Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Defeat of Globalism is the Story of 2017

by John and Andy Schlafly

On Dec. 21, as President Trump prepared to leave Washington for Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, the White House released a list of “81 major accomplishments” during the President’s first year in office. A second list touted more than 100 other “minor achievements” in 2017.

His fulfillment of his campaign promise to roll back globalism is one of his crowning achievements of the year. Without exception, President Trump stood up against the incessant pressure by other countries against the United States.

An example of this occurred later the same day at the United Nations in New York. The UN General Assembly held an emergency session to condemn Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, thereby walking into a trap that will come back to bite that dysfunctional body.

Some 128 UN member countries joined in the vote against this sovereign decision by the United States, while 35 countries abstained and 21 were absent. Only 9 countries (including the United States and Israel) voted against the resolution.

“The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out in this assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation,” said U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Voting against the United States were several of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid such as Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ambassador Haley acted promptly to deliver on her promise of consequences. The U.S. Mission to the United Nations announced that next year’s UN budget would be slashed by over $285 million and warned that further reductions would also be made to the UN’s management and support functions.

“We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of,” Haley said in a statement, adding that the “inefficiency and overspending” of the organization is well-known. The timing of her statement sends a clear message.

For many years, Uncle Sap has been paying 22% of the body’s annual operating budget, costing us $1.2 billion in 2017-2018. We also pay 28.5% of the $6.8 billion annual cost of peacekeeping operations.

After the vote, Haley reminded the assembly that the U.S. was “by far the single largest contributor to the UN” and would remember the vote “when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations, and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”

“I must also say today: when we make generous contributions to the UN, we also have expectation that we will be respected,” she said. “What’s more, we are being asked to pay for the dubious privileges of being disrespected.”

Haley added: “If our investment fails, we have an obligation to spend our investment in other ways … The United States will remember this day.”

Before the vote, the President Trump spoke at a White House cabinet meeting about the vote scheduled for the next day. “They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us,” he said. “Well, we’ll be watching those votes. Let them vote against us; we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.

“But this isn’t like it used to be, where they could vote against you, and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows what they’re doing. We’re not going to be taken advantage of any longer.”

Three weeks earlier, Haley announced that the Trump Administration had properly withdrawn from the UN Global Compact for Migration, which claims to be aimed at protecting the rights of refugees and migrants. Its real purpose is to give refugees and migrants the right to resettle in the countries of their choice (the United States and Europe) while fighting what is misnamed as xenophobia, racism, and discrimination towards refugees and migrants.

“No country has done more than the United States, and our generosity will continue,” Haley said in a statement. “But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone.”

“We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country,” Haley continued. “The global approach is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson explained that “we simply cannot in good faith support a process that could undermine the sovereign right of the United States to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders.” He stressed that it “is the primary responsibility of sovereign states to help ensure that migration is safe, orderly, and legal.”

As 2017 winds down, so does the century-long push for globalism. Thank you, President Trump!

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Dream on, Establishment

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

If money talks, the loudest noise in America would be an article published last Thursday entitled “Congress must act on the dreamers.” Legislation to protect the 690,000 illegal aliens known as Dreamers, the article insists, “is a political, economic and moral imperative.”

A movement is afoot either to slip this into a final 2017 bill when few are watching, or to make it a litmus test for candidates seeking to raise campaign cash for races next year.

“Delay is not an option,” the authors wrote, ignoring the backlog of unfinished business in Washington. “Congress must act before the end of the year.”
The op-ed was signed by Charles Koch, who shares a $97 billion fortune with his brother David. The Koch brothers are aligned with the “never Trump” Republicans who have undermined much of President Trump’s agenda.

Charles Koch is a businessman, and he likes to get his money’s-worth when he spends it. After striking out the past two years with their political agenda, the Koch network of mega-donors could be making support of DACA a litmus test for Republican primary candidates in the 2018 election cycle.

Republican candidates would be wise to decline, just as candidate Trump declined support by the Koch network last year, and won anyway on a platform of opposing illegal immigration.

Koch was joined by co-author Tim Cook, who succeeded the late Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple. Cook supports many liberal causes, and was criticized by candidate Trump for how Apple would not cooperate in unlocking the iPhone of a terrorist who went on the killing rampage in San Bernardino about two years ago.

Cook’s corporate practices at Apple hardly commend him to lecture about what is best for America. Apple stashes hundreds of billions of dollars – that’s billions, not millions – of its profits overseas in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States, and thereby avoid investing it in American workers here.

Moreover, Apple’s claim of employing a few hundred Dreamers – far less than 1% of its workforce – in mostly low-skill jobs would not ordinarily attract the attention of a CEO. But Cook and Koch are not just in favor of entitlements for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, but also for many millions of other illegal aliens.

Cook and Koch declare in supporting DACA, “If ever there were an occasion to come together to help people improve their lives, this is it.” But where is the compassion for helping Americans improve their lives, which ending benefits for illegal aliens would do?

Senator Jeff Flake was a frequent attendee at the Koch conferences of donors, and he has remained anti-Trump to this day. All that got him was a disapproval rating so high in his home state of Arizona that he resigned at a young age rather than even try for reelection.

Now Senator Flake is leading a group of other anti-Trump senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-SC), to try to forge a deal with Democrats to protect these illegal aliens.

The day after the Koch-Cook article appeared in the Washington Post, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report throwing cold water on the bum’s rush to protect the Dreamers. The CBO estimates that legalizing Dreamers would cost taxpayers $25.9 billion over the next decade.

The CBO explains why the costs of Dreamers would far exceed any benefit that Americans would ever see. Once legalized, the Dreamers would become eligible for the full array of benefits for the working poor including Obamacare, Medicaid, food stamps, and much more.

Dreamers would consume more benefits and pay less taxes than the average American because their skills and education are so much lower. Even though most Dreamers are now in their twenties or thirties, for example, more than half of them never finished high school.

Part of the skills gap is because Dreamers were never required to demonstrate English fluency, and many are functionally illiterate. Of those who signed up for DACA, many required the help of a translator to fill out the form.

The CBO estimates the cost of all those federal benefits at $27 billion over 10 years, while only $1 billion of new tax revenue would be generated from Dreamers moving “out of the shadows” to regular employment. Combining those two amounts produces a net cost of $26 billion.

Even in Washington, where the federal budget is measured in trillions, $26 billion is real money. And that number almost surely understates the true cost by a wide margin.

Democrats are acutely aware of the value of $26 billion, whether or not they are willing to admit it where the Dreamers are concerned. Trump's border wall, which Democrats consider exorbitantly expensive, would cost only $21.6 billion according to a study conducted by the Department of Homeland Security in February of this year.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Monday, December 18, 2017

Daubert standard is not current law

The Bezos Wash. Post attacks a Trump nominee:
But a clip of one of President Trump’s federal judicial nominees struggling to answer rudimentary questions about the law garnered well more than 1 million views in a matter of hours on Thursday night and stoked speculation that another of the president’s nominations might get derailed. ...

“As a trial judge, you’re obviously going to have witnesses. Can you tell me what the ‘Daubert standard’ is,” the senator asked, referring to a critical and well-known rule on using expert testimony in federal court.

“I don’t have that readily at my disposal,” Petersen said. “But I would be happy to take a closer look at that. That is not something that I had to —” ...

When video of the interrogation made its way online, several high profile law professors tweeted their surprise.

“Don’t want to beat up on the guy but the questions he was being asked could be answered by a second year law student,” wrote Aderson Francois, a professor at Georgetown Law. “Even if you know zero about evidence the one doctrine every law student knows is Daubert because it’s a very famous case about standard to admit expert testimony.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said it was unreasonable to expect Petersen to have recently studied the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a lengthy and complex document. “But,” Kreis added, “if you have little or no trial experience, I’d hope you could speak a little bit about the law with some degree of sophistication. Daubert is pretty basic.”
This is amusing, but the Daubert standard is not used in federal courts today, and there is no reason for a federal judge to know what it is. It was used from 1975 to 2000, and was defined:
If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise.
The current rule is:
RULE 702. TESTIMONY BY EXPERT WITNESSES

A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if:
(a) The expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue;
(b) The testimony is based on sufficient facts or data;
(c) The testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and
(d) The expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.
As you can see, the current rule goes beyond Daubert by requiring sufficient data and reliable methods.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Amid More Terrorism, Question Diversity

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

“There have now been two terrorist attacks in New York City in recent weeks carried out by foreign nationals here on green cards,” President Trump told an impromptu news conference on Tuesday. “The first attacker came through the visa lottery and the second through chain migration.

“We're going to end both of them – the lottery system and chain migration,” the president declared. “We’re going to end them – fast.”

The first terrorist attack occurred six weeks ago, on Halloween, when Sayfullo Saipov, a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan, drove a rented truck through a crowd of pedestrians and cyclists, killing 8 and injuring 12. Saipov had sworn allegiance to ISIS and reportedly asked to display the ISIS flag in his hospital room where he was recovering from a gunshot wound.

Saipov came to the United States in 2010 after winning the annual lottery for 50,000 visas which our government foolishly grants to people from the most diverse countries, defined as those that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the United States during the previous five years. Over a million people without skills have received one of these so-called diversity visas since the program began, and the average recipient brings three relatives to settle here permanently.

In the latest attack Monday morning, Akayed Ullah, a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, set off a pipe bomb in the crowded tunnel that links Times Square to the nation’s busiest bus terminal, which serves over 200,000 passengers each weekday. Ullah reportedly told police that he chose that location partly because he was triggered by nearby Christmas posters.

Ullah came to the United States in 2011 after qualifying for an F43 visa as the child of a sibling of a U.S. citizen (his uncle) through what’s called “extended family chain migration.” He was one of 141,501 immigrants who have entered the U.S. from Bangladesh through chain migration since 2005, an astounding number equal to the population of Dayton, Ohio.

The same day the President vowed to end the visa lottery and chain migration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the men who committed the two New York attacks were in the United States “as a result of failed immigration policies.” As Sessions explained, this “20-year-old son of the sister of a U.S. citizen should not get priority to come to this country ahead of someone who is high-skilled, well educated, has learned English, and is likely to assimilate and flourish here.”

President Trump points out that the United States “must fix its lax immigration system, which allows far too many dangerous, inadequately vetted people” into our country. Trump was elected president in large part because Americans applauded the strength of his commitment to put Americans first and protect our borders against politically correct notions of multiculturalism and diversity.

Congressman Steve King recently echoed an observation made by the prime minister of Hungary that diversity can lead to a lower quality of life, not a higher one. What is needed is not diversity as much as assimilation, in order to remain a secure and prosperous nation.

“Assimilation has become a dirty word to the multiculturalist Left,” King wisely observed. “Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength."

Supporters of diversity insist that immigrant terrorists became radicalized after they arrived in the United States. Even if true, that’s all the more reason to oppose such immigrants because they are not assimilating themselves into our society, and instead are trying to destroy it.

The Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is cited as an example of someone who supposedly became a terrorist after coming to America, but Tsarnaev was probably trained by his trip to the Chechen region of Russia in 2012. He was then allowed back into the United States despite his highly suspicious stay abroad, and the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Michael McCaul, expressed dismay at why the FBI did not pick up on this.

Akayed Ullah repeatedly traveled to Bangladesh in recent months before initiating his attack here. Is this the same mistake, which was made in letting Tsarnaev back in after a suspicious trip abroad, being made again and again?

One of the first executive orders by President Trump was to issue his so-called travel ban to restrict immigration from certain countries associated with terrorism. Liberals then filed multiple lawsuits to block his Executive Order from going into effect.

On December 4th the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that President Trump’s modified travel ban can be enforced while liberals challenge it in lower courts. It took nearly all of 2017 for the courts to allow the ban that President Trump first issued back in January to be enforced in a revised form, but better late than never.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Summarizing the Russian story

The NY Times keeps reminding us about the silly Russian story that is supposedly going to be used to impeach Trump.
Confused by all the news about Russia and the 2016 presidential election? We are here to help.

By KAREN YOURISH DEC. 10, 2017
What Is the ‘Russia Story’?
It is all a big nothing burger, but read it yourself.
Russia’s use of cyberattacks to interfere in the 2016 presidential election

In late 2016, top United States intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government directed a massive cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and putting Donald J. Trump in the White House.
Not exactly. Two agencies said that the Russians were probably trying to help Trump. One agency thought that the Russians were trying to undermine the coming Clinton presidency, and did not expect Trump to win. They all very explicitly said that they were not certain about those conclusions.

The "massive cyberattack" consisted mainly of broadcasts on RT television that decried American capitalism in general, and Clinton in particular.

None of the agencies said that the Russian interfered with the election. The reports have no allegations that any votes were changed or influenced as a result of Russian activities.
This broad campaign included hacking and leaking Democratic emails, pushing false information on Russian media outlets, ...
Wikileaks published hacked emails, but there is no proof that the Russian govt had anything to do with it. The DNC refused to let the agencies inspect their servers for evidence. Podesta apparently got phished by someone in Eastern Europe, but there is no known link to the Russian govt. The DNC president and many others believe that the DNC leak was an inside job by Seth Rich, and not related to the Russians.

The "pushing false information" refers to opinion broadcasts on RT TV. There is a lot of legitimate news on RT. Sure, there is some bias, but I am not sure that there is any more bias than there is for Hillary Clinton on MSNBC and CNN.
It was also recently revealed that Donald Trump Jr. exchanged private messages on Twitter with WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group that published Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers.
So? Is there something wrong with that? I am sure the NY Times and a lot of others had private communications with WikiLeaks. Even if Donald Jr. asked WikiLeaks to publish info embarrassing to Clinton, I don't see anything wrong with that.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is known to hate Hillary Clinton for reasons that have nothing to do with Trump. Apparently Clinton once suggested having Assange killed. Assange denies that he got the leaks from the Russians, and denies that he was trying to elect Trump.
Here are some of the ways Mr. Trump may have interfered in the continuing criminal and congressional investigations, according to ethics and legal experts.

• Mr. Trump admitted that he had been thinking about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination by Trump campaign associates when he fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey.
Are you kidding? Trump probably thought about all the things that Comey was involved in. It is Trump's constitutional responsibility to consider everything that makes Comey fit or not fit for the job.

The accusation here is that Trump was worried that Comey would screw up the Russian investigation in the same way that everyone agrees that he screwed up the Clinton email investigation.

The President's main job is to make sure that competent men are running the federal agencies. It was Trump's duty to consider what Comey might do, and to fire him if there are sufficient doubts about the job he will do.

The NY Times hates Trump, and presents this story in a way to make him look as bad as possible.

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Trump Should Take Control of DOJ

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

Robert Mueller’s ongoing “investigation” of Trump supporters is the only part of government that has no budgetary constraints and no real accountability. Its lack of proper oversight resulted in a political opponent of Trump, FBI agent Peter Strzok, apparently leading the biased questioning of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn that caused his downfall.

The partisan agent has since been reportedly removed from the Mueller investigation, but not until after the injustice occurred. The right to an impartial investigator is fundamental to our legal system, and Gen. Flynn was unjustly deprived of it.

“When the FBI first learned of the allegations, the employees involved were immediately reassigned, consistent with practices involving employee matters,” the FBI declared. But the flaw is that there has been no proactive oversight of Mueller’s out-of-control investigation, and no meaningful steps taken to ensure that bias does not taint the process.

As Trump properly tweeted, “Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI ‘agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.’ Led Clinton Email probe.”

We have three branches of government, and the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch. Yet President Trump has been misled by his advisers to believe that he cannot supervise his own department or fire employees who fail to ensure impartiality in the investigations.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the Justice Department released the shocking report that Mueller blew through $6.7 million in merely the first four-and-a-half months of his investigation, which exceeds more than $1 million per month. At that rate his runaway witch-hunt has already wasted more than $10 million in taxpayer money, with no end in sight.

General Flynn, who spent most of his life serving our country, could not possibly withstand an expenditure of so much money against him. Facing bankruptcy if he did not agree to a plea bargain, he had little choice to stop the hemorrhaging of legal fees in order to save his family from complete financial disaster.

Before long, the cost of Mueller’s searching for crimes done by Trump supporters will exceed the entire budget for the United States Attorney’s office in many states. The Department of Justice gives more money to Mueller’s unsupervised investigations than it does to prosecuting dangerous illegal aliens in many parts of the country.

Hire 17 prosecutors and give them a blank check for funding, as the DOJ has done for Mueller, and numerous injustices will inevitably follow. On Tuesday there was a report, denied by a Trump attorney, that Mueller’s prosecutors have even issued a subpoena on Deutsche Bank to provide highly confidential banking information about President Trump and his family.

At this point, Trump’s own advisers may be too terrified of the out-of-control prosecutors to give him candid advice. Congressmen are probably petrified about retaliation if they were to say anything critical of this.

But President Trump can and should take the decisive action that he is known for in other areas. For starters, he should impose a reasonable limit on expenditures by Mueller’s growing army of 17 lawyers.

In Texas, for example, the average cost of investigating and prosecuting a death penalty case is $2.3 million. That should be more than adequate for the task of looking into whether there was any illegal contact with Russians during the 2016 election, in which nobody died.

But Mueller has already burned through more than three times that amount. In the spirit of the Christmas season, Trump should cap the taxpayer expense at ten times the cost of a death penalty case, or $23 million.

In addition, Trump should fire those who are failing to properly supervise the Mueller investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be politically accountable for everything that Mueller does, and when there is a lack of oversight on his overreaching, then Mr. Rosenstein should be fired.

Use of an anti-Trump FBI agent to interrogate key witnesses is an example of something that should never have been allowed in the first place, and for which a supervisor should be fired. Issuing subpoenas on a private bank for the highly personal banking information of Trump and his family members is another basis for firing the supervisor who allows it.

Congress properly rejected the concept of an “independent prosecutor” nearly two decades ago, and Justice Antonin Scalia wrote against it as being unconstitutional. Similarly, the advice that President Trump has been receiving that the Department of Justice must somehow be independent is contrary to our Constitution.

Phyllis Schlafly felt an incoming president should take control of all of the Executive Branch to ensure loyalty to his mandate. It is long overdue for Trump to invoke Harry Truman to say “the buck stops here,” and stop the injustices coming out of his Department of Justice.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Monday, December 4, 2017

Billy Bush explains the tape

Billy Bush finally explains his famous Trump tape:
And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator. Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.
It was amazing how many people took this old comedy routine as if it were some sort of admission of guilt.

Friday, December 1, 2017

Immigration graph

Here is an excellent graphical representation of the history of American immigration. It shows the countries of origin.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Small Business Needed for Economic Growth

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

While large corporations dominate the news and the lobbying in D.C., economists have long known that small business is the real engine to drive economic growth. Headlines about big business are more likely to mention “massive layoffs” than any hiring plans.

Small business and innovation by small inventors are essential to our economy, as some of them will become the big employers of tomorrow. Kodak and Xerox were just two of the successful businesses founded on an idea of a small inventor, and a patent that secured for him the fruits of his labor.

Yet today 80% of challenged patents are invalidated in some way by the Patent and Trademark Office, without the patent owner ever getting his day in court. Imagine the outrage if homes or other property were taken away by an administrative agency without a court hearing.

On Monday, in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy, the Supreme Court held lively oral argument in a challenge supported by small inventors to how the federal government is taking away their property in deprivation of their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Several Justices expressed dismay at how our patent system, once the envy of the world, has denigrated into a victim of the administrative state.

Due to a federal law enacted in 2011, the America Invents Act, the Patent Office changes its mind and tosses out most of the patents that it previously issued, if someone asks it to. Anyone – a competitor, a disgruntled employee, or even a stranger – can ask the Patent Office to strike down a previously issued patent, without the right of the patent-holder to have a trial in court.

During the one-hour hearing before the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer expressed alarm at how a patent can be in existence for 10 years, with $40 billion invested in developing it, and “then suddenly somebody comes in and says: Oh, oh, we want it reexamined, not in court but by the Patent Office.” Phyllis Schlafly opposed this bad law at the time, but corporate lobbyists pushed it through.

Our economy depends heavily on new inventions to grow, because cheaper labor will always be available in other countries. Our competitors, such as China, recognize how important innovation is, and they force American companies to share the secrets of our inventions with them.

The result has been devastating to the real elements of economic growth: jobs and wages. Neither has improved in years.
Only 63% of potential workers are actually working in the United States. This labor participation rate is near its 38-year record low, set during the Obama Administration.

Likewise, real wages actually decreased in October, and over the past year wages have barely kept up with inflation. This is in sharp contrast with nearly two decades ago, when hourly pay was increasing at a much healthier rate of 4%.

When the Governor of Virginia issues a press release to brag about a company in his State creating merely 15 new jobs, as Democratic Governor McAuliffe did on Monday, it underscores how scarce good jobs are. Pandering to lobbyists of big corporations, as Congress does, will not help.

The American economy grew fastest when the incentives of our unique patent system existed for small inventors. Buoyed by the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, our economy boomed in the late 1800s.

Thomas Edison obtained more than a thousand American patents, which enabled him to attract large investments. With such funding Edison was able to light up New York City in September of 1882, using his new electricity-generating power plant.

Raymond P. Niro has explained how important the rights of small inventors are to a prosperous future, in an article available on the helpful website IPWatchdog.com. He listed nearly three-dozen inventions that have changed the world, all by “individual inventors who ultimately formed companies to exploit their ideas, but who initially manufactured nothing.”

Justice Sotomayor asked rhetorically during oral argument on Monday, “If I own something, … how can a government agency take that right away without due process of law at all? Isn’t that the whole idea of Article III, that only a court can adjudicate that issue?”

Indeed, and it is ironic that while Congress talks about boosting our economy with a tax bill, it is actually the Supreme Court that may do more for job and wage growth if it rules in favor of small inventors in the Oil States case. Congress seems uninterested in helping small investors and small business, but the Court might.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

No Thanksgiving at the Border

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

On the first day of Thanksgiving week, U.S. Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez died and an unidentified second agent was seriously injured as they patrolled a lonely stretch of Interstate 10 in west Texas, near the Mexican border.  The agents’ injuries were apparently caused by grapefruit-sized rocks thrown by men who had illegally crossed the border in an area where, as the New York Times reports, “drug and human trafficking are common.” 

The U.S. Border Patrol has tallied 720 assaults on border officers in the last fiscal year, and 38 agents have been killed in the line of duty since 2003. You’d think the dangerous assaults on federal agents would have given pause to the federal judge in San Francisco who was considering a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities, but no.   

Judge William Orrick went right ahead on Monday night with his 28-page order declaring a nationwide permanent injunction against the president’s effort to punish sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funds.  Judge Orrick was named to the federal bench in 2013 after he bundled at least $200,000 for Obama and donated another $30,800 to groups supporting him. 

As U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week in his address to the Federalist Society, “an increasing number of district courts are taking the dramatic step of issuing nationwide injunctions that block the entire U.S. government from enforcing a statute nationwide.  In effect, single judges are making themselves super-legislators for the entire United States.” 

“The Supreme Court has consistently and repeatedly made clear that courts should limit relief to the parties before them,” General Sessions continued.  “So if lower courts continue to ignore that precedent, then the Supreme Court should send that message again.” 

Last month California became a sanctuary state when Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that limits what state and local officials can say to federal immigration officers about people detained by police or awaiting trial.  It also prohibits law enforcement from inquiring about a person's immigration status.  

The law, known as SB 54, was championed by state senate president pro tem Kevin de Leon, who is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate.  If elected, he would represent a state that is home to more than 2.3 million illegal aliens – a state where 45 percent of the population told the Census Bureau that a language other than English is spoken at home.

The harm of sanctuary policies is illustrated by the case of Nery Israel Estrada-Margos, who was arrested by Santa Rosa, California police on August 18 after allegedly beating his girlfriend, Veronica Cabrera Ramirez, to death.  The illegal alien had been arrested two weeks earlier, on August 2, for domestic violence, but released because he had no prior convictions.

The sheriff of Santa Rosa county, which has its own sanctuary policy, defended the prior release by claiming he gave a heads-up to agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  In fact, local officials gave ICE only 16 minutes to travel over 60 miles, and the man was gone by the time ICE got there.

Similar atrocities have occurred in other sanctuary jurisdictions, which are mostly found in the 20 so-called blue states that voted for Hillary Clinton for president.  In Maryland near Washington, D.C., Montgomery County officials ignored a detainer from ICE in order to release Mario Granados-Alvarado, who broke into an unmarked police car and stole an AR-15 and ammunition from the officer’s trunk.

Near the town of Brentwood on New York’s Long Island, three more young bodies were found bearing the marks of ritual killing by the gang called MS-13.  They were Angel Soler, 15, from Honduras, who had been hacked to death with a machete; Javier Castillo, 16, from El Salvador; and Kerin Pineda, 19, from Honduras.

In Massachusetts, the popular columnist and talk-show host Howie Carr identified an assortment of violent crimes recently committed by “Third World illegal-alien criminals.”  In just the last few weeks a Cambodian, an African, a Salvadoran, a Dominican, a Vietnamese, a Chinese, and a Liberian were charged or convicted of murder, assault, drug trafficking, identity fraud and resisting a federal officer.

The tax reform bill moving through Congress plugs one of the ways in which illegal aliens have been supporting themselves with federal tax credits.  The bill requires a valid Social Security number to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit, under which $4.2 billion a year has been paid out to illegal aliens who lack a valid number.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but child tax credits should require a valid ID from both parents, not just one.  An even better reform, which is not currently in the bill, would be to prohibit employers from getting a business tax deduction from wages paid to unauthorized alien workers.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, $165 billion a year in deductible wages is currently being paid to illegal workers, thereby saving their employers about $25.4 billion a year in federal taxes.  Plugging that gap would yield $254 billion over 10 years which could support additional tax cuts for law-abiding Americans.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

The Sexual Revolution Turns Ugly

Stephen Baskerville writes in Crisis magazine:
The Sexual Revolution is now out of control. Initially promising freedom, like all revolutions, it has entered something like its Reign of Terror phase and is devouring its own children. As with other revolutions, it is not because the revolutionaries enjoy broad popular support; it is because civic and religious leaders are confused, divided, and cowed into silence. Those whom one expects to impose some order on all this—conservative politicians, religious leaders, civil libertarians, journalists, scholars—are either hiding under the table or signaling their virtue by themselves fanning the flames of a hysteria that they show no interest in trying to understand. ...

What we do have—as many long ago warned we would have—is a highly sexualized culture controlled by men and women who have succeeded in changing the terms of sexuality because they have both ideological and pecuniary interests in using sex as a financial tool and a political weapon. ...

Now that Secretary DeVos has made it safe to do so, conservative pundits—who for years remained mute as other journalists and a few scholars risked their careers and reputations to blow the whistle—are now coming out of the woodwork to trumpet their own virtue. Even the National Review, which for years studiously looked the other way in the face of rampant injustice, and even supported the hysterics, has suddenly discovered that the witch hunt, about which they were told for years, is real.
This appears to have been written before many additional allegations that have underlined his main points.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Why Democrats won in Virginia

Ann Coulter writes on why Democrats won in Virginia:
What happened was: Democrats brought in new voters. In 1970, only one out of every 100 Virginians was foreign-born. By 2012, one in nine Virginians was foreign-born.

The foreign-born vote overwhelmingly, by about 80 percent, for Democrats. They always have and they always will—especially now that our immigration policies aggressively discriminate in favor of the poorest, least-educated, most unskilled people on Earth. They arrive in need of a LOT of government services.

According to the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of Hispanic immigrants and 55 percent of Asian immigrants support bigger government, compared to just over 40 percent of the general public. Even third-generation Hispanics support bigger government by 58 percent.

Polls show that immigrants are far more likely to support Obamacare and affirmative action than the general public, and are far less likely to support gun rights and capitalism.
A comment says European immigrants are also socialists, and vote Democrat.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Roy Moore and the Double Standard

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

Personal scandals by Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Barney Frank are just fine with the liberal media, who endorsed them for election and re-election.  Ted Kennedy was celebrated as the Lion of the Democratic Party for 40 years despite having driven a young woman off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and abandoning her there to drown.

But woe to any conservative candidate, such as Roy Moore, who might have an imperfection in his distant past.  Somehow that renders him unfit for elective office in D.C., according to the same people who supported Bill Clinton throughout the scandal concerning his conduct with Monica Lewinsky in the White House.

The double standard in American politics needs to stop if we are going to make America great again.  Voters overcame the double standard by electing Donald Trump as president, despite the Billy Bush tapes and unproven allegations by women, and Roy Moore should do likewise in the upcoming Senate election in Alabama.

The criticism of Roy Moore is not about something that happened 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. The accusations against Moore, which he has denied, relate to misdemeanors he supposedly committed in December 1977 and January 1979, nearly 40 years ago.

Marrying later in life has become the norm today, but for most of American history it was considered normal and even desirable for a young woman to marry, or at least become engaged, in her teenage years.  Only in the last two decades has the median age of first marriage risen to 27 for females and 29 for males.

In 1977, the year Roy Moore supposedly flirted with a teenage waitress at the Olde Hickory House in Gadsden, Alabama, half of all young women in America were married by the age of 21.  By her own account, as she read her tearful statement under the watchful eye of Gloria Allred, the now 56-year-old woman refused Roy Moore’s advances because she already had a boyfriend, thereby conceding that she wasn’t too young to have one.

In that same year of 1977, a prominent feminist lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the “age of consent” for sexual acts should be lowered to the age of 12.  In her book entitled “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code,” the future Supreme Court Justice also called for repealing laws against statutory rape, bigamy, prostitution, and sex trafficking because they perpetuate a stereotype that such laws are needed to “protect weak women from bad men.”

Ginsburg has never disavowed her radical writings, so it is particularly hypocritical for feminists to criticize Roy Moore’s alleged dating of teenage girls as though there was anything improper about it.  As usual the feminists want to have it both ways, as they sanctimoniously insist that Roy Moore quit the race for dating teenage girls when he was a 32-year-old bachelor.

Liberals and the Establishment hate Roy Moore for his conservative positions today, not what he allegedly did 40 years ago as an unmarried district attorney looking for a future wife.  Judge Moore subsequently married his beautiful wife Kayla, who had been a runner-up for Miss Alabama, when she was 22 24 and he was 38.

If elected, Roy Moore would join a U.S. Senate in which one Democratic member, Bob Menendez, is on trial for allegedly accepting bribes, including the use of a private jet to Paris followed by three nights in a $1,500-a-night hotel room for Menendez and his girlfriend.  The same people who are calling on Roy Moore to step aside have failed to call on Menendez to resign for the many felonies of which he was charged.

The Establishment has insulted Alabama voters who have a right to decide the election for their Senate seat, not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the D.C. swamp.  McConnell staked his future on trying to defeat Roy Moore in the September primary, but Moore won by a landslide precisely because voters reject the same-old, accomplish-nothing politics of both parties in Washington.

The allegations against Roy Moore pale by comparison to what is the norm in Hollywood, which has long been one of the biggest financial backers of the Democrat Party.  First they ridiculed Roy Moore for supposedly being too much of a goody two-shoes, and now they criticize him for supposedly being too much like themselves.

We cannot make America great again if unproven allegations are allowed on the eve of elections to ambush only conservative candidates.  Those who had any beef about something Roy Moore did nearly 40 years ago should have spoken up long before now, or forever held their peace as voters pick the best candidate for the future: Roy Moore.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously last year. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Never-Trumpers’ Violence Goes Unpunished

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

Today is the 365th day after President Trump was elected president.  Yet like a few Japanese soldiers after World War II, there are still pockets of holdouts who refuse to accept Trump’s leadership.

Some holdouts can be found among professors on college campuses, where the feminist culture remains scornful of President Trump.  Other holdouts are holed up within the federal bureaucracy, where workers continue to block the agenda that Trump was elected to implement.

Pop psychologists say there are five stages of grief.  First there is denial, and then anger or resistance, and beyond that there is acceptance, reconstruction and hope.

Democrats and Republican Never-Trumpers have long been in the stage of denial, as displayed by the books of Hillary Clinton, Donna Brazile, Jeff Flake, and the Bushes.  Sen. Jeff Flake, facing a certain landslide defeat in his own primary due to his continuing denial of Trump, seemed finally to accept reality when he decided not to seek reelection, despite being one of the youngest senators.

The peaceful deniers do not pose a threat to our Republic, but the violent objectors do.  This began on Inauguration Day, when hundreds of anarchists rioted in downtown Washington, D.C., smashing windows at McDonalds, Starbucks, and Bank of America.

The media have failed to sharply criticize the anti-Trump violence, and the Department of Justice has been slow in prosecuting it.  It seems that crimes against almost anyone other than Trump supporters qualify as hate crimes, while authorities turn the other way to allow Leftists to commit violence against those on the side of our President.

When a burly man rushed toward President Trump from behind during a rally at an airport hangar in Ohio last year, as captured on national television, he was merely charged with a misdemeanor and ultimately fined only $250.  His slap-on-the-wrist punishment of one-year probation was lifted before he served even half of it.

Hate-filled acts of violence by the Left have dominated the headlines for much of this year.  In June a supporter of Bernie Sanders shot up a baseball practice by Republican Congressmen, and in September a refugee gunned down church attendees in Tennessee.  

When a Leftist goes on a shooting rampage and then kills himself, or is killed by a bystander, then there may not be much to prosecute.  But last Friday a frightening assault against a leading conservative in the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul, has left much to prosecute in order to deter future attacks like it.

The brutal attack by an outspoken liberal against Sen. Paul was cowardly, to put it mildly.  Senator Paul had been peacefully mowing his own lawn while wearing sound protectors, when his assailant sneaked up behind him to hit him so hard that it broke five of Senator Paul’s ribs and caused lung contusions.

It bloodied Senator Paul’s face, too, which suggests that the assailant did not merely “tackle” Senator Paul as initial media reports described.  Instead, the substantial injuries suggest that this was a calculated attempt to inflict pain on the conservative senator.

The assailant was a wealthy middle-aged man who, like the murderer Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, apparently had lots of time on his hands.  Rene Boucher, aged 59, is listed by a Kentucky government website as being a retired physician who no longer practices medicine.

Like most of the other perpetrators of recent violence, Boucher is a registered Democrat who has posted rants against President Donald Trump.  Boucher has advocated for gun control but apparently was just fine with an ambush of a U.S. Senator that injured him with physical violence.

The Department of Justice spends many millions searching for non-existent crimes by supporters of Donald Trump.  Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate will be without one of its finest members for some time due to this attack on him by a Democrat.

Boucher’s attorney quickly insisted that the attack has nothing to do with politics.  Yet Boucher has not yet publicly provided a real apology or plausible explanation for his violent ambush. 

This was the second time that Senator Paul was subjected to an ambush, the first being the shooting on the ballfield near D.C. where the unarmed conservative Representative Steve Scalise was gunned down in that politically motivated ambush.  Yet the Department of Justice has apparently done little to protect Trump supporters since.

Imagine the outrage if any of the above acts had been by a registered Republican against a liberal politician.  There would be deafening calls for prosecution of such conduct as a hate crime, and a flurry of immediate activity at the Justice Department to deter repetition of such a crime.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Where’s the Oversight of Mueller?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

After spending millions of dollars on his 15-lawyer dream team, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort primarily for failing to file paperwork that many Democrats also failed to file.  Indeed, a group co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser John Podesta failed to timely file the same paperwork that Manafort allegedly overlooked.

Yet Mueller did not indict anyone in Podesta’s group, or anyone opposed to Trump.  The American people elected Donald Trump as president after he promised to prosecute Hillary for her apparent corruption, and now the exact opposite is transpiring as it is Hillary’s side that is bilking the American taxpayers to lock up Trump supporters.

Many innocent people are being forced to spend enormous legal fees to defend against the out-of-control Mueller, who is acting like an independent federal prosecutor even though that law was terminated in 1999.  There was nearly unanimous consensus after abuses by independent federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 90s that such spectacles should not recur, yet Mueller apparently has carte blanche to pursue President Trump and his supporters.

Mueller was installed under the pretext of being merely a “special counsel” for the purpose of looking into possible interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election.  Instead, Mueller has acted without accountability or real oversight in going far beyond the outer limits of his charter.

Nothing in Mueller’s indictment of Manafort has a shred of evidence connecting President Donald Trump or his Administration to the unusual charges against Manafort, which relate to activities predating his involvement with Trump’s campaign.  Where’s the beef that justifies giving Mueller a blank check on the U.S. Treasury to engage in such a partisan, one-sided witch-hunt against persons, rather than any real crimes that would be within Mueller’s authorization?

The real purpose of Mueller’s bizarre indictment of Manafort is not to end lobbying on behalf of foreign interests, which is rampant in D.C., but to intimidate former and current Trump officials into playing ball with Mueller’s war against Trump.  Already many potential targets of Mueller’s one-sided investigation are being pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by having to hire $1,000-per-hour attorneys simply to defend themselves against alleged crimes that never happened.

Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, has a track record of over-the-top prosecutions ultimately reversed on appeal.  As pointed out in a stinging exposé at TheHill.com, Weissmann had a lead role in the destruction of the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen and the loss of its 85,000 jobs, by seeking a conviction that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed, after it was too late to save the company.

Supposedly Mueller’s conduct is made constitutional by a modicum of supervision and accountability that he should be receiving from the Department of Justice.  But judging by Mueller’s off-the-rails indictment of Manafort, Mueller is not being reined in by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or anyone else.

  It is time to do so.  President Trump, for whom the Department of Justice works, should begin by demanding an accounting of how much money Mueller’s team is wasting, and Trump should tweet that information directly to the American people.

With Attorney General Jeff Sessions having recused himself from this issue, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein is supposedly in charge of Mueller.  But Trump can fire Rosenstein, and should do so if there is not immediate transparency on Mueller’s expenses and significant changes that rein in the runaway prosecutions.

Mueller’s team is obviously picking the targets and then searching for crimes, even obscure ones, to charge that target with.  “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted,” as renowned U.S. Attorney General (and future Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940.

The indictment against Manafort even seems to be written more for the newspapers than for a court of law.  “Conspiracy against the United States” shouts the first charge, a rarely used, politically misleading phrase.

The indictment also tosses in a laundry list of demands for forfeiture of assets, a widely criticized technique of prosecutors ordinarily reserved for drug kingpins and notorious criminals.  But its message is for other Trump supporters: tell us what we want to hear, or you’ll lose your home too.

“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,” the future Justice Jackson said to a gathering of U.S. Attorneys in 1940, “a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.”  That is tyranny-by-prosecution, and Trump should instruct the Justice Department to stop it.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Have some say over our demographic future

The Clinton-sponsored site Media Matter complains:
CNN contributor Ed Martin, who has been appearing on the network to argue against “amnesty for illegals,” previously co-authored a book ...

Martin co-authored the 2016 book The Conservative Case for Trump, which aimed to persuade “well-meaning conservatives” that the then-Republican candidate “is worthy of every conservative’s vote.” ...

“Immigration that is in America’s national interest is one thing. Immigration that floods our welfare rolls and prisons, and that tears apart our nation’s heritage and social fabric is something else,” they added. ...

They wrote additionally about the country’s demographics: “Shouldn’t we have some say over our demographic future, of what America is and will become? Shouldn’t we have an immigration policy that serves America’s national interests? In Europe we have seen the danger of large unassimilated Islamic communities making historic changes in countries and their future; yet we seem blind to similar changes happening here.”
There is the difference between the Trump voters and Trump haters. Trump's side believes that we should have some say over our demographic future. The Trump haters want uncontrolled immigration instead.
Martin did not respond to a request for comment about his book and whether he stood by his citation of VDare.
The citation is actually to a report by Julián Aguilar in the Texas Tribune, which is a liberal newspaper in Austin, available here.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

44.6% in California Don’t Speak English at Home

New US Census data:
In California--which with a July 2016 population of 39,250,017 is the nation’s most populous state--44.6 percent of the people five years of age and older do not speak English at home, according to data released this week by the Census Bureau.

At the same time, according to the Census Bureau, 18.6 percent of California residents 5 and older do not speak English “very well.”

That ranks California No.1 among the states for the percentage of people in both of these categories.

Nationwide, 21.6 percent speak a language other than English at home and 8.6 percent speak English less than very well.

Texas ranked second for the percentage of residents five and older who do not speak English at home (35.6 percent). New Mexico ranked third (34.5 percent); New Jersey ranked fourth (31.7 percent) and New York ranked fifth (31.0 percent).
They are obviously not assimilating if they do not even speak English.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Trump Wins Again with Transparency on JFK Files

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump wins more kudos for allowing the release of the JFK assassination files.  Proving again why he is a welcome alternative to the Establishment, Trump has stood up for the American people in ending the 50+ years of cover-up by government of these documents.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a radical communist who described himself as a "Marxist" during his post-assassination interrogation.  It was widely known then that Oswald hated America so much he sought to renounce his American citizenship, and he had even defected to the communist Soviet Union.

What is not yet known, which perhaps this final document release will shed light on, is who allowed Oswald back into the United States to pass out pro-Fidel Castro literature months before he assassinated President Kennedy in 1963.  Why would the federal government allow the known America-hater to immigrate back to our country after he attempted in Russia to renounce his American citizenship?

If that question sounds familiar, then it is because the practice of letting America-haters into our country, or back into our country, has continued until recently when President Trump issued his so-called travel ban to stop the influx.  Trump’s travel ban is designed to cut off the immigration of people from areas hostile to the United States, but federal courts have worked overtime to block Trump’s sensible executive orders.

  A half-decade ago, the federal government let Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev back into the United States despite being put on full notice of how much he hated our country.  To this day government withholds information about the likely participation by Tsarnaev in the brutal murder of Jewish acquaintances on Sept. 11, 2011. 

Obvious clues linking Tsarnaev to the 9/11 anniversary killings were ignored by law enforcement, just as the risks posed by Oswald to our Nation were downplayed.  After more anti-American training in foreign countries Tsarnaev was let back into the United States to carry out his bombing at the Boston Marathon in spring 2013, just as Oswald was let back in to hurt America.

Even the Warren Commission, not known for the depth of its investigation, admits that Oswald had attempted to murder the outspokenly anti-communist Major General Edwin A. Walker in Dallas in April 1963, less than nine months before his assassination of JFK.  The bullet that narrowly missed General Walker in his home was traced to the same make of rifle Oswald used against JFK, and Oswald’s wife admitted to her husband’s attempted murder of General Walker.

The narratives preferred by liberals about the JFK assassination are that Oswald was “a 24-year-old loser who was mad at the world and wanted to make a name for himself,” in the words of Minnesota federal judge Jack Tunheim, who reviewed these soon-to-be-released documents as Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Commission.

But an angry-at-the-world 24-year-old merely seeking to make a name for himself does not stalk to kill a little-known anti-communist general.  Similarly, Tsarnaev was not merely angry at the world or merely trying to make a name for himself when he bombed the Boston Marathon.

Judge Tunheim, after reviewing the documents, conceded that the federal government destroyed some documents after the JFK assassination, preventing the public from ever seeing them.  Whether that destruction was ideological or simply to avoid institutional embarrassment may forever remain a mystery.

Liberals are nervous about the upcoming data dump on Thursday and seek to downplay its significance, anxious to smear anyone who analyzes them as a "conspiracy theorist."  Yet liberals are currently wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on their wacky theory that there was a Russian conspiracy that somehow interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

Wikileaks is popular because for eight years the Obama Administration did conceal or lie about information.  Despite numerous laws like the Freedom of Information Act that attempt to compel the government to be transparent, Clinton and Obama routinely hid and withheld information from the public.

For example, the federal government continues to hide evidence about other potential crimes even older than the JFK assassination.  More than 200 years ago Meriwether Lewis died of a gunshot wound, either by murder or suicide, after having led the marvelous Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Northwest.

Lewis is buried in a national park owned by the federal government, and President Bill Clinton refused requests by historians and Lewis's descendants to exhume his body probably because Clinton did not want to set a precedent that might result in the exhumation of his deceased Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, sought around the same time.  The Bush Administration later approved an exhumation of Lewis in 2008, but then the Obama Administration blocked it without any reasonable justification, presumably as a favor to the Clintons.

Government will hide information as long as the public allows it.  Fortunately, President Trump is siding with the public.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Why Trump voters stick with him

Razib Khan gives a historical analogy, and explains:
Why Trump could murder someone and people would still support him

... many pro-Trump Americans perceive that Trump may protect them and their values, and see that anti-Trump politicians and leaders will never do so. ...

Many people on the Left and the Right in American culture see that white Christian America will be marginalized. Demoted. They seem that people are picking sides, and you have to stick to your tribe. It’s a matter of existential concern.

Many pro-Trump Americans perceive that the Left and the cultural elite hate them deeply in their bones. Wish they would disappear. Dislike their aesthetic preferences, think their religion is contemptible, and are simply waiting for their expiration date to come due so that history will march onward, and leave them an unpleasant memory.

Some of them see their livelihoods in danger, as they perceive that their political choices and identities will make them targets for being unpersoned, without a way to keep a roof over their heads or food on their family’s table. They accept the narrative of their marginalization, and are terrified of the consequences that will be meted out to them by their triumphalist adversaries in the culture wars.

When elite Americans argue that these voters are supporting a conman, they shrug.
He makes some good points, but I don't think he gets to the heart of the matter.

Vox Day tries to define the Alt Right as 16 principles:
In the interest of developing a core Alternative Right philosophy upon which others can build.

1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right. National Socialists are not Alt Right.

2. The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russel Kirk's 10 Conservative Principles, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism.

3. The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of offense, in every sense of that term. The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.

4. The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy. ...

TL;DR: The Alt Right is a Western ideology that believes in science, history, reality, and the right of a genetic nation to exist and govern itself in its own interests.
Trump voters do not necessarily have a lot of loyalty to him personally. They vote for him because they agree with him on policy and principles.

Read those 16 Vox Day principles. If you agree with most or all of them, then Donald Trump is your man. No one else is even close. Other Republicans seem pathetic by comparison.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

How Trump Is Improving Health Care

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
by John and Andy Schlafly

“Since Congress can’t get its act together on Health Care,” Donald Trump tweeted last week from his personal Twitter account, “I will be using the power of the pen to give great Health Care to many people.”  Trump’s tweet was followed by a series of presidential actions that offer substantial relief for middle-class Americans hurt by Obamacare.

Unlike Barack Obama’s executive actions that were justifiably criticized by conservatives, President Trump’s use of the presidential “pen” was entirely within his lawful powers under the Constitution. Trump’s new actions on health care were authorized by laws that were previously passed by Congress, including Obamacare itself.

Trump’s first action was to restore the freedom to buy short-term policies as a viable alternative to high-priced Obamacare policies.  These policies were increasingly popular until Obama imposed a nationwide 90-day limit on such policies, which severely limited their usefulness.

Short-term policies lack some of the costly coverages that many Americans do not want or need, such as maternity care and drug rehab, but they are much more affordable.  Typically costing less than half of what Obamacare-compliant policies cost, they could be just what the doctor ordered for millions of middle-class Americans who have been priced out of the individual market for health insurance.

Only about 20 million Americans rely on the individual and small-group market for health insurance, but that small fraction of our nation has been forced to bear the burden of caring for people with costly pre-existing conditions.  That unfair burden of cost-shifting is the main reason premiums and deductibles have been rising so rapidly.

Although some low-income people have received credits to help pay those rising premiums, millions of self-employed and other middle-class people are not eligible for any subsidy.  About 8 million Americans have been hit with Obamacare penalties despite the lack of affordable insurance. 

The unaffordability of Obamacare has not affected the 155 million Americans with employer-based health insurance, which continues to benefit from a loophole dating back to World War II.  Not only do employer plans receive a $260 billion-a-year tax break, which is by far the largest so-called “tax expenditure,” but large and medium-sized employers can also opt out from many of the regulations that increase the cost of individual policies.

The employer-based tax break can be changed only by Congress, but President Trump is doing what he can to alleviate the unfair discrimination against individual and small group insurance.  In the second part of his health care order, Trump ordered the U.S. Department of Labor to consider how associations of small employers (including self-employed individuals) can qualify for the same privileges as large employers.

The Labor Department is already authorized by Congress to enforce a 1974 federal law called ERISA, which regulates employer health plans.  For decades, large employers have exploited ERISA to exempt themselves from some of the regulations that drive up the cost of individual and small group health insurance.

Association health plans have long been promoted by Senator Rand Paul, a medical doctor who specialized in eye surgery before being elected to the Senate in 2010.  Despite voting against the unwieldy repeal-and-replace bill that failed in Congress last summer, Senator Paul recently enjoyed a round of golf with the President at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.

The goal of association health plans is to create a level playing field so that small employer groups and self-employed individuals can obtain the same type of health insurance as large employers who currently enjoy an unfair advantage.  While the Labor Department goes through the process of changing its regulations under Trump’s direction, Congress should pick up on this idea and extend to individuals, whether employed or not, the right to buy health insurance across state lines.

Trump took another welcome action last week, by cutting off “cost sharing reduction” (CSR) payments to insurance companies.  “That money is a subsidy for insurance companies,” Mr. Trump said as he announced his long-awaited decision. “Take a look at their stocks. Look where they are. They’re going through the roof.”

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled last year that the CSR payments by Obama were illegal, because Congress never appropriated the money to fund them, but the liberal litigation factory is gearing up to block Trump’s decision to discontinue them.  Democratic attorneys general announced plans to file a new lawsuit in California, where they are more likely to find a judge willing to issue an injunction against Trump.

With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backing failed candidates as he did in the recent Alabama primary, and criticizing the America-first populism of Steve Bannon, it is unlikely the Senate will accomplish anything soon.  Fortunately, President Trump is taking the initiative to lead Americans out of Obamacare and other failed programs of the prior administration.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Sandwich is a crime against feminism

Man-hating feminism has infected Australia:
WHEN young Sydney mother Maddie asked her closed Facebook group of 26,186 mothers for some tasty alternatives to sandwiches for her husband’s lunches, she wasn’t expecting the backlash.

“I would love to hear what other mums make their hubbies for lunch and snacks throughout the work day,” she posted on Tuesday. “We are getting over sandwiches.”

You would think she’d asked for a hemlock recipe, judging by the torrent of scolding which erupted.

She was nothing but a “slave” and a “1950s housewife”.

She was “weird” and no one in their right mind or a “pink fit” would do something so demeaning as make their husband lunch. Let alone snacks.

“Your husband is a grown up and you’re not his mother”, wrote one member of the North Shore Mums Facebook group.

“My husband can make his own damn lunch.”

“I make my husband the same thing he makes me. Nothing!!”

“Stuff that, hubby is a grown man. I already do his laundry and keep his children alive.”

“Our advice is to stop making his lunches.”

“My role is childcare during working hours and that’s it.” ...

Leader of the attack pack was Polly Dunning, daughter of professional feminist Jane Caro, and mother of a toddler about whom she infamously wrote last year, recounting her horror at finding out she was pregnant with a boy: “I felt sick at the thought of something male growing inside me.”

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Rescuing Columbus from the Savages

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

On the 525th anniversary of the European discovery of America, the 90-foot tall monument in New York’s huge Columbus Circle escaped damage — but only because the NYPD maintained a 24-hour honor guard during the entire 3-day holiday weekend.  Police protection was needed because the violent leftwing movement known as “antifa” had announced a nationwide campaign to “deface Columbus Day.” 

Statues left unguarded were not so fortunate.  Around the nation in recent weeks, statues of Columbus have been toppled, splattered with paint or otherwise vandalized. In downtown Los Angeles, a Columbus statue in front of the county courthouse was shrouded in a white sheet, ostensibly for its own protection, after the L.A. City Council voted to rename the paid holiday as Indigenous Peoples Day.

The mayor of New York City, who was born Warren Wilhelm but changed his name to the Italian-sounding Bill de Blasio, had let it be known that the monument in Columbus Circle was at risk.  He has appointed a commission to review the political correctness of hundreds of monuments, plaques and statues throughout the city.

New York’s Columbus monument was built and paid for by Italian immigrants in 1892, to honor the 400th anniversary of discovery, around the time the Chicago was preparing to host the World’s Columbian Exposition.  Italian Americans are rightly proud of Columbus, but his voyages were actually sponsored and financed by Spain, his crewmen were Spanish, he spoke Spanish and wrote his journals in Spanish.

Americans were already celebrating Columbus on the 300th anniversary of discovery, in 1792, when a Columbus monument was erected in Baltimore. Despite the lack of Italian or Spanish people in the original 13 colonies, the English settlers recognized that Columbus’ discovery of the New World was the event that made America possible.

Our nation’s capital is the City of Washington in the District of Columbia, honoring the two men who made our country, and Columbus’ name is reflected in many other places, including two state capitals (Ohio and South Carolina).  For much of the 19th century, the word Columbia was often used as an alternative to America.

As President Trump said in proclaiming the federal holiday, Columbus’ voyages “undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation.”  On Columbus Day, Trump declared, “we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith” for his “courageous feat — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.” 

What a contrast with the apologetic tone of Obama’s proclamation one year earlier, which omitted any praise of Columbus or recognition of his greatness.  Instead Obama whined that “we must acknowledge the pain and suffering of Native Americans” which he said has been “marked by too many broken promises, as well as violence, deprivation and disease.” 

By apologizing for Columbus as a man allegedly responsible for bringing pain and suffering, violence and disease to America, Obama was apologizing for America itself.  Such ideas are far too common in our schools and colleges, where Columbus is wrongly accused of oppressing the native people with slavery, white supremacy, and even genocide.  

The National Education Association, which supplies teachers to most of our public schools, adopted a resolution that “formal apologies are long overdue to the indigenous people of the United States.”  The fierce campaign against Columbus is motivated by hatred for America, and will continue even if his statues survive.

It is impossible to exaggerate how great Columbus was, and how much our world depends on what he accomplished.  In the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ, it would be hard to name any one man who achieved so much for the betterment of mankind. 

Columbus was, first of all, the greatest sailor and navigator who ever lived up to that time, as detailed by the famous historian Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, himself a sailor who recreated Columbus’ voyages.  Yes, a Viking named Leif Erikson apparently landed somewhere in Canada about 500 years earlier, but Erikson left no permanent settlement or any trace that he was ever here.  

Yes, there were people already living in North and South America when Columbus came.  By comparison to the European explorers and settlers, however, America’s native people lived in extreme poverty and brutality, lacking the skills that are necessary to build a civilized nation.

Yes, the European settlers brought new diseases such as smallpox that infected the native people (unintentionally, of course), but they were repaid in tobacco, which caused far more deaths among Europeans.  Columbus wrote about tobacco in his journal on October 15, 1492, just three days after he arrived in the West Indies.

  Among the gifts that Columbus brought to America was Christianity.  Evangelization of the native people was a prime motivation for Columbus and his Spanish backers.  Columbus gave Christian names to places he visited, such as San Juan (St. John the Baptist), which became Puerto Rico.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Bannon Promotes Trump’s Economic Nationalism

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

Steve Bannon may be gone from the White House, but the agenda he championed is moving forward on many fronts.  “If there’s any confusion out there,” Bannon told Bloomberg News, “let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents — on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in corporate America.” 

In a series of recent interviews, the strategist who spent 12 months at Donald Trump’s right hand laid out the case for putting America first.  Bannon said the Republican establishment, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, simply “do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented. It’s very obvious.”

Bannon took a victory lap following former Justice Roy Moore’s 10-point victory in the Alabama Senate runoff, despite being outspent 15 to 1 by the Establishment candidate. “The populist-nationalist movement proved that a candidate with the right ideas and a grassroots organization can win,” Bannon crowed.

Bannon’s success in helping Roy Moore to his stunning triumph sent shock waves through the swamp, which wants to pretend Trump is a one-time phenomenon that will blow over without catching on.  Instead, Moore is another Trump-like figure who promises to shake up the self-serving U.S. Senate.

On 60 Minutes, Bannon gave Charlie Rose a history lesson that children rarely learn.  “Economic nationalism is what this country was built on.  What built America is called the American system — a system of protection of our manufacturing, a financial system that lends to manufacturers, and the control of our borders.”

The idea of controlling our borders seemed to offend to Charlie Rose, who complained, “We’re all immigrants, except the Native Americans. It’s what people respect America for.” Bannon replied, “You couldn’t be more dead wrong. America was built on her citizens.”

In response to another tired question, “You want a trade war with China?” Bannon pointed out that “China is at economic war with us. Through forced technology transfer and through stealing our technology, China is cutting out the beating heart of American innovation.”

“The forced technology transfer of American innovation to China is the single biggest economic and business issue of our time,” Bannon told Bloomberg Businessweek. “Until we sort that out, they will continue to appropriate our innovation to their own system and leave us as a colony — a tributary state.”

Bannon’s view is supported by Robert Lighthizer who remains inside the White House as U.S. Trade Representative.  “CEOs come in to see me continuously,” Lighthizer said recently, “and almost every CEO of a major company will say they’re having a problem with China forcing them into joint ventures, turning over intellectual property, having to license their intellectual property at less than market value.”

Those CEOs won’t complain publicly for fear of Chinese retaliation, so Lighthizer has opened a formal investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act.  That law authorizes the President to penalize countries that violate the rules of fair trade, as China does. 

“Expect change,” Lighthizer said recently.  “The sheer scale of [China’s] coordinated efforts to subsidize, to create national champions, to force technology transfer, and to distort markets throughout the world, is a threat to the world trading system that is unprecedented.”

In his executive memorandum authorizing the use of Section 301, President Trump condemned Chinese policies that “encourage or require the transfer of American technology and intellectual property to enterprises in China.”  China’s conduct, Trump said, could “deprive United States citizens of fair remuneration for their innovations, divert American jobs to workers in China, contribute to our trade deficit with China, and otherwise undermine American manufacturing, services, and innovation.”

As Steve Bannon told Charlie Rose, “Donald Trump, for 30 years, has singled out China as the biggest single problem we have on the world stage.”  In an interview with Bloomberg, Bannon said, “the heart of the economic-nationalist movement is standing up to China.”

Lighthizer agreed:  “While some politicians can be accused of changing to populist positions to get votes, this cannot be said of the President.  If you go back 10, 20, 30 years, or even longer, you see a remarkable consistency.  He has been a critic of so-called free trade deals and of their effects on workers.”

Bannon explained that China requires American companies to give “tribute” to that country by sharing our technology secrets.  “That’s what it takes to enter their market,” Bannon observes, and they’ve taken “$3.5 trillion worth over the last 10 years — the essence of American capitalism: our innovation.”

After Bannon’s departure from the White House, the aides whom Bannon had previously derided as “the New Yorkers” rolled out a package of tax reforms that will require the cooperation of Congress to enact.  But protection of our innovation, the wellspring of American jobs, can be achieved despite congressional inaction and Bannon is paving the road to that success.
 
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

The NFL Leaves America

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Ronald Reagan famously said when he began his political career in the 1960s. “The party left me.”

Now the same is being said by many former fans about the National Football League.  Americans who grew up admiring NFL football in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, can candidly observe that the NFL has left them.

Donald Trump, like Reagan, was elected President with the votes of millions of former Democrats, and Trump did NFL football fans a favor by using his bully pulpit (on Twitter) to expose how un-American America’s pastime has become.  As with other issues in the public eye, Trump’s smackdown of the anti-American stance by the NFL is welcome change.

Behind the scenes, the NFL had already been pandering to the radical Left for years.  Entirely dependent on the liberal media for profits, the NFL cares more about maintaining its massive revenues than it does about American values.

With attendance and viewership in decline, the NFL has increasingly embraced gambling as a way of boosting its own profits at the expense of those vulnerable to that addiction.  Its decision to move the Raiders to Las Vegas will make football seem more like a game of roulette or blackjack than family entertainment.

Near Detroit, the now-roofless Pontiac Silverdome sits as a colossal piece of litter that contributes to the blight of that once successful center of automobile manufacturing. Other cities, from Saint Louis to San Diego, have been harmed by the NFL taking big subsidies from local taxpayers and then, before public bonds are paid off, skipping town to a more profitable deal somewhere else.

Halftime performances at the Super Bowl, in front of the largest television audience of the year, have gone the way of commencement addresses at colleges where no conservative performers are allowed and no conservative messages permitted.  Bizarre occult themes are imposed on the captive audience during these shows.

This is not the same NFL where Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney ordered his head coach not to cut Rocky Bleier from the team after Rocky returned from Vietnam, where he was wounded in combat.  That patriotic decision created one of the many genuine heroes who played during the golden era of the game, and Rocky Bleier caught the extraordinary winning touchdown pass in the 1979 Super Bowl.

Today, the NFL is more likely to cut talented players in order to pander to liberals, as in the exclusion of the Bible-quoting Tim Tebow.  Burgess Owens, a member of the Super Bowl champion Oakland Raiders in 1981, was a dynamic speaker at our recently concluded Eagle Council in St. Louis where he explained how special the NFL was then, and how different it is now.

Phyllis Schlafly applauded Pete Rozelle, founder of the modern NFL and inventor of the Super Bowl, for respecting our traditions by not scheduling football games on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Rozelle also kept gambling out of football during his nearly 30-year tenure.

The current NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, has played footsie with gamblers by making deals with weekly fantasy football games, which are thinly disguised gambling, while fans are deciding not to fill stadiums in several major markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Goodell’s spokesman is Joe Lockhart, who managed the White House press during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and who recently sold his 9-bedroom Washington, D.C. home to Barack Obama for $8.1 million.

Today’s NFL has become a massive entitlement program for billionaires, one of the worst examples of corporate welfare.  Like others who enjoy lavish lifestyles based on government handouts, many NFL owners are ungrateful to the American system that makes their success possible.

Of course not all players put their game above the American flag.  Pittsburgh Steelers’ lineman Alejandro Villanueva, a former Army Ranger, gave us all something to cheer about when he stood alone on the field to honor the American flag and the National Anthem while his teammates cowered in the tunnel.

But then even he had to pay a price for being patriotic, as his own head coach and teammates began criticizing him for it.  He was apparently forced to apologize for supposedly embarrassing his teammates.

President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin summed this issue up well on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, remarking that NFL players “can do free speech on their own time.”  They do not have to insult our Nation in taxpayer-built stadiums before captive audiences.

Congress should hold hearings on how much taxpayer money is flowing to support the anti-American conduct of the NFL, and state legislatures should consider passing laws to cut off that money at the local level. While people have a right to be unpatriotic, Americans should not be forced to support them.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Monday, September 25, 2017

The Genius of Steve Bannon

A Trump-hating Democrat laments:
‘The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em,’ Bannon gloated to Kuttner. ‘I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.’

Rare does a political strategist so explicitly reveal his game plan. Rarer do his opponents utterly fail to recalibrate their tactics in response. From the day Trump announced his candidacy for president with a smear maligning Mexicans as rapists, to the release of a tape in which he joked about groping women, the American left has campaigned against Donald Trump largely on claims pertaining to identity: that Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, an Islamophobic bigot. ...

Notwithstanding the merits of these charges against Trump – which I happen to agree with – it was clearly an unsuccessful strategy, as Trump not only won the election, but did so with a higher portion of the black and Latino vote than his Republican predecessor, and with a respectable 42 percent of women.

This result came as a shock to people living in Democratic Party redoubts, like major metropolitan areas and college towns. And it came as a particular shock to the media, which had predicted with utter certainty that Donald Trump could never be elected president. ...

And so we should have every expectation that Trump will continue the Bannonite strategy of playing the role of culture warrior-in-chief. This appraisal of Bannon’s political acumen should not be interpreted as a moral judgment on the policy prescriptions he has advised Trump to follow. For what it’s worth, I disagree with Bannon and Trump on the travel ban, the transgender ban, and the removal of Confederate icons. But I’m not the sort of person Democrats need to win future elections.
Yes, the Democrat Party is focused on race and identity, while Trump and Bannon talk economic nationalism and what is good for the USA.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

“Just Stop It Now!”

THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT
by John and Andy Schlafly

When the Democratic minority leaders of the Senate and House emerged from the White House last week, “Chuck and Nancy” claimed that President Trump had agreed to a deal that would protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.  The media spin implied that Trump has a soft spot for the illegal aliens who, we’re told, were brought to our country as children through no fault of their own.

But in fact no deal was reached, as the White House soon clarified.  For starters, any deal for Dreamers would require inclusion of real border security provisions to which the Democrats have never been willing to agree.

Trump later told reporters that “We’re not looking at citizenship” for Dreamers, and on Twitter he insisted that “CHAIN MIGRATION cannot be allowed to be part of any legislation on Immigration!”  (Chain migration and a path to citizenship were included in previous versions of the Dream Act.)

The Dreamers are not children, as globalist opponents of border security pretend.  Often those in favor of open borders can be heard referring to Dreamers as “kids” when they are typically adults in their 20s, or even older.  As Trump has explained, “people think in terms of children but they’re really young adults.”

Back home in San Francisco during this week’s Congressional recess, Nancy Pelosi held a press conference at which she intended to introduce a carefully selected group of sympathetic Dreamers.  Much to her dismay, she was confronted with a mob of 60 angry aliens who feared they would not qualify for the Dreamer deal with Trump.

“You’re not helping the cause,” Pelosi pleaded pathetically to the mob of “undocumented youth” who shouted her down.  “Just stop it now!” Pelosi declared to the liberal protesters, who can never be appeased.

In the age of Trump, Pelosi knows that any hope of a deal depends on persuading the public that a handful of sympathetic young people are typical of the millions of illegal immigrants.

“All of us or none of us,” the rioters chanted for nearly an hour, as they waved signs demanding that Pelosi “FIGHT 4 ALL 11 MILLION.”  It was a good illustration of the entitlement mentality of illegal immigrants who think they have a right to defy our laws.

The mob scene in San Francisco should have been enough to discredit any DACA deal, but even worse was what happened the same day at the federal courthouse a few blocks away from where Pelosi was prevented from speaking.  That’s where the famous leftwing Harvard Law School professor, Laurence Tribe, filed a massive lawsuit against President Trump, claiming that he had no right to phase out the DACA program.

When DACA was announced in 2010 by executive action, Barack Obama insisted that it was not amnesty but merely a two-year reprieve and work permit with no guarantee of renewal.   Obama’s unilateral executive action had no legitimate continuing legal authority, but Tribe’s lawsuit claims that it is somehow unconstitutional for Trump to discontinue the program.

There are four other lawsuits filed against Trump over DACA.  A growing pattern among the opponents of Trump and the agenda on which the American people elected him is to file a lawsuit in a district court located within a Court of Appeals that consists overwhelmingly of Democratic-appointed judges, and the Ninth, Fourth, Second, and D.C. Circuits do.

That strategy generally ensures a ruling against President Trump at both the district and appellate court levels.  This game by the Left has continued even though the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly slapped down and reversed the liberal lower court rulings, and held in favor of Trump, often unanimously.

Anti-Trumpers are even filing numerous briefs challenging President Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  The power of a president to pardon has traditionally been fully supported and even promoted by the political Left, and was used flagrantly by Presidents Obama and Clinton.

If that were not enough, there are multiple lawsuits challenging the prudent action by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to withhold a small amount of federal funding from cities that defy federal law by declaring themselves to be “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens.  Even though federal power is at its peak in how it spends money, a federal district court in Chicago just last Friday issued an extraordinary nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration from implementing its plan to withhold federal taxpayer dollars from sanctuary cities.

The will of the American people is to protect our borders and to deport illegal aliens who should not be here.  Crime and the burdens on entitlement programs are immense and Trump should not be blocked by the courts from taking action to defend our sovereignty.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.