-starting the process of rolling back these so-called net neutrality rules,” Needham said. “The political left’s desire to treat internet service providers as publicly regulated utilities will erode choice and competition in the marketplace.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., supports the deregulation.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., opposed the rule change.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, approved of the move by the FCC.

“I commend the FCC for taking the first step in returning the internet to the state of permissionless innovation it thrived under until just two short years ago,” Lee said in a statement, adding:

Today’s action begins the process of undoing the agency’s 2015 Open Internet Order, which upended the decades-old bipartisan consensus that consumers—not government regulators—should control the information superhighway.

Comments for the public comment period will be accepted until August 16, Gattuso said, with the final rule change likely to come in the fall. (For more from the author of “Federal Communication Commission Takes Steps to Undo Obama-Era Net Neutrality” please click HERE)

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How the Obama Administration Turned Regulators Into the Speech Police

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The saga of Don Vander Boon has received little attention outside the Christian media. But among the growing threats to the livelihoods of gay marriage dissenters, the Vander Boon case stands out.

The family runs the West Michigan Beef Company for, as they put it, “the glory of God.” This is what they tell their employees. No employee has ever complained.

According to Don Vander Boon, the trouble with the USDA meat inspectors began in 2015. One day, he saw newspaper and magazine articles celebrating gay marriage in the company break room. So, he printed off an article explaining why gay marriage was against God’s will. He put the essay on the breakroom table with the other magazines.

Unfortunately for the Vander Boons and their employees, on July 1, 2015, then Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack issued an “Anti-Harassment Policy Statement.” He told USDA inspectors what to do if they spotted any “disrespectful” written or oral communication on LGBT issues. The inspectors now had an obligation to “take immediate and appropriate corrective action.”

Going Off the Record

Let’s pause for a minute and see what this means. In the past, someone would have to complain before federal agencies charged with preventing discrimination investigate a company. This creates a “case and controversy” and a public record on which courts can intervene. But here the USDA instructed the meat inspectors to intervene on their own.

What does that look like in practice?

In 2015, Dr. Ryan Lundquist, the USDA’s inspector in charge, saw the offending article. He removed it and reported it to USDA Frontline Supervisor Robert Becker. The two men then called Vander Boon on the carpet. Behind closed doors, and without witnesses, they told Vander Boon three times he had to remove that article or else. What was that else? They would withdraw all USDA meat inspectors. That would, in effect, shut down his business.

Becker pointed to the new anti-harassment policies. Karnail S. Mudahar confirmed to Vander Boon that the meat inspectors’ new anti-gay marriage morality policing was pursuant to policy. When the Daily Signal called the USDA, the agency said it has “zero tolerance for any form of workplace harassment or intimidation.”

Regulating the First Amendment Away

Think about the vast web of health, safety, environmental, investment, banking and tax regulations that surround us. They’re supposed to exist to further some public good, not to harass dissenters for the current sexual orthodoxy. Just think what this army of regulators can do to freedom if the government tells them to take immediate corrective action.

This is all according to Vander Boon of course. The USDA has never publicly commented on the matter. A private conversation is not a public act. The courts can’t review it. So far, the USDA has refused to respond to Don Vander Boon’s formal complaint, except to say they had passed it on to the USDA’s Civil Rights office.

Now imagine a good Christian man facing the real threat of losing a family business, one on which your family and your employees’ families depend. Even if you finally could win in the end, the business would still be gone. Your suppliers and your customers would have gone elsewhere while waiting for the meat inspector to return.

Even if the threat is not credible, it’s free speech buzzkill.

Should Christians in Business Just Stay Silent?

Maybe you think Don Vander Boon took an unneeded risk. Sir Thomas More himself might have advised silent prudence. But a man like Don Vander Boon should not have to face such dilemmas. He does so because one side of a culture debate now has all the power. Gay marriage dissenters are punished. Advocates are celebrated. The net result is to kill free speech on one side of the debate.

I’ve seen the same dynamic at work when I was on the frontlines of the gay marriage debate. In one epic state battle for a marriage amendment, every wealthy man I asked to donate to get the measure on the ballot faced private attacks on his business interests. In some cases, it was as slight as a complaint from a major vendor. “We only do business with companies that have a nondiscrimination policy,” one CEO was told. “And your personal donation to this marriage amendment calls into question your company’s commitment to nondiscrimination.”

Virtually no businessman whose business was attacked in this way donated again. But no businessman who gave in support of gay marriage was ever attacked for it.

And this was just a private behind-the-scenes business threat, backed by no government power.

How widespread is the use of health, safety, investment, environmental and/or banking regulations to “directly intervene” in enforcing speech codes? How many other federal regulators now see themselves as the speech police? How many businesses and workers, which we never hear about, receive such threats?

Congress Should Investigate

Here’s one way we could find out: The Republican Congress could investigate. They could subpoena Dr. Ryan Lindquist and Robert Becker and Karnail S. Mudahar and ask them: Did you make this threat? Was it based on government policy? How many other times have you threatened to pull health and safety inspectors because you saw a pro-gay marriage pamphlet lying on a table? Have you used the pretense of safety to squelch free speech?

That last question refers to what may be now be happening to the Vander Boons’ company. (I owe my knowledge of this phase in the USDA battle to gay bloggers.) Last August 16, the USDA sent a letter threatening to pull meat inspectors and shut down the Vander Boons’ West Michigan Beef Company.

Why? It has nothing to do with gay marriage. Instead an inspector claimed he saw a violation of humane slaughtering laws.

Let me quote at length from that letter:

On August 15, 2016, at approximately 1310 hours, the Supervisory Public Health Veterinarian (SPHV) observed a downed dairy heifer in the barn and an employee attempting to captive bolt stun the down animal to render it insensible. Your written animal welfare program describes the procedure for disposal of down cattle requires that after the animal is captive bolt stunned, it is immediately stuck in the heart to initiate exsanguination and ensure humane euthanasia. After the application of the captive bolt stunner to the head of the dairy heifer, the employee was observed to stick the animal in the heart area of the chest with a long blade knife. The SPHV noticed the animal exhibited rapid eye movement and natural blinking. The respiratory rate began to increase and the animal began vocalizing. The employee did not have additional cartridge charges for the hand held captive bolt device or any means of re-stunning the animal located in the immediate area. The employee left the area to retrieve additional cartridges. The animal continued to exhibit rapid breathing and increased vocalization until the employee returned approximately one minute later, reloaded, and applied the hand held captive bolt device, successfully rendering the animal insensible at that time.

Charged for Following Procedure

So, by the USDA’s own account, the employee obeyed the proper procedures. Due to a technical error, the cow was only partly sedated and experienced pain. The employee went for another stun gun charge, soon returned, and sedated the cow. The USDA’s letter calls this incident “an egregious violation of the humane handling requirements specified within the provisions of 21 U.S.C. 603, Section 3 (b) of the FMIA, and 7 U.S.C. 1901 and 1902 of the HMSA of 1978.”

Really? Might this be regulatory revenge against the family-owned business? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. One thing we know: The regulatory state now has power that it should not have. It gives bureaucrats the authority to treat a good faith glitch as an egregious attempt to break the law. In politicized regimes (aka “banana republics”) the heavy hammer of the government swings above the head of any political dissident who runs a business.

Congress Must Act to Defend Our Freedom

What can we do to stop this shut down on free speech?

President Trump’s executive order won’t help. The GOP Congress needs to pass some version of the First Amendment Defense Act. It should give private people like Don Vander Boon the right to sue when regulations are misused to punish gay marriage dissenters.

Unlike many conservatives, I’m not upset at President Trump. During the campaign, he avoided the conflict between gay marriage dissenters and the LGBT community. He pivoted to the Johnson Amendment whenever the subject came up. He is doing the one concrete thing that he promised to do: appointing spectacular judges.

These judges will help. But they won’t help the Vander Boons much unless we can persuade Congress that it’s in their interest to pass new laws to protect dissenters. (For more from the author of “How the Obama Administration Turned Regulators Into the Speech Police” please click HERE)

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How Court Reviewing Challenge to Trump’s Travel Ban Swung Left Under Obama

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The federal appeals court deciding the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s travel ban was once reliably conservative. But it underwent a transformation during the Obama administration, and Democratic appointees now outnumber Republican appointees 2 to 1.

A New York Times Magazine article in March 2003 vividly described the Richmond, Virginia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the “shrewdest, most aggressively conservative federal appeals court in the nation.”

“It is confident enough to strike down acts of Congress when it finds them stretching the limits of the federal government’s power and hard-headed enough to rule against nearly every death-row defendant who comes before it,” the Times wrote.

But today, the 4th Circuit has a higher percentage of Democratic appointees than even the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit, a court with a liberal reputation that Trump frequently has spoken out against.

Democrats appointed 10 of the 4th Circuit’s 15 judges. When President Barack Obama took office on Inauguration Day 2009, only five of the 4th Circuit’s 15 judgeships were filled by Democratic appointees.

“There has been a transformation of this court without much notice and without much difficulty,” said Kevin Walsh, a University of Richmond law professor who clerked for Paul V. Niemeyer, a current 4th Circuit judge who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

“The conventional wisdom is stuck in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” Walsh told The Daily Signal in an interview. “The conventional wisdom is that the 4th Circuit is a very conservative federal appellate court. That is just not true.”

Court Moves Left

The 4th Circuit has left its mark on some important recent cases.

Within the past year, the appeals court overturned North Carolina’s voter identification law and sided with a transgender teenager over a battle to use a boys’ restroom.

In a 2014 case, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit — consisting of two judges appointed by a Democrat and another nominated by President Bill Clinton, then renominated by President George W. Bush — upheld the legality of tax subsidies provided to Americans to pay for health insurance under Obamacare.

The Supreme Court later confirmed the 4th Circuit’s ruling in the case, King v. Burwell.

The 4th Circuit’s transformation will be tested when the court’s full roster of judges hears oral arguments Monday about Trump’s revised travel ban.

In March, after a federal judge halted the first version of his executive order, the president issued a new one to bar entry, for 90 days, to those from six terrorism-plagued, Muslim-majority countries who never before have come to America.

Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii quickly blocked major sections of the president’s revised order, again preventing the administration from implementing it.

The Trump administration appealed both those district court rulings. The 4th Circuit reviews appeals of decisions from federal judges or juries in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

So while the 4th Circuit is taking the Maryland case, the 9th Circuit will hear the appeal from the Hawaii district court May 15.

Signifying the importance of the case, the 4th Circuit decided to bypass the traditional three-judge panel — the construct that usually hears federal appeals court cases — in favor of a so-called en banc hearing, which includes all the court’s judges.

‘The Last Word’

While legal experts expect the case ultimately to be decided by the Supreme Court, appeals courts have the final say in most matters of federal law.

The Supreme Court reviews roughly 75 cases a year, compared to more than 55,000 cases that the nation’s 13 circuit courts (or federal courts of appeals) heard last year.

This disparity exists because the Supreme Court accepts only 1 percent of the cases submitted to it.

“This is something that people don’t appreciate,” said Walsh, who also clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “There are only so many cases that go up to Supreme Court each year. For all other cases, the last word in the federal system comes from these courts of appeals. So the 4th Circuit is a very important court.”

Walsh and other legal experts say they doubt Obama deliberately reshaped the 4th Circuit as a matter of strategy. They say he was simply taking advantage of an opportunity.

In 2009, Obama inherited 54 openings in the lower federal courts — district and circuit. That included four vacancies in the 4th Circuit, more than any other appeals court.

Today, nine of the 13 circuit courts have a majority of justices appointed by a Democrat, compared to only one when Obama took office.

“The fact the 4th Circuit has taken a liberal turn is not surprising considering how many judges President Obama got to put on that court,” said Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “I don’t have a sense the 4th Circuit was a high priority for Obama. It was just there was a large number of vacancies, and he took advantage of that.”

‘Reputation for Collegiality’

Trump has an opportunity to put his stamp on the lower federal courts, which currently have 121 vacancies. Trump has submitted one nominee for those openings so far.

But unless things change, the makeup of the 4th Circuit won’t shift under Trump because the court has no vacancies.

Russell Wheeler, an expert on judicial nominations at the Brookings Institution, says that a court’s balance of Democratic and Republican appointees is not necessarily an indicator of how a court rules on cases.

He notes that Republican-appointed district judges already have voted against Trump’s travel order in previous rulings.

“The party-of-appointing president is hardly a sure-fire predictor of decisions, certainly of any one judge’s decision in any single case,” Wheeler told The Daily Signal, adding:

In the aggregate, though, there are some fairly consistent if small differences. The reasons the differences aren’t greater is because judges by and large take their role seriously. When the law is clear, the outcome is equally clear, and that’s most of the cases. When the statute and precedents are more ambiguous and allow of more than one reasonable interpretation, judges tend to some degree to fall back on their own notions of sound public policy.

Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at the College of William and Mary, clerked for one of the 4th Circuit’s leading conservative voices, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who remains on the court. Though the court isn’t the conservative staple it once was, Larsen said, it still maintains a serious, collegial reputation.

Indeed, one feature of the court has not changed, she said. As a matter of tradition, its judges rise from the bench to shake lawyers’ hands after oral arguments.

“Gone are the days when it was safe to call the 4th Circuit a reliably conservative court,” Larsen told The Daily Signal. “But what remains consistent is that the 4th Circuit still prides itself on its reputation for collegiality, and I know this [travel ban] case will be thoughtfully deliberated by all the judges, regardless of who appointed them to the bench.” (For more from the author of “How Court Reviewing Challenge to Trump’s Travel Ban Swung Left Under Obama” please click HERE)

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Obama’s Sex Secrets Laid Bare

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The sex secrets of the young Barack Obama have been revealed in an authoritative new biography of the ex-president.

Obama slept with his girlfriend Genevieve Cook on their first date, before she wrote him a poem about their ‘f***ing’ and called their sex ‘passionate’, the book about the former president reveals . . .

Obama also considered a gay relationship while at college, twice proposed to another white girlfriend, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during the first year of their relationship.

His past is revealed in the 1,078-page biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, to be published on May 9.

Obama, a new Columbia graduate who was working for a firm that prepared financial reports at the time, made dinner for Cook at his apartment in Manhattan two weeks after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party and handing her his phone number. (Read more from “Obama’s Sex Secrets Laid Bare” HERE)

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The First Step in Revoking Obama’s Land Grab

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What is done by executive power can be undone by executive power.

Former President Barack Obama began to learn that lesson this Wednesday when President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct a review of all Antiquities Act designations larger than 100,000 acres over the past 30 years.

Specifically, the executive order directs Zinke to consider “the requirements and original objectives of the Act, including the Act’s requirement that reservations of land not exceed ‘the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected’” and whether “designated lands are appropriately classified under the Act as ‘historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, [or] other objects of historic or scientific interest.’”

This wording strongly suggests that Obama’s lame duck decision to designate 1.35 million acres in San Juan County as a national monument will at least be significantly reduced and possibly entirely rescinded.

Some environmental activists may claim that Trump does not have the power to shrink or revoke Obama’s Antiquities Act designations, but these claims are ignorant of both history and the law.

For starters, as University of California Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo and Pacific Legal Foundation Executive Director John Gaziano detailed in a recent legal report, five presidents have significantly reduced four previous monument designations, and no one has ever questioned the legality of those reductions.

Specifically, President Ike Eisenhower reduced the Great Sand Dunes National Monument by 25 percent, President Harry Truman reduced the Santa Rosa Island National Monument by 49 percent, Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge collectively reduced the Mount Olympus monument by 49 percent, and Taft reduced the Navajo National Monument by 89 percent.

A current president’s power to alter a previous president’s flows from the text of the statute, which authorizes the president “in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation … national monuments …. the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

As Yoo and Gaziano point out, “there is no temporal limit” on the requirement that a monument must be limited to “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected” so all presidents must use their ongoing discretion as to whether every monument is the proper size.

“What is done by executive power can be undone by executive power.”

Furthermore, what if a later president determines that an earlier president’s designation was so exceedingly beyond the “smallest area compatible with proper care” that the entire designation was illegal?

Yoo and Gaziano argue that the entire monument designation could be revoked.

Whatever Zinke does end up recommending to Trump—and a preliminary report is due in 45 days on Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument—further executive action will only be the beginning of solving San Juan County’s public lands issues.

Congress will then need to pick up the Public Lands Initiative legislation that was working through the House before Obama derailed the legislative process and pass a commonsense solution that includes real input from local residents.

Only through the legislation can local residents, including the Navajo, be given real power over their land use decisions. (For more from the author of “The First Step in Revoking Obama’s Land Grab” please click HERE)

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A Modest Proposal: Deport Obama to Libya and Clinton to Kosovo

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Perhaps you’re weary of reading about Syria. So instead let’s speak of Libya. That’s the most recent country we attacked without provocation and “liberated.” Minus the evil dictator which NATO bravely bombed from orbit, Libya has returned to some native traditions: It is chaining up black Africans and selling them as slaves. Great job, President Obama! You really were a post-racial president after all! But in a totally different sense than most people thought.

Millions of “right-thinking” Americans have this weird idea: that our foreign policy is a form of virtue-signaling with deadly weapons. That’s why they are demanding the overthrow of yet another foreign government that hasn’t attacked us: that of Syria. (News flash: Trump’s targeted military strike, while probably unconstitutional, was limited. And now he is promising we won’t send troops to Syria.)

Are Americans who favor full-on “regime change” in Syria thinking through what would happen next to Syrians? What would happen to one million Christians if al Qaeda takes over?

No. They are watching news of an atrocity and demanding that “something be done.” What we do doesn’t really matter.

What happens to Syrians after we’re done with them? Not interested.

How will things be in Syria ten years from now? Boring. By then we’ll be busy in Myanmar.

Who will take over the country when we’re finished? Doesn’t matter. Talking about that is just a way of making excuses not to do… something … about an atrocity we saw on the news and thought about for ten whole minutes.

Occupy Wall Street. Or the Entire Middle East.

Ugly, sad images (like Syria’s chemical attack on al Qaeda that also killed civilians) make us really upset! So do something already, Mr. President, and make us feel better. Overthrow Syria’s government and replace it with … something. Make us feel strong, decisive, and freedom-loving. And make it quick: We have short attention spans. Oh look, a squirrel!

It’s probably too much to expect an administration to resist such a national tantrum. (Heck, we’re lucky that the Commander in Chief isn’t under pressure to blow United Airlines jets out of the sky.)

But as patriotic Christians, we’re supposed to at least make an effort to avoid fighting unjust or foolish wars that kill thousands of people and make things worse, not better. Right? Or am I being too moralistic here?

We Must Learn from King Kong’s Sad Fate

America is more powerful, relative to our rivals, than any empire on earth has been since the Roman Empire. The Mongols, Napoleon’s France, even Hitler’s Germany: compared to America 2017, they’re Liechtenstein waving a popgun.

We’re the 16-ton gorilla. All the more reason we must resist the impulse to act out like King Kong. We need to stop seeing countries that look interesting or sad, then picking them up to play with them — till we break them and leave them behind.

There’s just one way to make the average voter think twice about sending our troops to foreign shores: Bring back the draft. Today a tiny percentage of Americans defend all the rest of us. They bear the brunt of our bravado. Alas, most Americans don’t even know personally any serving soldiers or airmen. So it’s easy for us to treat them like foreign mercenaries and ship them off to distant shores, on a moralistic whim.

If voters themselves, or their own sons and daughters, might have to march off into the desert, you can bet they would think twice about joining the rush to war. Also, a draft today would get many thousands of sullen Millennials out of their parents’ basements. So chalk that up in the “plus” column.

Don’t Draft the People. Incentivize the President.

But the draft has many down sides. For one, it violates liberty. Only in the gravest national emergency should we force our citizens, on pain of imprisonment, to dress up in uniforms and follow orders. In peacetime, that’s literally un-American. (Germans, by contrast, will spontaneously dress up in uniforms and follow orders at the slightest encouragement.)

More importantly, a peacetime draft would never pass muster in Congress. We can’t even figure out how to make people repay their student loans, much less get them into fighting trim with decent haircuts.

So I have a better plan. It harms very few Americans, so it should be easy to pass in Congress. But it maximizes impact. I promise you: Pass such a plan, and the U.S. will never get involved in another poorly considered foreign war.

The Ultimate Presidential Retirement Plan

Congress must pass a law with these provisions: Any future president who invades and occupies another sovereign state that has not attacked America, with the aim of overthrowing its government will be subject to the following penalties upon leaving office.

He must surrender his U.S. citizenship, in return for citizenship of that country. He must relocate to live in it. If he leaves his new homeland for more than 30 consecutive days, his pension is permanently cancelled.

He will be granted no Secret Service detail or U.S. Marines to guard him. He must rely on the local police, like everybody else.

He will have to build his presidential library in that country’s largest city. Again, it will be guarded by the same cops who guard — or looted by the same mobs that loot — every other local business, school, or church.

His pension will be paid in the local currency, which may well have collapsed, or been replaced by some pre-civilized form of primitive barter. So we might have to pay it out in tethered goats or cartons of cigarettes.

If he has invaded and toppled more than one such country, he will not be granted a choice among them. (Talk about perverse incentives!) No, he will be granted citizenship in the one with the lowest Gross Domestic Product.

If such a law were passed then President Trump and every one of his successors would need to think very carefully about their decisions on countries like Syria. He would need to flout public opinion, if it was out of step with reality.

He’d have very strong personal reasons to tell senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain and pundits like William Kristol what he thinks of their latest war of choice. He would face the same conditions that his policies left behind in a helpless foreign country whose citizens never voted for him. What could be fairer than that?

Where Would Dante Send Ex-Presidents to Live?

The Constitution forbids retroactive laws. Otherwise, such an act would demand that our recent ex-presidents reap the harvests that they sowed:

Bill Clinton forced to live in Kosovo, under the rule of increasingly radical Islamists who blew up its historic churches. They are also training al Qaeda and ISIS operatives for attacks all over Europe. He might not feel comfortable there, but Huma Abedin would, so at least poor Hillary would be happy (should she choose to join him there).

George W. Bush living in Baghdad, enjoying every day the exciting sights and sounds that his invasion and occupation of Iraq left behind. He might have trouble finding a church to attend, since most of the country’s 1 million Christians were driven out on his watch — precisely as antiwar conservatives had warned him would happen.

Barack Obama living in Benghazi. As a beloved elder statesman who holds a Nobel Peace Prize, he could certainly work out a diplomatic solution among the many violent factions — al Qaeda, ISIS, and a dozen tribal militias — which his bold, decisive action put in control of that country. But that might put a crimp in his golf game.

I hope that some statesmanlike senator, such as Rand Paul, will get behind this plan. We can call it the “Skin in the Game Act of 2017,” after The Black Swan author Nassim Taleb’s core principle of policy: Don’t let someone make major decisions for which he bears no personal risk.

Fear not! Presidents who fought countries that had actually attacked the U.S., or who didn’t spend trillions trying to bomb chaotic, hostile hellholes until they turned into Colonial Williamsburg, would go unpunished. (For more from the author of “A Modest Proposal: Deport Obama to Libya and Clinton to Kosovo” please click HERE)

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Trump Wants to Unleash America’s Energy Potential. So Why Is He Keeping Aspects of Obama’s Destructive Agenda?

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President Trump is taking steps to keep his campaign promise to create jobs and economic growth by reducing energy regulations, but his effort falls short of fully reversing former President Obama’s climate change agenda.

Trump recognizes that by removing the regulatory shackles on domestic energy development, processing and transport, the U.S. can unleash its vast natural energy resources and become an energy superpower yielding numerous economic benefits including job creation, boosted tax revenue, increased exports, and improved national security.

To reach that goal requires a stubborn determination to rip Obama’s climate change agenda out by its roots and build a pro-fossil fuel energy policy on a strong foundation.

Trimming the climate change edges will not give the business community the regulatory certainty it needs to bring about a U.S. energy renaissance.

Despite progress, lingering questions remain about Trump’s commitment to completely overturning Obama’s anti-fossil fuel policies.

For example, Trump has not canceled U.S. participation in the United Nations Paris Climate Change Agreement, a carbon tax trial balloon was floated at the White House, and the EPA is not reopening its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding which drives climate change regulations.

Admittedly, unwinding former President Obama’s climate change regulatory agenda is no small task, and Trump has made meaningful strides through executive branch actions and the Congressional Review Act.

Giving the green light to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline was important. The pipeline approvals allow a safer method of moving crude oil while providing construction and refinery jobs as well setting the stage for boosting energy exports.

Trump’s new Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth includes many beneficial policies that peel back key elements of the Obama climate change regime including changing EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Despite these advances, Trump needs to take stronger steps for a pro-fossil economy including his promise to coal miners.

Trump’s recent executive order to rewrite the Clean Power Plan is not compelling enough for utilities — the companies that will determine the future of the coal industry.

As a Reuters story shows, the president’s Clean Power Plan effort does not give utilities the business certainty they need to invest in coal generated electricity.

According to its survey, Reuters found about sixty percent of utilities said coal power is not part of their long-term investment.

A spokesperson for North Dakota’s Basin Electric Power Cooperative said, “… the executive order takes a lot of pressure off the decisions we had to make in the near term, such as whether to retrofit and retire older coal plants.” He then added, “But Trump can be a one-termer, so the reprieve out there is short.”

Smart business leaders are not going to gamble on changing political winds or the legal outcome of expected lawsuits. With abundant natural gas supplies, utilities have the luxury of picking less politically risky power sources.

Adding to the business uncertainty is Trump’s hesitation to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. During the campaign, Trump promised he would “cancel” U.S. participation in the UN effort.

Trump’s indecision on the Paris Agreement is confusing and troubling. Without the Clean Power Plan, the U.S. can’t meet its emissions targets, making our continued participation deceiving and meaningless.

Taxing energy via a carbon tax sends the wrong signal to energy companies, and it preferentially harms coal since it emits twice the amount of carbon dioxide than natural gas.

Conservative critics are also questioning Trump’s commitment to reverse Obama’s climate change agenda because the EPA is not looking to change the agency’s 2009 endangerment finding.

The EPA’s endangerment finding is the rule that established greenhouse gasses including carbon dioxide pose a danger to human health and it serves as the foundation for climate change regulations.

Tackling the endangerment finding will unleash the climate change mob including companies that bet big bucks on energy regulations, but it would allow a full vetting of the new climate change science.

Reversing the EPA endangerment finding would provide the long-term certainty businesses need.

As a builder, Trump knows the importance of a solid foundation. In the political context, that means his energy policy must withstand the winds of progressive attacks now and in the future.

For Trump to achieve his energy vision for the U.S., he must show the business community and the world he is serious about reversing Obama’s entire climate change agenda. (For more from the author of “Trump Wants to Unleash America’s Energy Potential. So Why Is He Keeping Aspects of Obama’s Destructive Agenda?” please click HERE)

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Obama Gave $68 Million to Pro-Abortion UN Population Control Agency, Here’s How Much Trump Is Giving

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The Trump Administration reinstated a policy Monday evening directing United States foreign assistance dollars away from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on the basis that its activities in China are complicit with that nation’s coercive population control program, the implementation of which includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization. United States funding will be directed instead to other family planning and health programs not involved in China’s population control program.

“We congratulate President Trump and his administration for making it abundantly clear the United States will not support a United Nations agency that cooperates in China’s brutally repressive population control policies,” said National Right to Life President Carol Tobias. “I heartily applaud what we at National Right to Life are seeing from this pro-life administration.”

The State Department memorandum issued Monday determined that the UNFPA was in violation of the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law. The amendment prohibits giving U.S. “population assistance” funds to “any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

As the memo states:

The Chinese Government’s Population and Family Planning Law, even as amended in 2015, and related regulations and practices at the central and Provincial levels, clearly constitute a “program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” and are an integral part of the comprehensive population-control program the Chinese Government advances. While there is no evidence that UNFPA directly engages in coercive abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China, the agency continues to partner with the [National Health and Family Planning Commission] on family planning, and thus can be found to support, or participate in the management of China’s coercive policies for purposes of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. (Read more from “Obama Gave $68 Million to Pro-Abortion UN Population Control Agency, Here’s How Much Trump Is Giving” HERE)

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