California may soon allow Communists to serve in government, after passing legislation Monday that calls for the elimination of a provision blocking them from working in state jobs.

California lawmakers narrowly approved legislation to repeal portions of a 1953 law enacted at the height of McCarthyism. The bill, sponsored by San Francisco Bay Area Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta, would remove parts of the law that allow public employees to be fired for being a member of the Communist party.

“There is a clear and present danger, which the Legislature of the State of California finds is great and imminent,” the 1953 legislation reads. “Communist organizations in the State of California and their members will engage in concerted effort to hamper, restrict, interfere with, impede, or nullify the efforts of the State and the public agencies of the State.”

Under the new law, employees could still be fired for being members of an organization that knowingly advocates for overthrowing the government, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Bonta has argued that his bill simply updates an outdated provision. “It’s an old and archaic reference,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s really just a technical fix to remove that reference to a label that could be misused or abused, and frankly, has been in the past, in some of the darker chapters of our history in this country,” Bonta said. (Read more from “California Moves to Allow Communists in Government Jobs” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Over the past few weeks, we have chronicled how the courts have bastardized fundamental rights, inverted state and federal powers, redefined marriage and sexuality, and erased our national sovereignty.

One of the old pastimes of the courts has been to interfere with state or federal criminal justice procedures that have been in place for years, resulting in colossal public safety concerns. Sadly, one of those chickens came home to roost this week in Los Angeles where a cop was killed by a known, violent criminal set free thanks to court-mandated legislation.

Michael Christopher Mejia is suspected of killing Whittier, California policeman Keith Boyer during a shootout in east Los Angeles on Monday. What is so tragic about this case is that Mejia was arrested five times over the past seven months during a probation program that was borne out of a 2011 court decision. He served only two years for a robbery conviction in 2014 and has been allowed to roam free despite five parole violations since 2016 because he had been deemed a “non-violent” offender. And who would want to fill up prisons with such peaceful denizens?

In Brown v. Plata (2011), Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a 5-4 decision asserting that his subjective view of overcrowding in California’s prison system (exacerbated by illegal aliens, by the way) violates the Eight Amendment. The court, therefore, required the state to engage in a massive jailbreak.

Needless to say, the liberal politicians in the state were eager to capitalize on this ruling. Much like Anthony Kennedy redefined marriage to comport with his personal views, he redefined the Eighth Amendment — as a living and breathing amendment — resulting in the release of at least 46,000 prisoners.

This is part of a growing trend whereby judges codify their political agenda for loosening crime statutes into the Constitution. Judges have already invalidated life in prison without parole for juvenile murderers, have invalidated a number of criminal statutes both at the state and federal level, and are now creating an arbitrary constitutional class of non-violent offenders, just like Mejia!

At the time, Justice Samuel Alito dissented due in part to public safety concerns, citing a prisoner release program carried out in Philadelphia in the 1990s:

Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful. During an 18-month period, the Philadelphia police rearrested thousands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79 murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, and 2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses.

— Alito, J., dissenting, slip op. at 14

Justice Scalia lampooned Kennedy in a scathing dissent (joined by Justice Thomas), in which he spent nine minutes reading it from the bench and called Plata, “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” (Although, that was before the injunction on marriage and national sovereignty that took place recently!)

Today the Court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation’s history: an order requiring California to release the staggering number of 46,000 convicted criminals.

There comes before us, now and then, a case whose proper outcome is so clearly indicated by tradition and common sense, that its decision ought to shape the law, rather than vice versa. One would think that, before allowing the decree of a federal district court to release 46,000 convicted felons, this Court would bend every effort to read the law in such a way as to avoid that outrageous result. Today, quite to the contrary, the Court disregards stringently drawn provisions of the governing statute, and traditional constitutional limitations upon the power of a federal judge, in order to uphold the absurd.

The proceedings that led to this result were a judicial travesty. I dissent because the institutional reform the District Court has undertaken violates the terms of the governing statute, ignores bedrock limitations on the power of Article III judges, and takes federal courts wildly beyond their institutional capacity.

Sadly, most legal eagles on the Right have been overcome by a strain of libertarianism that actually champions this sort of social transformation from the bench. Federal or state sovereignty, and national security be damned. Amazingly, they want to pass “criminal justice reform” to give the courts even more — not less— power over criminal law.

When reading Scalia’s writings, one is jolted by the degree of common sense, history, and tradition that he used to complement the original meaning of the Constitution and the role of the courts. All of that is lost in today’s judiciary, including much of the right-leaning legal profession. It would be nice to see if Neil Gorsuch shares this same character trait of Scalia, given the wide support for him among legal libertarians. We could add it to our long list of unanswered questions and unknowns about the next Supreme Court pick.

The growing trend of court involvement in criminal justice policy is one of the worst manifestations of social transformation without representation whereby they are violating state sovereignty, congressional statutes, and the underpinnings of the social compact. Even if Gorsuch turns out to be good on these issues, the Left already has an impervious five-seat firewall. And Roberts is also unreliable. Yesterday, the Supreme Court stayed an execution on ridiculous grounds and only Thomas and Alito dissented. They bulldozed settled law, criminal statutes, and state plenary procedures, as they did last year when staying executions in Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Sadly, there will probably be a lot more murders of cops and civilians at the hands of judicially mandated jailbreak before Congress protects state legislatures from the federal courts. (For more from the author of “Lethal Judiciary: California Cop Killed by Known Criminal Released by Activist Supreme Court” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

California conservatives won a surprise victory this week, changing a state assembly bill that would have curtailed the freedom of private religious colleges.

“We literally were able to see tens of thousands of people mobilize to make calls and to write their legislators, and to participate in the political process,” William Jessup University President John Jackson told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“We were hearing from legislators who said that they had gotten hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phone calls on just this one piece of legislation,” he added. “And I think that’s a tremendous, tremendous encouragement to me for the health of our state.”

It’s a victory that they hope will prove a bellwether for institutional liberty fights to come.

Facing a maelstrom of grassroots controversy, state Sen. Ricardo Lara, a Democrat, said Wednesday that he would remove the portions of his bill, SB 1146, that would have harmed the right of religious colleges to operate according to their principles.

Under the previous wording, SB 1146 would have ultimately blocked low-income students from receiving Cal Grants, California’s system of need-based education aid, if they attended colleges with policies such as bathroom use based on biological sex that violated the state’s LGBT policies. It also would have enabled students who feel discriminated against in light of these policies to bring a lawsuit against their college.

“Without a doubt, the unmodified version [of the bill] would have jeopardized Christian institutions and egregiously penalized all students of faith, especially Latino and African-American individuals,” Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said in a statement.

Conservatives who opposed the measure say they are relieved by this change, but some stressed that the current version of the bill, while less concerning, may still negatively impact religious colleges. Jackson mentioned a new amendment that would make religious colleges release data on expelled students—ostensibly to ensure they were not expelled for discriminatory reasons.

“What we’ve indicated to the senator [Lara] is that we’ll have to review the bill and compare it to [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] regulations,” Jackson said.

But religious liberty activists say they are pleased to have an effective blueprint for success as that battle progresses, a blueprint that involves building national coalitions focused on preserving the rights of religious Americans.

In addition to grassroots mobilization, conservative nonprofits also played a pivotal role in the controversy.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty publicized the fact that three of four students affected by the loss of Cal Grants would be low-income minority students, circulating a petition that quickly garnered 100,000 signatures.

With an open statement, Andrew Walker’s, the director of policy studies at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, commission publicly opposed the bill with the support of a diverse group of advocates and thinkers both on the ideological left and on the right. Notable signatories included law professors, administrators at religious colleges, Hispanic and Islamic leaders, seminary presidents, Christian denominational authorities, intellectuals at think tanks (including three from The Heritage Foundation), and conservative magazines.

The statement was publicly released on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Lara announced that he was changing the provisions.

“I just think that this was a multifaceted effort that really showed what effective communication and strategy can result in,” Walker told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “You get your national coalitions working with your people on the ground, coupled with strong messaging—and religious liberty, we found out, is not dead in California.”

Continued defeats on issues of individual conscience, Walker said, showed that advocates of religious freedom still have a long way to go. But as lawmakers nationwide begin to bicker over the limits of freedom of conscience for religious institutions, the changes to SB 1146 represent a heartening opening salvo.

“There’s one discussion about private citizens engaged in commercial acts, like the bakers and the florists and the photographers, but what we see here is that the ability to protect religious institutions and their religious integrity remains very intact and very strong,” he said. “We’re going to have to turn especially and fight on all fronts, and that includes institutionally. We had a large institutional win in California.”

Jackson and Walker also stressed that conservatives must remain vigilant to oppose similar encroachments in the future.

“The sponsor of this bill has said that he intends to study this issue at further depth, and possibly reintroduce legislation like this next year,” Walker said. “We’re not naïve to the fact that this is an ongoing battle.” (For more from the author of “What Conservatives Did to Pull off Religious Liberty Win in California” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.