A band of exasperated Republicans — including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a handful of veteran consultants and members of the conservative intelligentsia — is actively plotting to draft an independent presidential candidate who could keep Donald Trump from the White House.

These GOP figures are commissioning private polling, lining up major funding sources and courting potential contenders, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republicans involved in the discussions. The effort has been sporadic all spring but has intensified significantly in the 10 days since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination.

Those involved concede that an independent campaign at this late stage is probably futile, and they think they have only a couple of weeks to launch a credible bid. But these Republicans — including commentators William Kristol and Erick Erickson and strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson — are so repulsed by the prospect of Trump as commander in chief that they are desperate to take action.

(Listen to Erick Erickson discuss with Joe Miller Romney’s prospects back in 2012:)

Their top recruiting prospects are freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a conservative who has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who withdrew from the Republican presidential race May 4. Romney is among those who have made personal overtures to both men in recent days, according to several people with knowledge of the former Massachusetts governor’s activities. (Read more from “Inside the GOP Effort to Draft an Independent Candidate to Derail Trump” HERE)

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Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson is reportedly willing to give Donald Trump as much as $100 million for his presidential campaign — a purported record-setting amount for the wealth casino magnate.

Adelson pledged the amount to Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, during a meeting last week in New York, two GOP sources told The New York Times, which first reported the story.

Trump will indeed need the support. Much of the billionaire businessman’s success in the primary race came from his ability to fund his own campaign and tell voters that he is not beholden to corporate, Wall Street or lobbyists’ interests.

However, his own wealth and small-donor contributions would be no match for those of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic machine behind her if the front-running Clinton becomes Trump’s general election opponent.

Trump has since being declared the presumptive nominee on May 3 met with Washington Republicans to begin coordinating fundraising efforts for his general election bid and those of other Republican candidates on November ballots. (Read more from “Report: GOP Mega-Donor to Give Trump up to $100 Million” HERE)

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The contemporary federal court system is a raging dumpster fire that poses the biggest threat to our representative democracy, society, and sovereignty since our nation’s founding. Yet, we lack a political party that is willing to finally strip the judiciary down to its original function — interpreting the law, not reinterpreting the Constitution and even remaking marriage and gender from the bench. By understanding the true and irreversible threat of the courts to our personal liberty, popular sovereignty, and society, it will become clear that the question of whether to vote for Trump or Hillary is really irrelevant and a non-sequitur in the battle we must fight.

The Left has transformed our society and system of governance, particularly through the courts, in a way not even our grandparents’ generation could have ever envisioned. Yet, like frogs in slow boiling water, we become desensitized to the radically pernicious transformation around us. The more it succeeds and is unchallenged by a genuine alternative party, the more it becomes legitimized and is viewed as the default position in our society.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the nexus of judicial tyranny, marriage, religious liberty and transgenderism. It’s time we wake up and smell the stench of judicial tyranny and finally become inspired to act, even as we lack a political party that cares about the destruction of the civil society, federalism, and representative democracy.

Worse than Redefining Marriage, Gender, and Criminalizing Religion?

Over the weekend, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was “suspended” for opposing Anthony Kennedy’s royal edict redefining the building block of all civilization from the bench. Sadly, even most conservatives will continue to legitimize the lawless federal courts and mindlessly chant, “You must obey the court’s decision.” As I lay out in chapter three of my upcoming book, the gay marriage decision flips every word of the Constitution on its head and wields not one iota of legal legitimacy. This has nothing to do with one’s personal view on the underlying policy of marriage licenses. If federal courts now have jurisdiction over something that has been a state institution since the time the Constitution was adopted in 1789 and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, that means there is no limit to their power. It also means that the state and Congress mean nothing and we must submit to a judicial oligarchy.

I was inspired to write my book, “Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America,” because of the events of September 3, 2015. On that day, for the first time in history, a GOP-appointed judge threw a Christian in jail for upholding Kentucky law and peacefully abstaining from signing a gay marriage license. On the same day, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the deportation of a dangerous criminal alien by applying international law and asserting that the individual was transgender, all the while berating ICE officials for not using the proper pronoun.

We have hit rock bottom, indeed.

At some point, it just doesn’t matter anymore. Fifty years of built up anti-constitutional jurisprudence and hopelessly corrupt contorting of the Fourteenth Amendment have made the judiciary unsalvageable. We are now incurring a worse degree of social transformation than any of us imagined when we were warned of the need to keep electing Republicans a decade ago. We elected Republicans and are now at the point when not only has marriage been redefined but the Fourth Circuit has redefined gender itself.

The threat leveled at conservatives — that we must support the GOP nominee in order to “save” the courts — is laughable. It can’t get much worse. In fact, it’s better Hillary appoint three more justices so that the dumpster fire of the judiciary becomes self-evident enough to rally us all around the systemic judicial reforms that must take place.

The Republican Party at every level refuses to stand up to the judiciary and fight for religious liberty — the civil right of our time. This was true long before the rise of Donald Trump. It’s just that Trump is no better than the rest of them, given his support of Obama’s transgender agenda, the broader corporate homo-fascism, and the judicial role of marriage and religious liberty in our society. He fully supported Judge Bunning’s vile and lawless order to imprison Kim Davis for following Kentucky’s plenary power to define marriage.

What if Hillary Remakes the Court?

Whether one ultimately votes for Trump or not is less important than the realization that either way we have lost our society to the courts and the recognition that the courts are broken and must be stripped down to size. As I will demonstrate in my book, this is true for a number of reasons. Here are just a couple:

The lower courts are even worse. Obama has filled 30% of the appellate bench and 40% of the district judgeships. The anti-constitutionalists pretty much control all the appeals courts except for the Fifth Circuit. Even a conservative president will not change that balance due to the likely vacancies being in circuits that are already long gone. Remember, 99% of cases never make it to the Supreme Court anyway, and as we saw with the marriage case, the almost unanimous support for redefining it at the lower court level had a tremendous influence on the Supreme Court’s final decision.

Even among the “conservative” judges, very few of them are like Clarence Thomas in that they’d be willing to overturn the one-directional stare decisis (precedent) and Fourteenth Amendment “jurisprudence” constructed from years’ worth of corruption in the legal profession. As Justice Alito said in the marriage case, echoing comments Robert Bork made two decades ago, “decades of attempts to restrain this Court’s abuse of its authority have failed” as evidenced by “the deep and perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation.” Read Robert Bork’s article from 1996 on “The End of Democracy”– long before transgenderism was codified and Christians were being jailed and fined, and you will understand the folly of trying to “fix the judiciary” by appointing “good” judges.

It’s not just the judges. The entire legal profession, as noted by Alito, is irremediably corrupt, especially as it relates to constitutional interpretation, statutory construction, and the entire premise of the role of the federal judiciary. There is an army of tens of thousands of lawyers who are skilled at using decades of corrupt case law to contort the concept of fundamental rights and successfully grant super rights to protected classes and citizen rights to illegal aliens. Having a Republican appoint a few judges instead of a Democrat filling the vacancies will never roll back the jurisprudential velocity respected by the entire profession. Which is why almost all GOP-appointed judges drift to the left over time. The judicial game is rigged and it’s time we stop playing it.

Even the few tantalizing 5-4 victories we still enjoy are fleeting, narrow, and dwarfed by the magnitude of the liberal courts victories. Democrats have a perpetual first and goal at our one-yard line. Even if the court fails to “go there” now, they usually will adapt to the culture of the legal profession within a few years. Even the Heller decision has already been severely limited by the reluctance of Kennedy and Roberts to defend it, allowing blue states to get away with banning guns and the right to carry. If Hillary succeeded to tipping the balance on gun rights, red states can still do what they want, while blue states are already succeeding in pushing anti-gun laws.

Vote for Trump to “stop Hillary” if your heart so desires, but just remember that things will have to get worse before they get better. And at some point, we need to begin working on long-term reforms — starting a new party, pushing civil rights for religious liberty, stripping the court’s stolen jurisdiction, convening Conventions of the States to safeguard liberty. With every single RINO winning down the ballot for state and federal positions, together with Trump as the party’s nominee, nothing will change to stop the inexorable march towards a pagan theocracy, which legislates immorality and violation of property rights from the bench.

“But what if the Democrat wins?” is no longer a hypothetical question. We are already living through those consequences precisely because we’ve been too scared to act boldly and focus on long-term reforms, lest we risk defeat of the fake opposition party. And if we continue to fear the prospect of Democrat victory in the short run more than the lack of a conservative party, or even conservative movement, to combat the tyranny in the long-run, we will perpetuate this failed cycle and will have nobody to blame but ourselves. (For more from the author of “Trump or No Trump, the Judiciary Has Already Hit Rock Bottom and Must Be Overhauled” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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